Allusions/references To Actual History, Geography and Current Science
The depiction of Titan's surface is speculation based on respectable scientific data that was available in 1997 - in fact the book "Lifting Titan's Veil" notes that Baxter's story paraphrases closely sections of papers by Lorenz on raindrops on Titan and the geomorphology of crater lakes. The Cassini probe's study of Titan, which began in 2005, has recently borne out that there do appear to be liquid lakes on the moon.
Read more about this topic: Titan (Stephen Baxter novel)
Famous quotes containing the words actual, geography, current and/or science:
“The contest between the Future and the Past is one between Divinity entering, and Divinity departing. You are welcome to try your experiments, and, if you can, to displace the actual order by that ideal republic you announce, of nothing but God will expel God.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“Gradually the village murmur subsided, and we seemed to be embarked on the placid current of our dreams, floating from past to future as silently as one awakes to fresh morning or evening thoughts.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“My position is a naturalistic one; I see philosophy not as an a priori propaedeutic or groundwork for science, but as continuous with science. I see philosophy and science as in the same boat—a boat which, to revert to Neurath’s figure as I so often do, we can rebuild only at sea while staying afloat in it. There is no external vantage point, no first philosophy.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)