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Fossilized Science in Science Fiction
February 8th, 2009
Leaping off from a thread started by James Nicoll on his LJ blog where he blames Larry Niven for entrenching the idea in science fiction that a supernova close to another star can cause the second star to also go supernova, based on his 1966 story “At the Core” which underlies his entire Known Space future, what other discredited ideas are similarly entrenched?
Niven is a victim of success. I have no doubt that every speculative idea finds wacky application in one science fiction short story or other and are forgotten shortly after publication, but to become fossilized means that the idea is a key part of some book that has been consistently reprinted and read over decades. I mean, I remember reading “At the Core” as a teenager and assuming that the idea was plausible, even though it didn’t entire make sense to me. I mean, I knew stars formed in clusters and that these entire clusters didn’t all burst into supernova explosions leaving nothing behind, and I knew that other galaxies didn’t explode. It was years later when I started getting some real astronomy before I realized that this idea didn’t make real sense. It probably comes from misundertanding or missapplying some ideas about nuclear starbursts from back in the 1960s (e.g., Burbidge, Burbidge, and Sandage 1963 — sorry, a pay article not worth paying for for 40 years).
Now, back when I was a kid I was a voracious reader and learned a lot of things from novels. I assumed that the fact-based information was reliable. I knew enough, usually, to separate out the fantastical elements from the science-based ones, or so I thought. I mean, there was a lot of good stuff in the science fiction I grew up reading. Joe Haldeman taught me about relativity. Niven taught me about tidal forces. Philip Jose Farmer taught me that I could drink my own urine.
OK, some information was of dubious value.
But this all got me thinking about what science fiction (or fiction more generally) is still floating around there being read today, not intentionally getting any science wrong, certainly not for the time it was first written, but is creating misconceptions in the minds of sf fans. Now, there are some interpretive things that I suspect are B.S., like quantum immortality, but can’t disprove, but there have been some science fads, some cool ideas, that just didn’t work out. I’m also not talking about technical/quantitative mistakes, like how the Beowulf Schaefer should not have been able to survive his passage by the neutron star in Niven’s story by that name.
I blame science fiction generally for giving people misleading ideas about faster than light (FTL) travel, generally skipping any treatment of associated time travel.
There have got to be more cases from movies. Alien, for instance, gives people the idea that people should explode when exposed to the vacuum of space. Not so.
Mission to Mars has leaking fuel freeze in space? Ugh! No! Why doesn’t the Earth freeze? It’s in space, too!
Okay, those things are just plain wrong, not properly “fossilized science” just bad science being spread with every movie rental and every cable showing. I’m interested in hearing about more interesting cases like Niven’s exploding galaxy core, which definitely confused me for years.
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Wilson Tucker’s The Year of the Quiet Sun features polywater in a supporting role. Of course, even if that is in print, I don’t think most modern readers are old enough to remember poly water.
Here’s another one from Niven: memory RNA.
How about Dune? At the ending isn’t one of the schemes to make the planet more liveable to get water from the atmosphere to make lakes? While Earth has many lakes in the air, it’s only because water exists in large quantities on the ground. I haven’t read past the first book so I don’t know how important this is later on in the series.
Since i love Known Space, my half hearted attempt to say chain reacting supernovae are possible is that tremendous quantities of matter further along in the periodic table than hydrogen is ejected from the 1st exploding star. Wouldn’t large quantities of this stuff “muddy” nearby stars possibly pushing the star faster along in its stellar evolution? I know, though, that an exploding core is very likely to be visible in vastly distant galaxies. So we should see this stuff commonly.
Which brings me to Superman. When I was a kid reading his adventures, he was constantly throwing things into the centre of the sun where they “could do no harm”. Couldn’t this hurry our sun along in stellar evolution thus creating a red sun? We’d burn to a crisp and suddenly Superman would have no powers and burn, too. How delightful.
James, sorry, don’t recall polywater, and didn’t read that book. Doubt it is screwing with young minds today.
Larry, no issue with the heavy elements. It would be a very small portion of any supernova being gravitationally captured by a “nearby” star, and it would still be an issue of how fast the Hydrogen in the core is burned, primarily, also unaffected by local supernovas.
And throwing things into the sun is dumb — that’s not easy to do — he’d have to throw things back along the Earth’s orbit at 30 km/s. If he’s throwing things faster than that (it’s only 1/10000 of lightspeed) he could throw closer to the sun’s direction. But, man. No problem with altering solar evolution unless he’s throwing giant planets there in mass quantities. But it probably reveals the misconception that people think it’s easy to throw things into the sun because of it’s strong gravity (forgetting the Earth’s high angular momentum).
Mike, I dont understand whats the problem with the FTL travel in sci-fi when it doesnt includes the effects on time.
I mean… its usually hyperspace. Why should there be any special relativity effect while they are in this “other dimension”?
Maybe you could create a list of all FTL methods you can remember were used in science fiction and list which ones would in theory cause time distortion and each ones would not.
In so far as relativity works, and it seems to describe the universe very well, FTL of ALL sorts implies time travel/potential paradoxes. Here’s one explanation:
http://sheol.org/throopw/tachyon-pistols.html
The problem is in defining what is “now” for separated observers, but it is not just a definitional problem. The effects are real.
