2001: The Lost Science

In the last four decades Stanley Kubrick's 2001 has been dissected in books and theses from every conceivable angle. Until humanity actually encounters extraterrestrial intelligence, his movie will draw attention to this most tantalizing subject. However, what is often overlooked in all of these critical studies is the almost flawless scientific façade constructed by Kubrick, Clarke, Ordway, Lange and the hundreds of engineers and scientists who contributed to the production. Author and engineer Adam Johnson has spent years accumulating information, believed to have been long since destroyed, to create a detailed and unprecedented analysis of the technology envisioned in Kubrick's masterpiece. From British designers and model-makers to Soviet astronomers, from Canadian special effects wizards to German artists, from American spacecraft engineers and artificial intelligence scholars to French stylists, this is the Lost Science of 2001.