Essays on Life Sciences, with Related Science Fiction Stories
Essays on Life Sciences, with Related Science Fiction Stories

Author: Pier Luigi Luisi

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2020-01-02

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 1527544796

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This collection of essays highlights, in a new, critical fashion, some of the classic questions in life science. These include “what is life?”; “what is death?”; “what is consciousness?”; “why is life cellular?”; and “why are enzymes macromolecules?”. It also explores whether evolution is pre-determined, whether science and spirituality can harmonize with each other, whether artificial intelligence is at odds with the human spirit, and whether, and to what extent, we are genetically determined. In this text, some of the main conceptual tools used to tackle life’s many aspects are necessarily reviewed, such as the systems view of life, the notion of contingency, and the concept of autopoiesis. Each of the three chapters of the book contains a number of short science fiction stories which discuss aspects of the present-day development of artificial intelligence.

Creating Life from Life
Creating Life from Life

Author: Rosalyn W. Berne

Publisher: CRC Press

Published: 2014-12-19

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 9814463590

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This book is a collection of essays by scientists, historians, philosophers of science, and students. The essays meld biotechnology into science fiction stories and thereby open a conversation about the morality of what we may be one day, and what it may mean to be human as our biotechnological endeavors continue to evolve. The biotechnology "revol

Science Fiction and the Two Cultures
Science Fiction and the Two Cultures

Author: Gary Westfahl

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2009-06-01

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 0786442972

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Essays in this volume demonstrate how science fiction can serve as a bridge between the sciences and the humanities. The essays show how early writers like Dante and Mary Shelley revealed a gradual shift toward a genuine understanding of science; how H.G. Wells first showed the possibilities of combining scientific and humanistic perspectives; how writers influenced by Gernsback's ideas, like Isaac Asimov, illustrated the ways that literature could interact with science and assist in its progress; and how more recent writers offer critiques of science and its practitioners.

Life Beyond Us
Life Beyond Us

Author: Stephen Baxter

Publisher:

Published: 2023-04-22

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781988140483

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The European Astrobiology Institute presents 54 SF Stories and Science Essays on life, from microbial to macro, from automatic to sagacious. Each story is followed by an essay illuminating the scientific underpinnings of the story.

The Scientist
The Scientist

Author: Alex Pucci

Publisher: Author House

Published: 2012-09-12

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1477264299

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What typifies a scientist? In a brief essay that is a birds eye view of the character of scientists over time, specialty and method, we find that only one common denominator persists: their curiosity and passion for science. What happens then to this drive in the cutthroat biotech industry or in the ravines of bioethical issues like those relating to IVF? The two themes are developed in fictional stories based on real characters. A companionable guide, Jim, participates to the events unfolding and tells them. As a scientist at the forefront of his research in one story and as a mature science journalist in the other, Jim often finds refuge in mental games and visual models of his own creation and thus survives the upheavals. In Bourse Brigands financial interests hijack science while Alba, its committed protagonist, fights for her passion to ferry science across to the wider world. In Eves Speed a young embryologist finds two mutant human embryos in her IVF work. But her life spins out of control when scientific arrogance raises its head and makes her blind to reality and ethical rules. The Scientist offers a glimpse into another world not just through its technical details but also because it shows how scientists think and behave. We are in the factual world of IVF, embryology, stem cell research, commercial and scientific clashes, professional paranoia and the legal and ethical issues that all raise.

Essays on Life Itself
Essays on Life Itself

Author: Robert Rosen

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 0231105118

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Compiling twenty articles on the nature of life and on the objective of the natural sciences, this remarkable book complements Robert Rosen's groundbreaking Life Itself--a work that influenced a wide range of philosophers, biologists, linguists, and social scientists. In Essays on Life Itself, Rosen takes to task the central objective of the natural sciences, calling into question the attempt to create objectivity in a subjective world and forcing us to reconsider where science can lead us in the years to come.

Representations of Science in Twenty-First-Century Fiction
Representations of Science in Twenty-First-Century Fiction

Author: Nina Engelhardt

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-06-28

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 3030194906

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This collection of essays explores current thematic and aesthetic directions in fictional science narratives in different genres, predominantly novels, but also poetry, film, and drama. The ten case studies, covering a range of British and American texts from the late twentieth to the twenty-first centuries, reflect the diversity of representations of science in contemporary fiction, including psychopharmacology and neuropathology, quantum physics and mathematics, biotechnology, genetics, and chemical weaponry. This collection considers how texts engage with science and technology to explore relations between bodies and minds, how such connectivities shape conceptions and narrations of the human, and how the speculative view of science fiction features alongside realist engagements with the Victorian period and modernism. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach, contributors offer new insights into narrative engagement with science and its place in life today, in times past, and in times to come.

The Everyday Fantasic
The Everyday Fantasic

Author: Michael Berman

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2009-03-26

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 1443807834

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The Everyday Fantastic is an anthology born in love. The love is for science fiction, in all its myriad forms: novels, television, movies, music, art, etc. Many writers from a plurality of disciplines, professions and walks of life share this disposition. This attitude cuts across national boundaries and has even outlasted the vagaries of popular culture fads. This collection of essays draws upon these feelings in terms of the different ways science fiction is engaged in different disciplines, viewing the genre beyond mere entertainment. The papers collected here engage the fundamental questions explored in science fiction. Many of the essays were originally presented at an interdisciplinary conference in October 2005 at Brock University, highlighted by Robert J. Sawyer’s engaging keynote address. Additional chapters were in part inspired by these presentations. These essays represent a wide array of voices from the humanities, social sciences and sciences, and address a comparable range of topics and the media that use the science fiction genre.

Seveneves
Seveneves

Author: Neal Stephenson

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2015-05-19

Total Pages: 419

ISBN-13: 0062190415

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From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Anathem, Reamde, and Cryptonomicon comes an exciting and thought-provoking science fiction epic—a grand story of annihilation and survival spanning five thousand years. What would happen if the world were ending? A catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb. In a feverish race against the inevitable, nations around the globe band together to devise an ambitious plan to ensure the survival of humanity far beyond our atmosphere, in outer space. But the complexities and unpredictability of human nature coupled with unforeseen challenges and dangers threaten the intrepid pioneers, until only a handful of survivors remain . . . Five thousand years later, their progeny—seven distinct races now three billion strong—embark on yet another audacious journey into the unknown . . . to an alien world utterly transformed by cataclysm and time: Earth. A writer of dazzling genius and imaginative vision, Neal Stephenson combines science, philosophy, technology, psychology, and literature in a magnificent work of speculative fiction that offers a portrait of a future that is both extraordinary and eerily recognizable. As he did in Anathem, Cryptonomicon, the Baroque Cycle, and Reamde, Stephenson explores some of our biggest ideas and perplexing challenges in a breathtaking saga that is daring, engrossing, and altogether brilliant.

Falling in Love; With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science
Falling in Love; With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science

Author: Grant Allen

Publisher: Good Press

Published: 2019-11-20

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13:

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"Falling in Love; With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science" by Grant Allen sees Allen attempt to make science fascinating to the average person. By tackling topics that interest people from all walks of life, like falling in love, he's able to show that science in in every part of life. Written to be easily understood by non-scientists, these essays are an interesting introduction to the field for past and modern readers.