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BURSTS of radio waves flashing across the sky seem to follow a mathematical pattern. If the pattern is real, either some strange celestial physics is going on, or the bursts are artificial, produced by human – or alien – technology.
Telescopes have been picking up so-called fast radio bursts (FRBs) since 2001. They last just a few milliseconds and erupt with about as much energy as the sun releases in a month. Ten have been detected so far, most recently in 2014, when the Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia, caught a burst in action for the first time. The others were found by sifting through data after the bursts had arrived at Earth. No one knows what causes them, but the brevity of the bursts means their source has to be small – hundreds of kilometers across at most – so they can't be from ordinary stars. And they seem to come from far outside the galaxy.
The weird part is that they all fit a pattern that doesn't match what we know about cosmic physics.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JNCF on Thursday April 02 2015, @06:57PM
I really like the book version of the line, and would prefer it if this generation of scientists didn't fuck around with whatever is under Europa's ice sheets. Even atmospheric entry could bungle things up beyond repair. If there is life on/in Europa I'd hate to see our crude modern tools infecting the ocean with waterbears [wikipedia.org] and other Earthly biology.
Minor nitpicks: I'm pretty sure the line was in the first book (2001), I've never read 2010. I'm also under the impression that Clark and Kubrick were collaborating with each other while producing the book and film versions of 2001. It might not be correct to say that the film version "added" to the line "as originally written." I don't know which version was released first, but it either way it's probably incorrect to view one as an adaptation of the other. They're different riffs on the same story.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 02 2015, @09:17PM
As I understand it, they were. I've got a book about the making of it, cannot recall the title of it and it's in a box somewhere, and they mention that Kubrick deliberately withheld his approval of the book so as to not hurt the release of the film./
(Score: 2) by TK on Thursday April 02 2015, @09:32PM
Arthur C. Clarke talks about collaborating with Kubrick in the foreword to an audiobook version of 2001: A Space Odyssey that you can find on youtube [youtube.com].
As for that line, it's not in 2001, you may be thinking of "My god, it's full of stars", which is in the novel but not the movie.
The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Thursday April 02 2015, @10:44PM
You're totally right. I guess I'm not sure where I got it from (probably a friend or a wiki), but the line has definitely been bumping around my meat-drive for a while with (evidently wrong) neural links to the book version of 2001.
(Score: 2) by Covalent on Friday April 03 2015, @03:16AM
You are all correct about 2001 being a book / movie collaboration.
But this line was definitely not in 2001. It was in 2010, which was written as a book first, then made into a movie:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010:_Odyssey_Two [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_%28film%29 [wikipedia.org]
They even quote the lines in both pages. I really hate the addition...sigh.
You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.