Good Science and Bad Science And Lack Thereof In Science Fiction Films and TV Series

BAYLOR said:
Then there are the light sabers in Star Wars. Wouldn't two light beams pass through one another and how do you limit the length of a beam of light to swords length? :)
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I don't think it has to be made of light just because it's called a 'light' saber. Maybe that means "not heavy" :LOL:

I have something similar in my current WIP, but it's a magnetically contained high-energy plasma (thus the glow).
 
I'm fairly sure light sabres are called such because they use a high energy proton beam which is a posh way of saying laser. IIRC the different colours originate from the crystals the sabres are made from.

Even if we are talking about some magnetically charged plasma the point still stands that there is nothing to contain the Plasma at the tip of the sabre. There is no conceivable reason for either light, or plasma, or anything else to stop at an arbitrary length without a mechanism to do so.

Anyway trying to explain light sabres results in the same cognitive failures I experience when someone mentions midi-chlorians. "Midi... say what now?"

Lol
 
Ray McCarthy said:
I don't buy alternate realities in SF, only in Fantasy :D
I'm sure that interpretation of Quantum mechanics is crazy.
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Yeah I remember watching an episode of Jonathan Ross and Brian Cox was a guest. He decided to talk about the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Theory and then stated - as a fact, that somewhere in a parallel Universe Liverpool FC won that Premier League season. I was literally screaming at the television and then spent days and days convincing friends that Cox was merely stipulating, on one interpretation, on a non-falsifiable theory.
 
SilentRoamer said:
I'm fairly sure light sabres are called such because they use a high energy proton beam which is a posh way of saying laser. IIRC the different colours originate from the crystals the sabres are made from.

Even if we are talking about some magnetically charged plasma the point still stands that there is nothing to contain the Plasma at the tip of the sabre. There is no conceivable reason for either light, or plasma, or anything else to stop at an arbitrary length without a mechanism to do so.

Anyway trying to explain light sabres results in the same cognitive failures I experience when someone mentions midi-chlorians. "Midi... say what now?"

Lol
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Yes Midi Chlorians was one of my next topic of importability.:)

Also the Deathstar's main weapon the 3 beams fire toward the center merge into one bigger beam and demolish Princess Leah's planet Alderan . So what is the the focusing mechanism where the beams converge? :)
 
Ray McCarthy said:
Magic.

They don't actually exist. The Force is Magic, it's propaganda :)
The Bene Gesserit ARE Witches. It's not advanced psychology.
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Careful the MidiChlorians might hear you. They take a very dim view of people who don't believe in them.:eek:
 
SilentRoamer said:
Yeah I remember watching an episode of Jonathan Ross and Brian Cox was a guest. He decided to talk about the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Theory
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It's a measure of my ignorance that it took me ages to twig that you meant:

blow-your-mind-space-sp1-promo_1024x576.jpg

Brian Cox​


not

cox_x2_1117657873.jpg

Brian Cox​

I was thinking: Wow! Brian Cox is both a great actor AND he is converse with quantum mechanics! Some guy!
 
The 1959 film Journey to the Center of the Earth did the similar thing, they took Iguanas and glued sail fins on them and used them as Dimetrodons. The result wasn't bad at all, they almost looked the part. :)

when they did the 1960 film The Lost World , they took Monitor Lizards, Iguanas and alligators and glued horns on them and had them stand in for dinosaurs ,This was not all convincing for a lot of very obvious reasons . :D
 
As much as I like The Day After Tomorrow , there is no way a climate shift can happen that dramatically.:)
 
Came across a couple of real clangers in series 3 of Stargate Atlantis which I am currently working my way through for the first time.

In one episode our heroes manfully struggle to close the internal door of a ship venting its atmosphere into space. Mighty are the grunts as they struggle to push the door shut against the roaring torrent of air streaming through it - which means, if you think about it for more than a couple of seconds, that the hole in the ship was behind them (that's where all the air is going) and by shutting the door they were effectively killing themselves.

A couple of episodes later they are in a facility deep at the bottom of the ocean where the pressure would "crush them in seconds" but get out of the facility (in convenient anti-lots of pressure suits they find lying about) through a swimming pool type thing in the floor. If the outside pressure would crush a human body "in seconds" it would crush the rather less dense atmosphere inside the station in even less time.
 
BAYLOR said:
There is no air in space therefore no medium with which to carry sounds. Lots of science fiction films ignore this one and tv science fiction series as well.

2001 a Space Odyssey didn't do sound in space , did try to keep things within the realm of science.(y)
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Yes, one of the main inaccuracies in sci-fi films are the sounds of explosions in outer space. I really like Star Wars films, but the sounds that are made by explosions in the battle scenes and by asteroids crashing into the Millennium Falcon are impossible. I write science fiction myself, and I think that being entirely scientifically accurate is difficult when you are trying to make the implausible seem real. You have a certain amount of poetic license that you can get away with, but you better make what you are writing/saying sound good.
 
Anne Spackman said:
I really like Star Wars films, but the sounds that are made by explosions in the battle scenes and by asteroids crashing into the Millennium Falcon are impossible.
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So's the London Symphony Orchestra playing John William's music very loudly. (The woodwinds and brass sections especially.) But no one ever complains about that. Treat the whooshes, pew! pew!s, and Kabooms! as part of the non-diegetic soundtrack and the problem goes away instantly.
 
BAYLOR said:
And could David Bowman have really held his breath in the vacuum of space? Wouldn't it have caused his blood to boil, wouldn't he have exploded and frozen solid in the absolute zero of space?
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One of the classic authors wrote a story where a spaceship is wrecked, and the crew have to jump to a nearby rescue vessel- but unfortunately all their suits were in the part that was destroyed. The person giving the instructions assures them that in that short time their blood won't boil or lungs explode- the only bad result is they end up with massive sunburns. Don't know how accurate it was.
 
BAYLOR said:
Independence Day They fly a captured alien ship to the main mothership (which is a stretch in and off it self) , download a virus which disables the shields on all the invading ships so that we can defeat the aliens Considering how different the hardware and software is, there is no just no possible way that this works.
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Wasn't there an attempt to retcon this by saying (a la Men in Black) that all modern computer technology had been developed from studying the alien crash in Area 51?
 
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