Goodbye Arthur C. Clarke – Visionary

We must wish Andrey Kobilnyk, departing editor of FirstScience.com, good luck this week and welcome, below, a guest editorial from Nigel Henbest. In his writing and film making Nigel had occasion to meet the recently departed Arthur C Clarke on a number of occasions and here pays tribute to his contribution to science and science fiction

"Somewhere in me is a curiosity sensor. I want to know what's over the next hill. You know, people can live longer without food than without information. Without information, you'd go crazy."

Of all Sir Arthur C. Clarke's quotations, this has to be my favourite. It wouldn't be true of everyone, of course, but Arthur Clarke certainly wasn't just someone in the crowd.

At one stage, he was intrigued by the concept of cold fusion - the idea, dating from the early 1990s, that nuclear fusion reactions could occur at room temperature as well as in the searing conditions of a hydrogen bomb or the Sun's core. I remember him particularly espousing "bubble fusion", where researchers used sound waves to make tiny bubbles collapse in on themselves, generating enormously high temperatures.

Bubble fusion has yet to have its day, but Clarke's main claim to immortality has of course come to permeate our everyday lives. In 1945, the young wartime radar researcher calculated that a satellite at the right altitude would orbit the Earth once as our planet turns, so it would appear to hang motionless in the sky. Every time we watch the weather report, we are seeing the view from the - Clarke orbit - if we are tuned to a satellite TV station, we are receiving a transmission directly from what Arthur originally dubbed an 'extraterrestrial relay'.

His concept was somewhat different from our comsats today. Arthur C. Clarke was writing in the days of valve amplifiers, and in his professional life was well aware that humans were constantly needed to change valves as they blew. So his 'relays' were not just robotic satellites but constantly manned space stations.

Arthur C. Clarke was also a publicist for ideas that were not his own, but that grabbed his imagination. The most important must be the space elevator. To obviate the need for powerful rockets to launch us to space, and the fiery dangers of re-entry, he promoted the idea of an elevator (lift) that rides up a cable to geosynchronous orbit.

But Arthur was never one just to go with the tech flow. When we interviewed him in the mid-1990s for a television program, we asked him about the Worldwide Web. "Never touch it," he replied. A bit of a bombshell! "Why not?" The problem was information overload, the sage replied "don't go to Niagara Falls if I want a drink of water."

Science was always just one of Arthur's passions. His other main interest was scuba diving; and, as a result, he moved to Sri Lanka in 1956 where he set up a diving school. His brother Fred, who still lives near where the family was brought up in Minehead, Somerset, has minded much of Arthur's British interests: his house boasts a large study that;s packed with international editions of Arthur's books, and innumerable prizes and trophies.