In 1913, the British chemist Frederick Soddy (1877-1956), advanced the “isotope concept” based on his studies of the elements produced in the course of radioactive decay. He proposed that a particular element might be made up of atoms identical in chemical properties but differing somewhat in atomic weight. Elements, then, instead of necessarily being made up of absolutely identical elements were actually mixtures of several almost identical “isotopes” differing in atomic weight.
This made so much sense, it was quickly accepted and has remained a cornerstone of chemistry and of atomic physics ever since.
But just the other day, I received a reprint of a paper by H. G. Wells, written on September 5,1896 (seventeen years before Soddy’s suggestion), in which he refers to some work done by a chemist the previous year, before radioactivity had even been discovered, and suggests that to explain that work, it is possible to suppose that “there are two kinds of oxygen, one with an atom a little heavier than the other.” By saying that, he is anticipating and predicting the existence of isotopes.
Furthermore, he points out that “the electric spark traversing the gas has a…selective action. Your heavier atoms or molecules get driven this or that way with slightly more force.” This is a pretty good description of a phenomenon first noted by the British physicist Joseph John Thomson (1856-1940), in 1912, sixteen years after Wells’s suggestion.
How’s that!
Naturally, I would like to point to something of my own that contained a bit of nice intuitive insight, and here it is. In 1966, I wrote a scientific essay, “I’m Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover,” which eventually appeared in the September 1966 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
In it I wanted to speculate about the origin of the universe and I was anxious to rebut the favorite comment of some who would ask, “If the universe started as a ‘cosmic egg,’ where did the cosmic egg come from?” The hope was that if I were faced with that question I would have to admit the existence of a supernatural agency of creation.
I therefore postulated the existence of “negative energy” and supposed that energy was created in both negative and positive form so that there was no net creation. I went on to advance what I called “
Asimov’s Cosmogonic Principle” and wrote, “The most economical way of expressing the principle is ‘In the Beginning, there was Nothing.’”
Well, some ten years later, the theory of the “inflationary universe” was advanced. It was altogether different from anything I had suggested, but in one respect it was identical. The universe was pictured as starting as a quantum fluctuation in a vacuum, so that “In the Beginning, there was Nothing.”
That piece of insight I am really proud of.
Best-Sellers
In the December 1982 issue of this magazine, you may recall that the first two chapters of my novel, Foundation’s Edge, were presented as an excerpt, together with an essay of my own on the novel’s genesis and some pleasant comments from my friends and colleagues. I agreed to all this under strong pressure from the editorial staff, who thought it would be a Good Thing and who overrode my own objections that readers would complain that I was using the magazine for personal aggrandizement.
As it happened, my fears were groundless. Readers’ comments were generally friendly, and a gratifying number indicated their determination to get the book and finish reading it.
It may be that you are curious to know what happened after the book was published. (For those of you interested in Asimovian trivia, it was published on October 8, 1982.) I’d like to tell you, because what happened astonished me totally. The book proved to be a best-seller!
I don’t mean it was a “best-seller” in the usual publisher’s promotion way of indicating that it didn’t actually sink without a trace on publication day. I mean it appeared on the national best-seller lists and, as I write, it is in third place on both The New York Times and on the Publishers Weekly list of hardcover fiction. Maybe by the time this editorial appears, it will have disappeared from the lists, but right now it’s there.
In the past, in these editorials, I have promised to keep you up to date on my endeavors and I will do it now in the form of an invented interview:
Q. Dr. Asimov, is this your first best-seller?
A. For some reason, people find that hard to believe, perhaps because I’m so assiduous at publicizing myself, but Foundation’s Edge is my first best-seller. It is my 262nd book and I have been a professional writer for forty-four years, so I guess this qualifies me as something less than an overnight success.
Mind you, this is not my first successful book. Very few of my books have actually lost money for the publisher and many of them have done very well indeed over the years. The earlier books of the Foundation trilogy have sold in the millions over the thirty years they have been in print. Again, if you group all my books together and total the number of sales of “ Asimov” (never mind the titles) then I have a best-seller every year.
However, Foundation’s Edge is the first time a single book of mine has sold enough copies in a single week to make the best-seller lists, and in the eight weeks since publication (as I write), it has done it in each of eight weeks.
Q. And how do you feel about that, Dr. A.?
A. Actually, I have no room for any feeling but that of astonishment. After publishing two hundred and sixty-one books without any hint of best-sellerdom, no matter how many of them might have been praised,
I came to think of that as a law of nature. As for Foundation’s Edge in particular, it has no sex in it, no violence, no sensationalism of any kind, and I had come to suppose that this was a perfect recipe for respectable nonbest-sellerdom.
Once I get over the astonishment, though (if ever), I suppose I will have room for feeling great.
After all, Foundation’s Edge will earn more money than I expected, and it will help my other books to sell more copies, and it may mean that future novels of mine may do better than I would otherwise expect, and I can’t very well complain about any of that.
Then, too, think of the boost to my ego! (Yes, I know! You think that’s the last thing it needs.) People who till now have known I was a writer and accepted it with noticeable lack of excitement even over the number of books I have committed, now stop me in order to congratulate me, and do so with pronounced respect. Personally, I don’t think that being on the best-seller lists makes a book any the higher in quality and, all too often, it might indicate the reverse, but I must admit I enjoy the congratulations and all that goes with it.
Q. Are there any disadvantages to all this great stuff: Isaac?
A. Oddly enough, there are. For one thing, my esteemed publishers, Doubleday and Company, would like me to travel allover the United States pushing the book. (It is, at the moment, their only fiction best-seller and they are as eager as I am to have it stay on the lists forever.) They are putting considerable money into advertising and promotion and it would only be fair that I do my bit as well. However, I don’t like to travel, and so I have to refuse their suggestions that I go to Chicago, for instance. And it makes me feel guilty, and a traitor both to my publisher and my book. I have made a trip to Philadelphia, though.
There is also a higher than normal demand for interviews through visits or on the telephone. This doesn’t demand traveling on my part and I try to oblige (telling myself it’s good publicity for the book), but it does cut into my writing time, and I can’t allow too much of that.