Respecting Science

Introduction

We are about to take up some of the more speculative topics, like space combat and star travel. To make things work, we will have to bend, and perhaps even break some of the theories of physics. But you have to do it responsibly, remaining true to the spirit if not the letter of the laws of science. Otherwise your SF world will degenerate into a self-contradictory mass of putrid fantasy pathetically trying to cover up with scraps of ridiculous technobabble. There is some good reading on this topic at StarDestroyer dot net. In particular beware of pseudoscience.

There are a few areas where the problem crops up again and again. They are all where the theories of science are inconveniently preventing the writer from doing something they want, and the writer is getting petulant about it.

Limiting the damage

In some cases you have no choice but to violate a theory of physics. For instance, if you are going to have FTL travel, you are going to have to violate either relativity or causality; one of them has got to go.

The important point is to keep the fracture under control. Hack writers will assume that "if we have to break a few theories of physics for FTL, why not just throw all the theories out the window?" Don't give in. Omitting physics will degrade your novel to a pathetic lack of accuracy worse than an average Space Ghost cartoon.

And try just to break one theory, not two or three.

In the sphere of economics, there is the havoc created by the unintended consequences of the Star Trek Replicator.

The producers saw one problem right off the bat, and quickly handwaved a reason which prevented using a replicator to make multiple clones of a person. But they passed over small matter of replicator technology irrevocably causing the collapse of the global economy. You would have spotted that right away, if you had read Ralph Williams's "Business as Usual, During Alterations" Murray Leinster's The Duplicators, or George O. Smith's "Pandora's Millions".

In "Pandora's Millions", the ivory tower engineers of Venus Equilateral invent a matter transmitter, and quickly figure out that the signal can be recorded. This makes it into a replicator. A businessman friend of theirs screams at them that they've just destroyed the economy of three worlds in one fell swoop.

The businessman says it is too late to suppress the invention, but if the engineers want to prevent it from being a complete and utter disaster, they had better go and invent some substance that cannot be replicated ASAP. Lacking that, there is no way to prevent either currency or cheques from being counterfeited. Counterfeits so good they cannot be distinguished from genuine money.

With a replicator, everybody can pave their driveway with gold bricks, eat caviar and filet mignon every day, and wallpaper every room in the house with Mona Lisas. Which basically means all these formerly expensive items are now worthless, that is, valueless in the sense of being free.

From "Pandora's Millions" by George O. Smith (1945). A disgruntled preacher confronts the businessman.

"So What If I Broke Twelve Laws Of Physics? It's Only Science FICTION"

This silly opinion implies that the word "fiction" nullifies the word "science." Since it is "fiction", and fiction is by definition "not true", then we can make "not true" any and all science that gets in the way, right?

Hogwash. By the same logic, the term "detective fiction" gives the author license to totally ignore standard procedures and techniques used by detectives, the term "military fiction" allows the author to totally ignore military tactics and strategy, and the term "historical fiction" allows the author to totally ignore the relevant history.

Imagine a historical fiction novel where Napoleon at Waterloo defeated the knights of the Round Table by using the Enola Gay to drop an atom bomb. It's OK because it is "fiction", right?

This non-argument is the favorite of science fiction fans who like all the zipping spaceships and ray guns but who actually know practically nothing about real science. And who cannot be bothered to go learn.

In the presence of people who are indeed scientifically literate, such fans tend to get very defensive about their lack of knowledge. The non-argument is a feeble attempt at compensating for their shortcomings by attempting to forbid the others from using their knowledge.

Slightly more difficult to deal with, but still operating under a flawed concept are those fans with little or no technical background, who think that they can take a "shortcut" to advanced scientific knowledge by skipping over the usual years of hard work in university, and simply reading some books on quantum mechanics. It doesn't work that way.

"It's Just A Theory"

This generally takes the form of "Well, Einstein's relativity is just a theory, not a fact/scientific law." However, such a statement only demonstrates that the speaker is either severely scientifically illiterate or an evil demagog trying to pull a fast one.

The colloquial meaning of the term "theory" is the opposite of "fact", it is a guess, or hunch (what a scientist would call a "hypothesis"). But in Science, the meaning of the term "theory" is totally different. Theory and fact can be the same.

So Einstein's relativity theory is "just a theory" in the same way that atomic theory is "just a theory", you shouldn't mind sitting on top of this thermonuclear warhead while I sit in a bunker a few kilometers away pushing the detonator button.

"Well, Maybe In The Future There Will Be A Scientific Breakthrough That Will Let Me Have My Way"

This argument usually takes the form of "Well, they said that man would never break the sound barrier either, but they were wrong!".

That formation of the argument is doubly suspect, since if you do the research there does not appear to be any scientist on the record who actually stated that breaking the sound barrier was impossible. For one thing, bullets were breaking the sound barrier almost since the invention of gunpowder. Heck, whips have been doing it since the invention of whips. The "crack" of a whip is actually a the tip of the whip creating a tiny sonic boom (By the late 1940s, no competent engineer or test pilot thought that there was anything mysterious {beyond the mysteries of complex aeronautical design itself} about the sound barrier) .

But the core of the argument is that maybe some future scientific breakthrough will remove all those pesky scientific theories that are keeping the author from doing what they want.

First off, from the standpoint of probability, there is at least a 50% chance that any new scientific breakthrough will actually make it harder to do what you want. There was an amusing SF story by George R. R. Martin called "FTA" where scientists discovered how to enter hyperspace. They were initially jubilant, with visions of FTL starships and Nobel prizes dancing in their heads. Their hopes were quickly dashed when they found out that the speed of light in hyperspace was slower than in our universe.

But actually it is probably a better than 50% chance that a breakthrough will make matters worse. And this will still be a problem if you try to declare by authorial fiat that the breakthrough is indeed in your favor. Let me explain.

The general rule is what physicists call the correspondence principle or the Classical limit. This states that any new theory must give the same answers as the old theory where the old theory has been confirmed by experiment. Newton's laws and Einstein's Relativity give the same answers in ordinary conditions, they only give different answers in extreme conditions such as near the speed of light, refining the accuracy of the GPS system, or calculating the orbit of Mercury (none of which Newton could confirm by experiment).

Which means if you just state that in the year 2525 Professor XYZ came up with the "Take THAT, Einstein!" theory of FTL travel, you still have a problem. You have to explain how the TTE theory allows FTL flight while still giving the same answers that relativity theory did for all those experiments it confirmed. Experiments that were accurate to quite a few decimal points.

And since your desired breakthrough is functionally equivalent to breaking a theory of physics, you also have the problem of unintended consequences.

Ken Burnside had this to say. The topic was postulating some scientific breakthrough rendering null and void the Second Law of Thermodynamics and thus allowing stealth spacecraft in a proposed spacecraft combat game.

What science does is take a heretofore unexplained phenomenon and tries to make it fit into the established knowledge base. There is no unexplained phenomenon that might result in violating thermodynamics - and if there WERE something that violated thermo, it would radically change the universe as we know it - for instance, stellar processes require thermodynamics, the entire model of cosmology is based off of known properties for thermodynamics. Your car runs on thermodynamic processes. And all of these things work out the same way, and derive from the same knowledge base.