SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY

Tech-Word Origins: Stranger Than Science

from the Christian Science Monitor

Scientists are uniquely qualified to describe the universe in numbers and equations, but sometimes it takes an imaginative novelist to distill discoveries into words.

For his book Brave New Words, freelance lexicographer Jeff Prucher uncovered a slew of words that many people assume came from science, but actually originated in the pulpy pages of early science fiction. Here are some of his favorites.

Zero-gravity: While most people associate the term with outer space, "zero gravity" first described the center of the Earth. In 1938, fairly obscure writer Jack Binder imagined a momentary weightlessness while traveling from our planet's core to the surface. Arthur C. Clarke later shortened it to "zero-g" in his 1952 space novel Islands in the Sky.