box kites and small rooms

It has been and will continue to be, for the next few days, unseasonably warm with this past weekend having temperatures in the low twenties with nary a cloud to see. I did little to enjoy the outdoor weather over the weekend as I had other plans.

Yesterday I read 'Time for the Stars' by Robert Heinlein, written in 1956. The setting is a very over populated Earth wanting to expand outside of our solar system searching for Goldilocks exo-planets (though this term hadn't existed yet in 1956). One science aspect that still holds true today (were ships to travel to distant places) is how the ships sent out to explore these potential planets would accelerate to the midpoint of their traverse where they would then turn the ship around and then decelerate until arrival thus providing artificial gravity on the ship for the duration with the exception of that flip-over at the midpoint. Another science aspect that is beyond our current capability is that at approach of that midpoint they reach 0.99c which none of our space craft, manned or otherwise come any where close. The fastest we've done is 0.00064c with NASA's Parker Solar Probe.

The story follows Tom and Pat, identical twins, from Tom's perspective; they are late teens as the story begins. Someone from the Long Range Foundation enlists them to go for tests where they find they can communicate telepathically. The LRF then goes out into the world to find dozens of twins who can do this. They are solving the problem that radio waves travel at the speed of light, however, when 1200 light years away, the radio signals would take 1200 years to travel back and forth between explorer ship and Earth. At the start the scientists aren't certain if telepathic thought transmission is truly instantaneous or if it is at a very high multiple of c. What they are certain of is that it is space or distance independent which I suppose is the most dubious part of the book. The LRF had already done a test with one twin at a Jovian moon station with the other twin on Earth and their telepathic communication continued to be instantaneous and 5x5 received, or that mental equivalent. (5x5 is the highest quantitative value of volume and clarity).

So a dozen ships go out in roughly equidistant directions away from the fairly spherical Earth and to not go further than 100 light years. Each ship has half a twin pair with the other twin pair staying on Earth so as to keep those ships within communication ability irrespective of how far away they are. Heinlein correctly uses relativity to show how Pat, stuck on Earth, ages at a different rate as compared to Tom, on the ship. Tom and his ship reach a first world which looks good; then go to a second where a large portion of the crew get killed due to the wildlife on the planet they visited. By this time 60 years have passed on Earth where only 4 years have passed ship time. 

During those 60 years Earth scientists finally determined that yes, telepathic thought is instantaneous, and so they figured out how to make use of this 'new physics' to design ships that can travel in that same way; so a new physics ship goes out, 65 light years to where Tom's ship is, to rescue them as their crew is now in very rough shape.

It was an easy read that I quite enjoyed.