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09:42 Aug 19, 2018 |
English language (monolingual) [PRO] Art/Literary - Aerospace / Aviation / Space | |||||||
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| Selected response from: Charles Davis Spain Local time: 17:48 | ||||||
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4 +2 | imaginary |
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imaginary Explanation: Taken literally, this doesn't make any sense. It's science fiction, not science fact. Dick is just using it to suggest some sort of navigation system of the future, in which a gyrocompass will somehow be able to act like a GPS device and pinpoint a precise location. Firstly, a real gyrocompass is a compass: it tells you in which direction you are currently heading as a number of degrees from north. Moreover, it's used on ships and is not suitable for aircraft. It cannot possibly identify a particular point on a planet. As for the idea of a single number identifying a location, in theory you could devise a system in which longitude and latitude coordinates are combined in a single number, though you would surely need more digits than this. But a number of the form 4.65003 as the identification of a location has no basis in fact, to my knowledge. |
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