“I’ve suffered for my Art” (and now it’s your turn) —Turkey City Lexicon This part of the DareAngel spaceship library is devoted to the background research done by Leo Korogodski for his stories. Do not worry; you won’t suffer… much. The Other Design Brain and Evolution Galaxies in Plasma Lab
My work on Pink Noise included much research, exposing me to some very interesting science, which I will attempt to summarize here. We live during exciting times, at the beginning of another major scientific revolution. Not that long ago, if anyone had asked me what was the greatest scientific discovery of the 20th century, I would have been stumped, not knowing which scientific discipline to favor: physics, genetics, computer science? Now, I wouldn’t hesitate a bit before naming Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003) and his discovery of spontaneous self-organization in systems far from equilibrium—because, among other things, it spares me from having…
In 1972, Gerald Edelman (b. 1929) received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of somatic selection in the immune system of mammals. It was his answer to the question of how our bodies manage to produce so many different antibodies, each geared against a particular invader. Previously, it had been thought that the blueprints of all antibodies were encoded somewhere and were activated during an infection. But the number of all possible infectious agents that our species has encountered in the past and may yet encounter in the future is so staggering that this assumption strained…
Once upon a time, astronomers thought that the planets, the Sun, and the Moon all moved around the Earth in uniform circular motion. The heavens must be perfect, right? And what could be more perfect than a circle! One problem: every now and then, planets reverse the direction of their visible motion across the sky, which would be impossible if they turned around the Earth on circular orbits. This so-called retrograde motion of planets forced the introduction of epicycles. An epicycle was a smaller circle on which a planet would turn around a certain point, which itself would turn on…