Capclave 2019 — Talks & Panels
I’m appearing at Capclave this year (October 18th thru 20th), doing my talk on Time Dispersion in Quantum Mechanics (3pm on Saturday the 19th) and five panels, all great topics: Technospeed, Coming Civil War, Failure of SF Prediction, Secrets of the Dinosaurs, & Exoplanets. Prep for these will be a lot of fun. And the other panelists include a number of old friends and I’m sure some new ones.
Capclave — always one of the best organized cons — did a great job on the schedules, sliced & diced by time, track, & trouble-maker. I can’t improve on theirs for me:
| Friday 9:00 pm: Technospeed (Ends at: 9:55 pm) Truman Panelists:John Ashmead, Martin Berman-Gorvine, Bud Sparhawk (M), Christopher Weuve Is technology moving too far? Too fast? What is coming up in the future? What happens to those left behind? Can people who never learned how to set the time on their VCRs handle what brain-implants and whatever else is coming next? Is this increasing the generation gap? |
| Saturday 10:00 am: Coming Civil War (Ends at: 10:55 am) Washington Theater Panelists:John Ashmead, Tom Doyle (M), Carolyn Ives Gilman, Sarena Ulibarri, Christopher Weuve Is the U.S. dividing again? Or are current difficulties just an historical burp? Why didn’t the US divide in the 1960s? What can be done to keep the Union together? Or would splitting be a good thing? Will the South rise again or will it be cities versus countryside? |
| Saturday 2:00 pm: Failure of SF Prediction (Ends at: 2:55 pm) Truman Panelists:John Ashmead, Tom Doyle (M), Natalie Luhrs, Sarah Pinsker, K.M. Szpara SF is not really supposed to predict the future but presents possibilities. Still, comparisons are inevitable. What did past SF writers get right and wrong about today? How can writers do a better job (or shouldn’t they even bother trying?) |
| Saturday 3:00 pm: Time Dispersion in Quantum Mechanics (Ends at: 3:55 pm) Truman Panelists:John Ashmead (M) John Ashmead gives a science talk on time dispersion. Is time fuzzy? In quantum mechanics space is fuzzy. And in special relativity time and space are interchangeable. But if time and space are interchangeable, shouldnt time be fuzzy as well? Shouldnt quantum mechanics apply — to time? Thanks to recent technical advances we can put this to the test. We ask: How do you get a clock in a box? How do you interfere with time? When is one slit better than two? And what happens at the intersection of time and quantum mechanics? |
| Sunday 10:00 am: Secrets of the Dinosaurs (Ends at: 10:55 am) Monroe Panelists:Robert J. Sawyer, John Ashmead, Michael Brett-Surman, Thomas Holtz (M) Did dinosaurs really have feathers? Why did people get it wrong for so long? What else did people believe about dinosaurs 50 years ago that is no longer true? Why did people think that then? What of our present knowledge about dinosaurs is most likely to also be incorrect? |
| Sunday 12:00 pm: Exoplanets (Ends at: 12:55 pm) Truman Panelists:John Ashmead, Inge Heyer, Edward M. Lerner (M) What do we know about planets outside our solar system? How do we discover them? What are the implications for aliens Exobiology? |
Announcement, Quantum Time, SF Cons | John Ashmead | 
October 6, 2019 10:47 am | 
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