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:
“What a perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and gifted! After interviews have been compassed with long foresight, we must be tormented presently by baffled blows, by sudden, unseasonable apathies, by epilepsies of wit and of animal spirits, in the heyday of friendship and thought. Our faculties do not play us true, and both parties are relieved by solitude.”
—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)
“Reputation runs behind the current state of affairs.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“There are two kinds of truth; the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art.... Without art science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)