The world of science fiction has transported us to hyperspace and has anticipated major scientific advances on many occasions. However, according to statements by Professor Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University, science fiction has always been inspired by the avant -garde science of the time.
In Stephen Hawking’s own preface to Professor Krauss’s international best-seller “The Physics of Star Trek,” he states that “science fiction suggests ideas, and scientists incorporate them into their theories; but, sometimes, science gives rise to ideas stranger than any fiction ”. Thus, science fiction helps inspire our imagination but it “does not match reality.” And this is so because the imagination of nature (reality) far exceeds the human imagination (fiction).
“The most interesting thing about science fiction is not in all those things in which they have succeeded, but rather in which they have failed,” says Krauss. This cosmologist and theoretical physicist delves into the question stating that, despite everything, it is instructive and fun to compare science with science fiction to run into challenges (not yet solved) as exciting as time travel or teletransporation. Although Krauss doubts that it is possible to transport a human being from one place to another, he does bet on quantum teleportation as a revolutionary model of physics.
Lawrence Krauss is the only scientist to be awarded the American Society for the Advancement of Science Award for Public Scientific Knowledge (2000), the Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Award from the American Physical Society (2001), and the Andrew Gemant Award , of the Institute of Physics of the United States. Among his best-known books is the award-winning “Story of an Atom .”
