The Card: Seven of Hearts
The Suit: For Deal Me In 2023, Hearts is my suit for stories from the Sci-Fi anthology, “Orbit 5,” which I purchased at the local Benton House’s annual book sale fundraiser.
The Author: Philip Latham – Actually the nom de plume of real life astronomer, Robert Shirley Richardson. Unbeknownst to me when picking my stories for 2023, he’s a fellow Hoosier, born in Kokomo, Indiana in 1902. He also wrote two “Children’s Sci-Fi” novels (I didn’t even realize this was a genre!)
The Story: “The Rose Bowl-Pluto Hypothesis” from the Orbit 5 anthology of science fiction stories, published in 1969.
Are you (like me) one who is interested in the origin stories of works of fiction? That’s one of the things I like about a good anthology – they often have an appendix or chapter with short bios of the authors or even a short explanation of how they came to write their particular contribution to the anthology. That’s why the annual Best American Short Stories volumes are among my favorites. They have great background info. Alas, when I leafed through the Orbit 5 anthology, however, there was none of this background info, BUT, in reading the story myself, I think I can infer something of its origin…
The Rose Bowl-Pluto Hypothesis
“Now, for the first time, he was becoming aware of the awful majesty with which the heavenly bodies went through their motions, enacting a drama the minutest detail of which was inevitable from the beginning.“
Mr. Zinner and Mr. Alyson are professors of, respectively, Physics and Literature at – I assume – a California university. We meet them as they’re spectating a track meet at the Rose Bowl. Zinner is questioning why records in the 100-yard dash – or the mile for that matter – are continuing to get faster and faster. Alyson suggests that there is only one explanation for this fact: ‘The track men today are better than we were forty years ago.‘ Zinner dismisses this and reveals his own shocking theory: ‘…the hundred yards of today are not the hundred yards of yesterday… because space is not the same. It’s shrunk.’ (I did say it was a shocking theory)
Zinner goes on to explain how measurements of the speed of light over the history of scientific inquiry (see here for a brief history) have been inconsistent, with the velocity of light “taking a slump” every now and then. It is in his explanation to his more literary colleague that the potential origin is revealed. He describes an early attempt by Galileo to measure the speed of light (the first such experiment we know of in recorded history). Galileo has an assistant take one lantern a great (but known) distance away. The lanterns have a shutter and Galileo directs his assistant to raise the shutter of his lantern the instant he sees the light from Galileo’s lantern when Galileo raises his shutter. Galileo reasoned that he could time the interval between his revealing light from his lantern and his subsequent observation of his assistant’s lantern. It didn’t work. The speed of light is too fast to be measured in such a way at such short distances (great idea, though, huh?). His only conclusion was that the speed of light it must be very fast indeed.
Latham takes some liberties with the Galileo story to make his own short story more interesting, but what I loved about the story is that, to my imagination at least, the light from those lanterns shone roughly 300 years into the future to spark the idea for this short story. Researching the author and finding out he was an astronomer himself added more appeal to this origin.
So, just a little short story in a >50-year old anthology sparked a lot of thinking and learning on my part. Now that’s a short story that has done its job!
The story ends with the following lines from John Donne’s poem “Go and catch a falling star”:
Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devil’s foot,
Trivia Addendum: E=mc2… We all learned this formula in school right? (or at least from watching the intro to episodes of The Twilight Zone!) But why does the letter “C” represent velocity (the speed of light in this case)? You may know that the word “celerity” means ‘rapidity of motion or action’ which comes from the Latin word, “celeritas” which was Galileo’s conclusion about the speed of light after his lantern experiment.
Bibliophilopolis 
marianallen said,
June 12, 2023 at 9:11 am
This is the first of your posts I’ve had notice of in a long time. It’s good to see you again!
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