Gallery: Horny Dinosaurs, Venutian Rains and a Rorschach Shirt: Ray Bradbury's Science
01the-long-rains-all-summer-in-a-day-2
The science fiction genre was always an inexact fit for the kaleidoscopic enthusiasms of Ray Bradbury. Closer to Borges and Calvino than Asimov and Heinlein, he was a carnival-barker poet of the human condition in all its forms -- but as befits a consciousness blooming in what some historians [call the Age of Science](http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Age_of_Science.html?id=0MyaD_t_hCgC), the era's themes and curiosities inevitably shaped his work. On the following pages, Wired peers at some of our favorite Bradbury stories through the lens of what's now scientifically known. Of course, as he wrote several hundred short stories and more than 30 books, we've only scratched the surface, so please suggest your own favorites. ### Above: "The Long Rain" & "All Summer in a Day" The cloud-covered surface of Venus inspired much literary speculation in the early 20th century, with writers including C.S. Lewis, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Olaf Stapledon imagining what lay beneath the shroud. Bradbury dreamed of a world where rain fell almost ceaselessly. "It had been raining for seven years; thousands upon thousands of days compounded and filled from one end to the other with rain, with the drum and gush of water, with the sweet crystal fall of showers and the concussion of storms so heavy they were tidal waves come over the islands," Bradbury wrote in "All Summer in a Day," a 1954 story about a girl who missed the planet's septennial day of sunshine. "And this was the way life was forever on the planet Venus, and this was the schoolroom of the children of the rocket men and women who had come to a raining world to set up civilization and live out their lives." It's now known that surface temperatures on Venus could melt lead, and that the rain would be acid -- but perhaps Bradbury's conditions prevail on one of [thousands of newly discovered exoplanets](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/02/kepler-data-dump/), just as life imitated George Lucas' [imaginary planet of Tatooine](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/09/new-binary-star-exoplanet/). *Image: Three-dimensional surface rendering of Maat Mons, the tallest volcano on Venus. (NASA/JPL)*
02the-fog-horn
### "The Fog Horn" Drawn by the deep, booming sound of its foghorn, the last of a vanished species of prehistoric ocean reptiles makes a remote lighthouse the object of its lonely affections. "Out there in the cold water, far from land, we waited every night for the coming of the fog, and it came, and we oiled the brass machinery and lit the fog light up in the stone tower," Bradbury wrote. "And if they did not see our light, then there was always our Voice, the great deep cry of our Fog Horn shuddering through the rags of mist to startle the gulls away like decks of scattered cards and make the waves turn high and foam." But would dinosaurs -- the creature resembles [a long-necked plesiosaur](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plesiosauroidea) -- actually sound this way? Actually they might: Studies of birds, the living descendants of dinosaurs, suggest that [long necks serve as amplifiers](http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=41443), and [many dinosaurs are thought to have possessed deep voices](http://philoscience.unibe.ch/documents/TexteHS10/Weishampel1997.pdf ). *Image: A long-necked plesiosaur model at the Canadian Fossil Discovery Centre in Morden, Manitoba. ([Loozrboy](https://secure.flickr.com/photos/loozrboy/4803814720/)/Flickr)*
03a-sound-of-thunder
### "The Sound of Thunder" In "The Sound of Thunder," a boorish big-game hunter travels back in time to shoot a *Tyrannosaurus rex*. The *Tyrannosaur* is already fated to die naturally just minutes before the hunter's arrival, allowing him to kill the dinosaur without affecting the future. But the hunter panics, disobeys instructions and with one tiny action sets off a cascade of unintended consequences. Returning to their own time, the hunting party finds a very different world. "It fell to the floor, an exquisite thing, a small thing that could upset balances and knock down a line of small dominoes and then big dominoes and then gigantic dominoes, all down the years across Time," Bradbury wrote. "Eckels' mind whirled. It couldn't change things. Killing one butterfly couldn't be that important! Could it?" In 1961, a decade after the story's publication, mathematician Edward Lorenz articulated the ["butterfly effect,"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect) a piece of chaos theory describing how small changes to complex systems really might alter history's course. Whether a butterfly's death would actually do so is, of course, untestable. Perhaps it would simply give another butterfly a chance to survive, and the two would cancel each other out. One thing is known, though: The *Tyrannosaur*'s flesh would not have glittered "like a thousand green coins," as [it would have been covered in proto-feathers](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/04/yutyrannus-huali-feathers/). *Image: Artist's impression of* Yutyrannus huali*, a relative of* Tyrannosaurus rex*. Image: Brian Choo*
04martian-chronicles
### *The Martian Chronicles* The *Martian Chronicles*, published in 1950, is among Bradbury's best-known works. It depicts a Mars full of wonderful machines, strange vegetation and old canals, populated by an ancient civilization of brown-skinned, golden-eyed Martians. In this, it resonates with with earlier science fiction works about the planet, such as Edgar Rice Burrough's "Barsoom" series and other pulpy stories. When scientific probes arrived on Mars in the 1960s, their close-up photographs changed our understanding of the planet forever. Mars was found to be dry, cold and seemingly devoid of life. Bradbury's stories have little in common with this newer view of Mars, though his description of the planet having dried-out seas fits with modern evidence that Mars [was once much more wet](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/06/teardrop-shaped-island/). Bradbury himself never intended the *Martian Chronicles* to reflect any realistic state of Mars. He thought the stories should be treated less as science fiction and more like fantasy. "It couldn't happen, you see? That's the reason it's going to be around a long time — because it's a Greek myth, and myths have staying power," he said during a 1999 interview. *Image: Martian surface photograph taken by Viking 2 lander. (NASA)*
Jev Olsen05the-rocket
