Tag Archives: Bill Higgins

Four Things You Want Me To Know

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I’m passing on some of the interesting links people have sent me in the last 24 hours –

(1) Janice Gelb discovered proof that Arthur C. Clarke predicted the Internet in 1974 [YouTube]. Really accurately, and on video!

In 1974 Arthur C. Clarke told the ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation] that every household in 2001 will have a computer and be connected all over the world.

(Was this really such a daring prediction? The ARPANET was declared operational in 1975 (I know several science fiction writers who got accounts so they could play the games online at MIT) and companies were already bringing to market the forerunners of the true PCs that appeared in the early 1980s.)

(2) Steven H Silver points to “Ferguson Wins Collecting Prize” at SF Site where he reports –

Andrew Ferguson has won the top prize in the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia’s 49th Book Collecting Contest. Ferguson’s collection focuses on the works of R. A. Lafferty.

(3) On April 1, James H. Burns announced the discovery of the treatment for a lost episode of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. guest-starring The Three Stooges.

(4) Bill Higgins has written a post for Tor.com about a 1956 NBC radio documentary devoted to SF. Lots of interesting voices: hear Asimov, Bradbury and John W. Campbell:

On the 4th of December that year, the NBC radio network broadcast “Ticket to the Moon,” an episode of the series Biography in Sound. Usually this series profiled a prominent person of recent decades — for example, Winston Churchill, Knute Rockne, or Grandma Moses — but on this occasion, the subject was science fiction.

You can access a recording of the show from Bill’s post.

Turning Off the Tevatron

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Back in the Eighties Bill Higgins — aka Beam Jockey, who works at Fermilab as a radiation safety physicist — helped build the Tevatron, the premiere particle accelerator of its generation. And Bill was there on September 30 when the Tevatron was retired.

Bill is interviewed in BoingBoing’s report about the event:

Ultimately, the Tevatron was simply the victim of the progress of technology. When it opened in 1983, it replaced older, lower-energy accelerators. And, in turn, the Tevatron has been replaced by the Large Hadron Collider, an accelerator capable of pushing particles to even higher energies. Once that happened, it was only a matter of time before the Tevatron felt the budgetary axe….

Bill Higgins: Wistful is a good word to describe the way I felt, as I witnessed the shutdown ceremonies, and joined the crowd at the party—think of it as a wake—afterward…. Right now I work on shielding analysis to support future operation of Fermilab’s multiple accelerators. Over thirty years ago, I was assigned to work on the testing of Tevaron magnets as they came down the production line.

[Thanks to Bill Higgins for the story.]