From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Fri Aug 30 2002 - 06:30:24 MDT
>Frederik Pohl, 1980, _Beyond The Blue Event Horizon_, Del Rey,
>NY, pg 251:
>
> Then I turned to the tapes. I let the semi-Albert, the rigid
> half-animated caricature of the program I knew and loved,
> lecture me on Mach's Principle and gosh numbers more
> curious forms of astrophysical speculation than I had ever
> dreamed of.
I believe I first encountered the term in a Pohl article in an sf zine in
either the late '50s or the early '60s, before the anthropic principle was
much talked about. Dirac seemed to be the main reference point then (10^40,
10^80, particle number, age and extent of the cosmos, you know the kind of
thing.)
Damien Broderick
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