Scientific research certifies – 4. Андрей Тихомиров

Other sections of our list are equally saturated with literary and artistic predictions, where behind each line there is an exciting prehistory of artistic searches anticipating scientific and technical thought. For example, robots. One of the old fantasies is to build an anthropomorphic, that is, "human—like" machine capable of facilitating, or even completely replacing our work in some details. L. da Vinci was already seriously burdened with this idea both as a scientist and as an artist. Gradually, the theme became firmly established in the fields of fiction. In the middle of the XVIII century, an eighteen-year-old Englishwoman M. Shelley in the novel "Frankenstein" told about a rebellious robot (although the term itself was not born then). The hero, the young scientist Frankenstein, managed to build an artificial man, and then revive him. Alas, this husband turned out to be ugly, people were afraid of him, and for this he begins to take revenge on them. The first victim was the inventor himself, who dies with the consciousness of the severity of the mistake. Indeed, there is something to think about. And not only to the hero of the novel, but also to today's reader. The moral and ethical theme of modern science is outlined in full growth in front of us, the fruits of which are capable of bringing the death of civilization itself, along with scientists and their achievements. Later, humanoid creations flashed on the pages of J.'s books. Verne, G. Wells. Finally, in the play by the famous Czech writer K. Chapek "RUR" (abbreviated designation: Rossum's Universal Robot – a reasonable universal robot), written in 1920, as we see, the name itself appears. It is derived from the Czech word robota – "forced labor". Immediately, as it always happens when loud ideas appear, there were a lot of imitators. Acceleration, presumably, was communicated not only to writers, but also to scientific circles, which were even more convinced of the possibility of creating such a mechanism. Thus, art has forestalled science, bringing closer, albeit in a dream, in a half-dream, the time of the invention of human-like devices… According to the number of successful predictions, one of the first is the famous Jules Verne, an inexhaustible discoverer of scientific and technical innovations. An attentive eye discovers in his works more than a hundred original proposals, 66 of which by the end of the 60s of our time had already been implemented. The rest are also considered quite real and are just waiting in the wings in the more or less near future. Thus, J. Verne anticipated the appearance of submarines, electric vehicles, aviation and space rockets, color photography, sound films and television. You can't reread everything and you won't keep track of his heroes, who managed to traverse the depths of the oceans and seas, break through the earth's strata, and visit space. The power of the writer's foresight is incredible, and in places it seems simply inexplicable. Judge for yourself. In the novel "From a Cannon to the Moon", a spaceship launches from Cape Canaveral in 1876. Exactly a hundred years later, it was from here that satellites went into space, and then ships. Maybe this is a tribute to the memory of the writer, or rather, Cape Canaveral is a very suitable place for space launches, which is why American engineers chose it "at the suggestion" of J. Verne. But whatever happened, Apollo 11 was also equipped here, which took the astronauts to the Moon. Moreover, the ship was an exact replica of the projectile sent by Verne. And finally, an absolutely amazing detail: Apollo 8 landed just four kilometers from the point where the heroes of the Jules Verne novel completed their journey. It seems that everything has turned upside down, and it is not clear who copied from whom: whether the Americans from J. Is it true, or is it J. They have Vern. Many other premonitions of the great science fiction writer are also striking. For example, what Dr. Fergusson saw from the work of the same name during a balloon trip over Africa. The hero tells about plants, animals and birds, about the landscapes of this interesting continent, the surface of which had not yet been touched by a single human foot. Imagine the surprise of contemporaries when, shortly after the publication of the book, it turned out that the information delivered by Fergusson was quite reliable and coincided with those brought by the first African travelers. Let's say they watched and saw everything. But where did J. get these facts from? Vern? Such is the power of artistic vision, penetrating through decades and spaces, having power over time, over the future of science. It is characteristic that J. himself Verne did not consider himself a science fiction writer. One day he explained to his daughter that he was wrongly attributed to fiction: everything he says is true. When, for example, the first projectile flies to the Moon (or rather, it will not be a projectile, but a ship), it must have the dimensions and trajectory specified by it. And so it turned out. The researcher, based on knowledge, calculation, using analogy and generalizations, boldly makes guesses, accurately predicting even details… Dostoevsky never encroached on the genre of science fiction, describing quite modern events in the second half of the last century. Nevertheless, he also had the opportunity to make exceptionally bold, long-ahead-of-time predictions. There is a remarkable place in the novel "The Brothers Karamazov". Ivan Karamazov is having a conversation with an authorized devil about… a satellite. He seems ready to deploy a real space program. And to begin with, he says that if you throw an axe further into space, then it "will begin to fly around the Earth… in the form of a satellite." Astronomers will calculate the "rise and fall of the axe" and even put it on the calendar. The impression, what can I say, is impressive… Almost a hundred years before the first Soviet satellite in human history was launched into orbit, the artist had already put it into flight with the power of imagination, "forcing" it to overcome the field of gravity. And what an expression! "Fly… in the form of a satellite." It was only in our days that they began to say that. Perhaps they began to talk because F. Dostoevsky prepared these words. And if they hadn't been pronounced by him, who knows what it would have been called. In general, why did the designers of the satellite call it "sputnik", and not in any other way? Was it not the influence of the writer who established this concept as the norm when describing cosmic events? After all, "sputnik" had a completely different meaning in the Russian language than the one with which F. enriched it, one might say, ennobled it. Dostoevsky and in which it has now spread all over the world. Everything is so. But how could he have prevented it? Here is the hero of D. Granin's story "Return Ticket" Pyotr Semyonovich in perplexity (presumably, we, the readers, are perplexed). "Is it acceptable to present such an accurate prediction? After all, no one will allow it. This is a violation of scientific laws. I ask you," Pyotr Semyonovich presses, "how did he become aware of space achievements?" And here D. Granin makes the necessary correction on behalf of the author: "Nothing surprising… It is accepted among good writers."