Going to WorldCon

Tuesday, August 11, 2016

At Oh Dark Thirty Larry, Michelle, Alex, and our friend Michael Donahue are supposed to meet here and shortly after a limousine capable of taking all of us and our luggage to the airport will appear.  We will get there in time to get past the alert crackerjack team of TSA agents, and have breakfast in the Crown Room of Delta Airline. This is supposed to happen without incident.

I’m about to go to bed with my hearing aids on because I don’t know if I will hear the alarm clock without them.

I’m nominated for a Hugo, but I don’t expect to win it.  It’s for Best Editor, based on There Will Be War Volume 10, which came out last year new along with reissue of four of the original There Will Be War volumes.  Those I should have won a Hugo for; they were that good.  It wasn’t the practice to nominate anthology editors, and anyway, There Will Be War was not a popular title back then; Harry Harrison hated it so much that he rushed out an anthology called There Won’t Be War, but I think the first volume of that was the last.  The series was published when we did not know what outcome would end the Cold War; but the stories were good, some timeless, and all hold up well.  The essays were about principles, not tactics, and while most relevant to the Cold War are all important today – and their lessons are not being learned as widely as they should be.

Volume Ten contains some very good stories, essays relevant to modern problems, and continues the series nicely.  May I did deserve a Hugo for it.  It had two Hugo=nominated stories in it, one about as serious as you can get, and all very readable.

Anyway, I’m off.  They have me on many panels, so I doubt I’ll get much work done, but I am taking a ZenBook with copies of my current projects,  just in case.

I’ll be back next week.  Perhaps I’ll have something during the week, but no promises.

Fifth Force in the Universe

This is exciting:

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Recent findings indicating the possible discovery of a previously unknown subatomic particle may be evidence of a fifth fundamental force of nature, according to a paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters by theoretical physicists at the University of California, Irvine.

“If true, it’s revolutionary,” said Jonathan Feng, professor of physics & astronomy. “For decades, we’ve known of four fundamental

forces: gravitation, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. If confirmed by further experiments, this discovery of a possible fifth force would completely change our understanding of the universe, with consequences for the unification of forces and dark matter.”

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http://phys.org/news/2016-08-physicists-discovery-nature.html#jCp

If you want the original paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.03591 ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo