Pete Carlton wrote:
Jesse has it right on here, and one can go even further in this vein. You
are impressed by the relationship between one particular story and one
particular event - but you hand-picked both the story and the event for
discussion here because of their superficial similarities. You challenged
me to find another example of a story with the same resemblances that the
Heinlein story has to the atomic bomb project. But resemblances between
any written story and any similar event that happens after the story's
publication would be in the same class.
I'm not saying that the resemblances between the story and the bomb are
trivial - they do make an impression. It also makes an impression when
someone dreams of a relative dying and the next day they receive news that
that relative did in fact die that night; or when you're in a foreign city
and you look up the number of the taxi company and it turns out to be your
home phone number, or when exactly 100 years separate (1) the election to
Congress (2) the election to the presidency (3) the birth of the assassins
of and (4) the birth of the successors of John F. Kennedy and Abraham
Lincoln.
You also need to consider what in the academic world is called publication
bias. Richard Feynman once told a story about a sudden premonition he had
that his grandmother had died. Uncannily, the next moment the phone rang -
and it was his grandmother, alive and well. For every case you hear about
where a premonition (or whatever) miraculously "comes true", there are the
hundreds of cases where it doesn't come true, which you don't hear about
because they're not noteworthy.
Is it just a coincidence that just about everyone on this list is a cynical
skeptic?
--Stathis Papaioannou
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