Dead, Not Forgotten

Famed author and thinker Arthur C. Clarke died March 19, 2008, at his home in Colombo, Sri Lanka after experiencing breathing problems. He was 90 years old. He had suffered from post-polio syndrome since 1988.

Clarke’s impact on science, literature and popular culture cannot be underestimated. He always seemed to go places no one had gone before and it is easy to see how he would get there if you consider his well known three laws.

1. “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
2. “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”
3. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Arthur C. Clarke was born December 16, 1917 in Minehead, Somerset, United Kingdom and earned a first-class degree in mathematics and physics at King’s College London. Though he is best known for his works of fiction, he also impacted real science with more than just his thinking. During WWII he served in the Royal Air Force as a radar specialist and was involved in the early warning radar defense system which contributed to the RAF’s success during the Battle of Britain. After the war he served as the Chairman of the British Interplanetary Society. He is credited as the first person to promote the idea that geostationary satellites would be ideal for communication purposes.

Clarke’s most famous work of literature is “A Space Odyssey.” It is based upon his 1948 work, “The Sentinel,” which he wrote for a BBC competition. The work was not accepted for the competition but the stage was set for a primary theme of Clarke’s work, an advanced but clueless mankind is shocked into growth by its interaction with a superior alien intelligence. Of course, the book was made into the famous science fiction move, “2001: A Space Odyssey” directed by Stanley Kubrick.

Arthur C. Clarke moved to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1956. In Sri Lanka is was able to persu one of his greatest loves, scuba diving. Sri Lanka also inspired the locale for his novel The Fountains of Paradise, in which he first described a space elevator. This, he believes, will be his ultimate legacy, more so than geostationary satellites, once space elevators make space shuttles obsolete.

A space elevator is described as “… a tether, usually in the form of a cable or ribbon, spanning from the surface near the equator to a point beyond geosynchronous orbit. As the planet rotates, the inertia at the end of the tether counteracts gravity, and also keeps the cable taut. Vehicles can then climb the tether and reach orbit without the use of rocket propulsion. Such a structure could hypothetically permit delivery of cargo and people to orbit at a fraction of the cost of launching payloads by rocket.”

I think of Clarke when I hear people talk about the possibility of life other than on earth. He summed it up well when he said, “Sometimes I think we’re alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.”

We are a little more alone in the universe today having lost Arthur C. Clarke.

Popularity: 20%

You may not recognize her face as readily as the talking head reporters on TV, but for 35 years Kate Webb rode the waves of strife, disaster, revolution, and invasion throughout Asia.

Never shying away from the front lines of any action, Webb was taken prisoner by North Vietnamese soldiers along with five others in April 1971 while covering a battle in Cambodia. She was held for nearly a month before being released and making her way out of the jungle. Long before then a body found at the site of the original battle was misidentified as Kate Webb’s and by the time she made it out her obituary had been published in the New York Times and she had been eulogized and buried by her friends, family and colleagues.

In addition to Cambodia she covered Vietnam, Afghanistan, South Korea, Iraq, Indonesia, India and many more hot spots throughout the region.

At a time when few women had yet had the opportunity to prove themselves as foreign correspondents, Kate Webb earned the respect and admiration of her male colleagues for her reverence for the facts and her fearless pursuit when finding them. For a long time to come she will also have the thanks and appreciation of female journalists who have benefited from her groundbreaking work and from the common people caught up in the stories that she covered, whose voices she made sure were heard.

Kate Webb retired in 2001. Sharp-witted until the end, when found by a nurse who scolded her for hurting her health by sneaking a smoke outside of her hospital, she is said to have replied, “Too late!”

Kate Webb, age 64, died from bowel cancer in Sydney, Australia, on Sunday May 14, 2007.

For more information:
Read this great interview with Kate Webb in The Correspondent (Dec. 2002)

Popularity: 40%