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giovedì 12 settembre 2013

"Stanley uses a tame Black Hole as a filing system": 2001 and the Skylab


"... One of the most technically brilliant sequences in the movie was that in which Frank Poole was shown running round and round the circular trick of the giant centrifuge, held in place by the 'artificial gravity' produced by its spin.

Almost a decade later, the crew of the superbly successful Skylab realized that its designers had provided them with a similar geometry; a ring of storage cabinets formed a smooth, circular hand around the space station's interior. Skylab, however, was not spinning, but this did not.deter its ingenious occupants. They discovered that they could run around the track, just like mice in a squirrel cage, to produce a result visually indistinguishable from that shown in 2001. 


And they televised the whole exercise back to Earth (need I name the accompanying music?) with the comment: 'Stanley Kubrick should see this.' As in due course he did, because I sent him the telecine recording. 

(I never got it back; Stanley uses a tame Black Hole as a filing system.)"

(Arthur C. Clarke, author's note from "2010: odyssey two". Source: google books)

Let's see those pictures in motion!


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