From Birger Johansson
Science fiction fans may be familiar with “Clarke’s three laws”. I suggest a
fourth: “You have to get up early to get ahead of Arthur C. Clarke.”
Regarding the “figure of eight” solution to the three-body problem
(14 April, p 16),
the mathematician Douglas Heggie suggests that the presence in space of
objects arranged in this pattern would signal the intervention of intelligent
beings.
When the “figure of eight” was mentioned in Science last year, I wrote to
Clarke and made the same suggestion. He politely replied he had used a similar
idea in “City and the Stars” (The Seven Suns) as early as 1956.
Umeå, Sweden