Physics may allow for such things (via wormwholes) but there are ongoing debates about these things. The physics approach is to find self-consistent solutions of the type that appear to remove free will from the picture (paradoxes not allowed). Pick your poison.
James, sorry, don’t recall polywater,
Enjoy!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywater
and didn’t read that book.
But it won the John W. Campbell Award for the Novel John W. Campbell Was Least Likely to Have Purchased That Year! Kids these days.
It’s by Wilson Tucker and it involves a small team of researchers being sent a few decades into the future on the orders of a President who thinks knowledge of the future will help him cling to power. Guess how well that works out?
Wow, just totally missed polywater. I probably had no awareness of polywater in real life when I saw those Star Trek episodes and wrote them off to the usually made up technobabble.
I know a fair amount about Campbell, but I wonder if there is a guide somewhere online that describes who was and what he was about?
And I’m now thinking there must have been science fiction stories/novels written back in the 1980s about cold fusion, Utah-style, revolutionizing near-future Earth. I mean, a smart sf writer probably leaves it cold fusion or something vague, and the risky sf writer designs an entire near-future world extrapolated from the specific details, with palladium billionaires, the collapse of big oil, and laughing at global warming.
The Wiki on Campbell isn’t that bad.
Cold fusion rose and fell pretty darn quickly, maybe too fast for an MS to get into print without being corrected. As I recall their press release was in late March 1989 and the damning report from the United States Department of Energy came out in November of that year.
That said, there are still die-hard fans of Pons and Fleischmann and Arthur C. Clarke was one of them. Don’t think it turned up in his SF but by that point he’d pretty much given up writing solo and of all his collaborative novels I read only the one with Pohl has any taste of Clarke in it.
“That said, there are still die-hard fans of Pons and Fleischmann…”
Tell me about it. In a blog post I used cold fusion as an example of the wrong way to bring scientific results to the public and a die-hard fan left a long series of critical comments.
I once posted an alternate history in which the Flexner Report [1] was never published and got a heated tirade about the injustice of what was done to Wilhelm Reich in reply [2].
1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexner_Report
2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Reich
Mike, doesnt your tachyon example still considers things travelling THROUGH space-time?
Hiperspace (which obviously is just a literary invention) is supposed to be like another dimension. You should not consider relativity. (sounds similar to the spaceship propulsion device proposed by Burkhard Heim ´s followers)
Actually, most sci-fi stories make hiperspace look like a separate universe which is “smaller” then ours… thus, a ship travelling at 1km/s in it covers the distance of several AU in the normal space, although it DOES NOT travels in normal space, nor it travels above light speed in hiperspace.
All nonsense of course, its just so we can imagine intergalactic empires and the sort. But still, IMAGINING hiperspace like its described in many books, I see no reason for the relativity time paradoxes and all…
Also, what about alcubierre ´s drive, where the ship is actually motionless in its own space time reference frame?
oops, found on Wikipedia a description Asimov gave of his own version of hiperspace travel. Dont really know how expert in physics Asimov was and how much his explanation makes sense…
“Asimovian Hyperspace
The concept of traveling between stellar systems via the hyperspace drive or “jump” is described or mentioned in several of Isaac Asimov’s short stories and novels written from the 1940s through to the 1990s. Hyperspace seems to enable teleportation on a pre-calculated route, the ends of which are in normal space. Although the timeline is not consistent, it appears to start with the development of a hyperdrive from a theoretical construct by The Brain, a positronic supercomputer built by US Robots. Interplanetary travel has already been developed, and in 2002, when US Robots demonstrates its first primitive positronic robot, it is intended to be used for mining operations on the planet Mercury.
Simultaneously, the theories of the spacewarp are developed by a research project under military control, with the assistance of positronic robots, until the first hypership is built at Hyper Base on an asteroid. Once perfected however, the drive is little used, as it is fearfully heavy in energy use and still very risky. But once the existence of habitable planets around the nearer stars to Earth is established (also with robot help), the drive is further developed, and over centuries colonies are established on these planets.
The collection of more and more data on stellar systems and the analysis of stellar spectra allows the compilation of what becomes the Standard Galactic Ephemeris, with which hyperspace navigation (see The Stars, Like Dust) becomes less of an art and more of a science. It still requires complex calculations; not until the fall of the Galactic empire and expansion of the Foundation thousands of years after the first drives were developed would a ship be developed (as in Foundation’s Edge) that allows the total computerization of the calculation of single or multiple hyperspace jumps and the control of the jump without human intervention. There is no description of the hyperspace environment, as travel through it is instantaneous (it must be mentioned however, that in all of Asimov’s book where hyperspace travel is described-except for Foundation’s Edge, where the time in hyperspace is very short-the travel is said to involve a feeling of momentary “insideoutness”).
