{"id":2899,"date":"2021-12-25T11:44:00","date_gmt":"2021-12-25T00:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2021\/12\/25\/the-real-solar-flare-of-august-1972-in-cixin-lius-science-fiction\/"},"modified":"2025-07-22T18:04:06","modified_gmt":"2025-07-22T08:04:06","slug":"the-real-solar-flare-of-august-1972-in-cixin-lius-science-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2021\/12\/25\/the-real-solar-flare-of-august-1972-in-cixin-lius-science-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"The (Real) Solar Flare of August 1972 in Cixin Liu’s Science Fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A view of McMath Region 11976 from the Paris Observatory early on 4 August 1972. <\/i><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

I have a vivid memory of seeing — as a kid — Aurora from our home near New York City. <\/b>Eric Carlsen, m<\/b>y childhood friend and colleague from the Waters Edge Rocket Research Society<\/a>, told me his mom had similar memories. <\/b>A while back I did some Googling and concluded that it had to have been the monster solar flare of August 1972:<\/b><\/p>\n

<\/b>https:\/\/soldersmoke.blogspot.com\/2009\/09\/carrington-flares-aurora-where-were-you.html <\/b><\/a> <\/b><\/p>\n

That blog post got about eight comments, mostly from other folks with similar memories — they apparently were led to my blog by the same kind of memory-based Googling that I had done. <\/b><\/p>\n

This year, on Christmas Eve, Elisa and I were flying home from the Dominican Republic. I was reading (on my phone) “To Hold Up the Sky,” an anthology of Cixin Liu’s science fiction short-stories. I’d read his excellent “Three body Problem” in the Dominican Republic back in December 2017. <\/a> His work is usually “hard” sic-fi, with a strong connection to real physics.<\/b><\/p>\n

One of the short stories in the anthology is entitled “Full Spectrum Barrage Jamming.” Wow, I thought, that one is really promises to be very interesting for a radio amateur. I turned out that it was more interesting than I expected. <\/b><\/p>\n

I won’t spoil the story for you. Suffice it to say that Cixin Liu makes reference to the same August 1972 solar flare that I remember from my childhood, and discusses its effect on radio propagation. It was really kind of eerie to be in that plane, flying over the Bahamas, reading Chi-Fi on my I-phone, and seeing the author reference that memorable event from 1972. TRGHS. <\/b><\/p>\n

There were plans to turn this story into a movie: https:\/\/www.yicaiglobal.com\/news\/wandering-earth-producer-to-film-another-liu-cixin-novel<\/a><\/b><\/p>\n

Here is an excellent article describing what happened back in 1972: <\/b>https:\/\/room.eu.com\/article\/lessons-from-the-sun<\/b><\/a>. The August 1972 flare was so strong that it caused U.S. Navy anti-ship mines to explode in Haiphong harbor in Vietnam. <\/b><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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A view of McMath Region 11976 from the Paris Observatory early on 4 August 1972. I have a vivid memory of seeing — as a kid — Aurora from our home near New York City. Eric Carlsen, my childhood friend and colleague from the Waters Edge Rocket Research Society, told me his mom had similar … Continue reading “The (Real) Solar Flare of August 1972 in Cixin Liu’s Science Fiction”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2900,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[128,22,19,163,362,80,379],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aurora","category-china","category-dominican-republic","category-rockets","category-science-fiction","category-solar-cycle","category-vietnam"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2899"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2899\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2901,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2899\/revisions\/2901"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}