Fictional Predictions
See also: RaygunSeveral novelists described devices similar to lasers, prior to the discovery of stimulated emission:
- A very early example is the Heat-Ray featured in H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds (1898).
- A laser-like device was described in Alexey Tolstoy's science fiction novel The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin in 1927.
- Mikhail Bulgakov exaggerated the biological effect (laser bio stimulation) of intense red light in his science fiction novel Fatal Eggs (1925), without any reasonable description of the source of this red light. (In that novel, the red light first appears occasionally from the illuminating system of an advanced microscope; then the protagonist Prof. Persikov arranges a special set-up for generation of the red light.)
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Famous quotes containing the words fictional and/or predictions:
“One of the proud joys of the man of letters—if that man of letters is an artist—is to feel within himself the power to immortalize at will anything he chooses to immortalize. Insignificant though he may be, he is conscious of possessing a creative divinity. God creates lives; the man of imagination creates fictional lives which may make a profound and as it were more living impression on the world’s memory.”
—Edmond De Goncourt (1822–1896)
“The Brahmins say that in their books there are many predictions of times in which it will rain. But press those books as strongly as you can, you can not get out of them a drop of water. So you can not get out of all the books that contain the best precepts the smallest good deed.”
—Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910)