In fact, Fiji is right up against the degree meridian of longitude. But that is not the final word either. The dateline has long had an eastward bulge beyond the degree line, including the South Pacific island of Tonga, situated in a later time zone. But Kiribati, a wide-spread island nation split by the date line, with a different date in each half, has announced a spectacular relocation of the date line eastward around their boundary.
Now Kiribati's Christmas Island will see the new millennium an hour before Tonga. Personally I hope to go to bed early and find a new millennium waiting for me when I awake. Sign up for our email newsletter. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Go Paperless with Digital.
The editors of Scientific American offer this explanation: Years in the most popular calendar used today, the Gregorian calendar, are counted from the year A. Get smart. Sign Up. Support science journalism. David Bowie took a few drops of cannabis tincture before watching, and countless others dropped acid.
These movies, though cheesy, found a new use for editing and special effects: to mimic psychedelic visions. The power of the movie has always been unusually bound up with the story of how it was made. He had one advantage over reality: the film could present the marvels of the universe in lavish color and sound, on an enormous canvas.
If Kubrick could make the movie he imagined, the grainy images from the lunar surface shown on dinky TV screens would seem comparatively unreal. In Clarke, Kubrick found a willing accomplice. Clarke had served as a radar instructor in the R. His reputation as perhaps the most rigorous of living sci-fi writers, the author of several critically acclaimed novels, was widespread. Kubrick needed somebody who had knowledge and imagination in equal parts.
Kubrick liked to work from books, and since a suitable one did not yet exist they would write it. They studied the scientific literature on extraterrestrial life. Slowed down to normal speed, the oozing shades and textures looked like galaxies and nebulae.
Spacecraft were designed with the expert help of Harry Lange and Frederick Ordway, who ran a prominent space consultancy. The lines between film and reality were blurred. In the coming decades, conspiracy theorists would allege that Kubrick had helped the government fake the Apollo 11 moon landing. Kubrick brought to his vision of the future the studiousness you would expect from a history film. By rendering a not-too-distant future, Kubrick set himself up for a test: thirty-three years later, his audiences would still be around to grade his predictions.
Part of his genius was that he understood how to rig the results. The plot was simple and stark. Back in England, a massive camera system was built to project these shots onto screens, transforming the set into an African landscape.
And in the film, the ironies pile up even higher. A HAL computer makes a mistake. A mission controller confirms that is a mistake — because his own identical HAL computer on Earth says so. Not that is simply a Dr Strangelove sequel.
Kubrick was dreaming of other worlds, but he kept coming back down to Earth. If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter. And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.
Play it Again. Why A Space Odyssey remains a mystery.
0コメント