### "The Rocket" A junkyard owner dreams of taking his family to space in this 1951 tale. "Many nights Fiorello Bodoni would awaken to hear the rockets sighing in the dark sky," Bradbury wrote. "He would tiptoe from bed, certain that his kind wife was dreaming, to let himself out into the night air. For a few moments he would be free of the smells of old food in the small house by the river. For a silent moment he would let his heart soar alone into space, following the rockets." Bodoni's craft never takes flight, and he transports his family by imagination alone. Had the story been written a half-century later, however, Bodoni's dream would have been realistic: Witness the efforts of [Copenhagen Suborbitals](stag-komodo.wired.com/wiredscience/rocketshop/), a group of hobbyists and engineers building their own backyard rocket ship. *Image: Copenhagen Suborbital's Tycho Deep Space capsule. (Jev Olsen)*
06i-sing-the-body-electric
### "I Sing the Body Electric" Technology isn't quite science, but the application of scientific insight -- and perhaps no technology is more alluring than the creation of a creature like ourselves, only better. The robot nanny of "I Sing the Body Electric," arriving after a mother's death, is just such a being. "For we, her grandchildren, slapped her to life. Timothy, Agatha, and I, Tom, raised up our hands and brought them down in a huge crack!" wrote Bradbury of the robot's activation. "We shook together the bits and pieces, parts and samples, textures and tastes, humors and distillations that would move her compass needle north to cool us, south to warm and comfort us, east and west to travel round the endless world, glide her eyes to know us, mouth to sing us asleep by night, hands to touch us awake at dawn." Almost 50 years after the story's publication, robot babysitters are indeed under development, but they're nothing like Bradbury's creation. Some scientists [worry that using robots to watch children](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/12/babysittingrobo/) will impair their social development. *Image: PaPeRo, a prototype robot designed by NEC to live with humans. ([Ms. President](https://secure.flickr.com/photos/granick/205674338/sizes/l/)/Flickr)*
07the-murderer
### "The Murderer" More than 50 years before the rise of social networking, ambient intimacy and round-the-clock digital interaction, Bradbury had an uncanny sense of how that world would feel. "There sat all the tired commuters with their wrist radios, talking to their wives, saying, 'Now I'm at Forty-third, now I am at Forty-fourth, here I am at Forty-ninth, now turning at Sixty-first,'" Bradbury wrote in "The Murderer," a story of a man who goes on a rampage after one too many Siri-style admonitions. "The car radio cackling all day, Brock go there, Brock go there, Brock check in, Brock check out, okay Brock, hour lunch, Brock, lunch over, Brock, Brock, Brock.'" Bradbury clearly sympathized with the story's gadget-smashing protagonist, but he was no technophobe: After all, he helped design the United States pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair and the Epcot Center's Spaceship Earth display. *Image: [Justin Baeder](https://secure.flickr.com/photos/justinbaeder/247116120/)/Flickr*
08the-man-in-the-rorschach-shirt
### "The Man in the Rorschach Shirt" Emanuel Brokaw, a world-renowned psychiatrist who retired unexpectedly at the peak of his fame and hasn't been seen in years, is encountered on a seaside bus in Southern California, walking up the aisle in a shirt adorned with the psychoanalysis-inviting blog patterns invented by early 20th century psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach. "This child found zebras all optical illusion on an African wild. The doctor slapped the animals and made them jump! This old woman saw vague Adams and misty Eves being driven from half-seen Gardens," Bradbury wrote. "The doctor scooched in on the seat with her awhile; they talked in fierce whispered elations, then up he jumped and forged on. Had the old woman seen an eviction? This young one saw the couple invited back in!" As the story unfolds, Brokaw explains the circumstances of his mysterious departure from psychiatry: After a new prescription for glasses improved his eyesight, he suddenly found himself hearing better, too -- and realized that, for decades, he'd misunderstood what his patients said, dispensing counsel for complaints that hadn't actually been voiced. Somehow his wisdom had worked, but he couldn't continue the charade. This seemingly far-fetched plot isn't entirely absurd. There is evidence that a change in one sensory domain, such as sight, can [cause a neurological reorganization in other sensory areas](http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v11/n1/full/nrn2758.html), though it wouldn't happen so rapidly or with such precision. As for Rorschach's test, it's largely fallen from psychiatric favor, but Brokaw's enthusiasms can be forgiven. He was, after all, one of Bradbury's more autobiographical characters. "Dogs, lightnings, cats, cars, mushroom clouds, man-eating tiger lilies! Each person, each response, brought greater outcries," Bradbury wrote of Brokaw's passage. "We found ourselves all laughing together. This fine old man was a happening of nature, a caprice, God’s rambunctious will, sewing all our separateness up in one." [](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2012/06/bradbury-light.jpg) *Images: 1) Card X, the last of 10 ink blot cards used in the Rorschach test. (Hermann Rorschach/Wikimedia Commons) 2) Ray Bradbury photographed at the San Diego Comic Convention in 1975 ([Alan Light](https://secure.flickr.com/photos/alan-light/332925230/)/Flickr)*