Asimov (in Foundation’s Edge) defines Hyperspace as a condition rather than a location. In Hyperspace, all velocity is zero. Relative to the Einsteinian metrical frame, however, speed is infinite. For navigational purposes, the Galaxy is imagined as being real (G) and imaginary (G0). Peturbations such as those experienced by ship in space from the gravitional field around an object such as a planet or even a star are exacerbated in hyperspatial travel, since mass in real space distorts hyperspace in an equal measure. ‘Jumping’ near to a gravitational mass is likely to make resulting exit from hyperspace to be highly uncertain, with the level of improbability i decreasing with the square of the distance to the nearest gravitional ‘well’
As a condition, hyperspace translates objects as a phased Tachyon wave, which once collapsed restores the objects to their Meson composition instantaneously. This is supposed to happen with a minimum of energy expenditure. While it is necessary for a ship to have nuclear engine to produce the hyperspace drive field to hurl a vessel through hyperspace, nearly all of the energy expended is recovered as the hyper field collapses. Also, there is no Cherenkov radiation flash associated with re-entry from hyperspace. Asimov describes the re-entry in several stories as “The ship winked into existence….”
Rogerio, I don’t think it matters as long as things are coming back to “this” universe. Teleport things “instantaneously” if you like. I understand that this isn’t the simplest concept out there. Let me find another source (a comment from me here is unlikely to be enough):
http://www.gdnordley.com/_files/published_nf.html
Go to his “Graphic Demise of FTL” article.
Keep in mind that relativity already lets you go arbitrary distances in arbitrary times — from your own perspective.
hmmm… damn. Well, although you and the other physicists are probably right, I hope you are wrong, you know. Not that hope is any valid in science, haha.
well, anyway, even knowing its wrong, do you ENJOY sci-fi which deals with FTL? (there are so many of them)
I’m probably being a total ignoramus about this, but wouldn’t fuel freeze in space?
sourman, it would boil. Immediately. Boiling is a function of pressure primarily, and liquids in vacuum pretty much go straight to the gaseous phase. If you suddenly found yourself popped out an airlock, you would feel the saliva in your mouth start to boil in seconds, before you passed out (about 10-15 seconds in). To freeze something requires removing the heat. In space, this is actually pretty hard — radiation is the only cooling mechanism. And if you’re in the sunlight (as you would be in the solar system most places) you also have a heating source to contend with.
So, this movie that has both fuel and people freezing in seconds is totally wrong and has led many viewers to have some bad ideas about what happens.
If we’re talking water ice, it’s fine in the outer solar system, but you won’t find much if any in space inside the orbit of Mars. And “rocket fuel ice?” I’ve never even seen that on Earth.
what about when the Appolo 13 astronauts ejected their urine and they say “constellation urine” (or something like that). It seems like urine ice flakes, not gas…
Thanks for the explanation
Rogerio, I need to think about that and maybe do a little more research. I know ice cannot persist for long in space this close to the sun, but it is possible that there is rapid evaporative cooling and there are some small bits of stuff left for a short time. I have little doubt most will boil away rapidly, but maybe there is some that freezes in the process, too.
What was shown in Mission to Mars was ludicrous, however, both with the fuel and with the people.
I havent seen Mission to Mars… maybe I was lucky?
Btw, I started reading The Forever War (which I bought on Leo ´s store) and they were in Charon, and this girl has her head cut off, and Haldeman describes her blood spilling from the flying body and cristalizing as ice while in the air.
Not that Haldeman IS RIGHT on the issue. I dont mind creative licenses sometimes 😉
“In the air?” That’s fine then. If the pressure is high enough, there will be no boiling and the cold air will help carry off heat rapidly.
Haven’t read The Forever War in quite sometime, but maybe it’s a good time to do so before the movie comes out, and before next time I see Joe. Then we can drink some wine and argue about under what conditions blood boils and freezes.
Interestingly, we have sayings about getting angry “My blood is boiling!” and being cruel “He had ice in his veins.”
oops… sorry… when I meant “in the air”, I meant “while not touching the ground”. Haha, damn. Many expressions were made to use on Earth conditions. For example… flying… can the word “fly” designate moving on vaccum?
You know Joe Haldeman? Yay, thats cool. Which other sci-fi authors are your personal acquaintances (sp?)
Btw, even better was to know that there is a Forever War movie being made. Where can I get more info about that? Just hope its more true to the book than all the latest sci-fi movies based on books around (Starship Troopers, I Robot, etc)
Freezing won’t happen first. Boiling first. I can see some flash freezing afterward from the evaporative cooling, perhaps. Close to the sun, not so much, or it won’t last long if a little bit does freeze. Out by Charon, it will freeze and stay frozen, but the first thing will be that the blood boils away, leaving a little ice later.
Yeah, I know Joe, and he’s going to be a guest instructor for a workshop I’m running in the U.S. in July, back in Wyoming. SF is a relatively small field and we have conventions and most of us have met each other at least in passing. My fanboy moment was after my first novel came out, having dinner with Gregory Benford, David Brin, David Gerrold, and Vernor Vinge, and being treated as one of the gang. You name them, I’ve probably met them at least in passing, or seen them across the room.
There isn’t a lot of info about the Forever War movie yet, although Ridley Scott is supposed to be running the show. I don’t know how far along it is, and Hollywood projects aren’t sure things until they’re in the theater.