It's a useful fiction — but it's still fiction.
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Six visionary science fiction authors on the social impact of their work.
Do grim sci-fi scenarios crush our hopes for real-world growth? Author Michael Harris looks elsewhere to unblock the road to a better future.
Instead of walking a mile in someone’s shoes, try reading a chapter in their book.
There's nothing like the end of the world to make you a philosopher.
We're separating the facts about EVs from the fiction.
From forgotten Hollywood movies to Frank Herbert’s "Dune," science fiction illustrates some of our deepest fears about technology.
Perhaps wormholes will no longer be relegated to the realm of science fiction.
"If we find just one other example of biology out there, then life is not an accident."
Invisible cloaks. Ghost imaging. Scientists are manipulating light in ways that were once only science fiction.
Jules Verne wrote about gasoline-powered vehicles, weapons of mass destruction, and global warming more than a century ago.
The Multiverse fuels some of the 21st century's best fiction stories. But its supporting pillars are on extremely stable scientific footing.
Gods and angels have been replaced with hi-tech extraterrestrials.
Science fiction movies capture a classic human flaw: getting the future mostly wrong.
Science fiction met nuclear fission when Hungarian physicist Leó Szilárd pondered the explosive potential of nuclear energy.
Meet the masterful con-men who impressed the great and the good despite the astonishing fiction of their very existence.
Some scientists think brain organoids could develop a form of consciousness. Others say that's science fiction.
The science fiction dream of a traversable wormhole is no closer to reality, despite a quantum computer's suggestive simulation.
Poker pro Maria Konnikova on how to recognize which details matter and master the science of deduction.
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Unfortunately, the Lunar Ark project is an idea more at home in science fiction than science fact.
In the quest to measure how antimatter falls, the possibility that it fell "up" provided hope for warp drive. Here's how it all fell apart.
Is LK-99 truly a room temperature superconductor? These 4 tests, none of which have yet been passed, will separate fact from fiction.
Why does time move forward but not backward? Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder explains.
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Quite a lot, actually, even though it has no identifiable value as a scientific concept.
The authors call it "wildly theoretical" — but let's take a look, anyway.
Dig a 70-mile tunnel under the Bering Strait, and you get this amazing InterContinental Railway, which will reshape the world.
From "The Castle of Otranto" to "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, these books changed the literary landscape.
Sci-fi enthusiasts have long hoped that a substance called antimatter might experience gravity opposite that of ordinary matter. It doesn't.
Detective fiction reveals how a particular society or time period looks at crime and criminal justice.
Omer Bartov, who spent decades studying the unspeakable horrors of genocide, shares how his studies have impacted his own mental health.