Other founders of the "Golden Age" of Sicience Fiction

[rkomar]

Originally Posted by nabsltd

Generally, "hard" science fiction means the author has attempted to work out the "rules" of the science developments and explain them with as little hand-waving and technobabble as possible.

So, "discovered a new element that enables faster than light travel" == "soft" (or maybe even fantasy), while "discovered a new element that is more stable than other transuranic elements and allows this previously impossible chemical process" == "hard".

I appreciate the examples, but as someone who used to be a nuclear physicist, I'd say a new element that is stable is as much fantasy as Star Trek's "warp factor 10". That's the trouble with most science fiction, the technological innovations required to make the stories interesting (faster-than-light travel and communications, cryogenics, transporter beams, tractor beams, hand-held weapons containing immense quantities of energy,...) are considered to be impossible today for very good scientific reasons. Why worry about hand-waving when the whole premise is fantasy to begin with?

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by rkomar

I appreciate the examples, but as someone who used to be a nuclear physicist, I'd say a new element that is stable is as much fantasy as Star Trek's "warp factor 10". That's the trouble with most science fiction, the technological innovations required to make the stories interesting (faster-than-light travel and communications, cryogenics, transporter beams, tractor beams, hand-held weapons containing immense quantities of energy,...) are considered to be impossible today for very good scientific reasons. Why worry about hand-waving when the whole premise is fantasy to begin with?

Actually, both warp drives and stable transuranics and things *not* known to be impossible as current scientific theories say they are in fact possible. We just do not know how to create them just yet.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability

https://www.space.com/17628-warp-dri...aceflight.html


It is worth remembering Clarke's Laws:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws

1- When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2- The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

[rkomar]

Sticking to my old field, even the most wildly optimistic theories state that nuclei in these islands of stability will still decay radioactively, so they really aren't stable (i.e. with lifetimes near or above the age of the universe). More realistic theories only predict lifetimes that are somewhat longer than the extremely short ones of neighbouring isotopes. Extensive searches for these longer-lived isotopes have been going on for decades, so that's one strike against finding any that are stable. Another strike is that we would probably see them in the wild if they existed, since they would be produced in supernovae.

I think it's worth looking to better our understanding of nuclear physics, but I have no confidence that we will find anything with a long enough lifetime that we can do useful chemistry with it and not fatally irradiate anyone standing close by.

Here's a nice interactive chart of the nuclides: http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/chart/. I have a printed copy that is a few decades old that ends at about Z=109 and N=160. The interactive chart shows that they have pushed well beyond that since, but the lifetimes are getting shorter and shorter.

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Actually, both warp drives and stable transuranics and things *not* known to be impossible as current scientific theories say they are in fact possible. We just do not know how to create them just yet.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability

https://www.space.com/17628-warp-dri...aceflight.html


It is worth remembering Clarke's Laws:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws

A very good science fiction novel about implication and existence of "island of stability" elements is Nova, Samuel (Chip) Delaney.

[crich70]

Originally Posted by rkomar

Sticking to my old field, even the most wildly optimistic theories state that nuclei in these islands of stability will still decay radioactively, so they really aren't stable (i.e. with lifetimes near or above the age of the universe). More realistic theories only predict lifetimes that are somewhat longer than the extremely short ones of neighbouring isotopes. Extensive searches for these longer-lived isotopes have been going on for decades, so that's one strike against finding any that are stable. Another strike is that we would probably see them in the wild if they existed, since they would be produced in supernovae.

I think it's worth looking to better our understanding of nuclear physics, but I have no confidence that we will find anything with a long enough lifetime that we can do useful chemistry with it and not fatally irradiate anyone standing close by.

Here's a nice interactive chart of the nuclides: http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/chart/. I have a printed copy that is a few decades old that ends at about Z=109 and N=160. The interactive chart shows that they have pushed well beyond that since, but the lifetimes are getting shorter and shorter.

But wasn't the idea of a nuclear bomb also at one time science fiction? I seem to remember an editor (I think it was John W. Campbell) who advised an author on some story details and found himself being investigated by the F.B.I. because he had the details of the possible process for a nuclear detonation too perfect. And they suspected him of spying or something as a result though it turned out all the information was already out in books on the subject. Sometimes art imitates life I guess.

[rkomar]

Originally Posted by crich70

But wasn't the idea of a nuclear bomb also at one time science fiction? I seem to remember an editor (I think it was John W. Campbell) who advised an author on some story details and found himself being investigated by the F.B.I. because he had the details of the possible process for a nuclear detonation too perfect. And they suspected him of spying or something as a result though it turned out all the information was already out in books on the subject. Sometimes art imitates life I guess.

The fundamental physics theories we currently use have been tested rigorously for a long time now, at least on a local scale. If there were big holes in our knowledge, they would show up as we looked at the world in increasing detail. We just don't see that. The better our equipment, the better the agreement with theory. And, believe it or not, scientists are trying very hard to find things that don't fit into current theories. It would bring them great respect and accolades from the scientific community if they did. New stuff is always more interesting and fun to work on, and easier to get research grants for.

Things are different on a cosmological scale, where the behaviour of galaxies doesn't seem to fit our theories of gravitation. However, it's hard to imagine how discoveries in that field are going to help us travel around the universe and communicate instantly with each other. Even gravity waves travel at the speed of light.

[dwig]

Originally Posted by crich70

But wasn't the idea of a nuclear bomb also at one time science fiction?...

Yup, check out The World Set Free by H. G. Wells, first published in 1914 though written the year earlier.

/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Set_Free

[fjtorres]

Doc Smith also did a couple versions of "atomic energy" in SKYLARK OF SPACE and TRIPLANETARY. Both were extrapolations of chemical principles instead of physics.

That's a problem with "hard SF", sticking with known-right science and (maybe) extrapolating from there. What is known to be true changes quickly and often ceases to be so as science moves on.

Sometimes the hand wavers come out ahead.

[barryem]

Originally Posted by rkomar

Things are different on a cosmological scale, where the behaviour of galaxies doesn't seem to fit our theories of gravitation. However, it's hard to imagine how discoveries in that field are going to help us travel around the universe and communicate instantly with each other. Even gravity waves travel at the speed of light.

I'm no scientist but for me it's hard to imagine how "hard to imagine" equals "impossible". I'm sure flashlights were hard to imagine a couple of centuries ago.

I'm a computer programmer, retired now for about 25 years. I remember when I was new in the field, which was itself fairly new, around the mid 1960s, before computers even had screens, a bunch of us would get together for lunch or after work and speculate on the future of computing. We wove all sorts of fantasies. But we never imagined anything like this!

Barry

[rkomar]

Originally Posted by barryem

I'm no scientist but for me it's hard to imagine how "hard to imagine" equals "impossible". I'm sure flashlights were hard to imagine a couple of centuries ago.

I'm a computer programmer, retired now for about 25 years. I remember when I was new in the field, which was itself fairly new, around the mid 1960s, before computers even had screens, a bunch of us would get together for lunch or after work and speculate on the future of computing. We wove all sorts of fantasies. But we never imagined anything like this!

Barry

Sure, but nothing we have accomplished so far goes against the laws of physics. Our innovations are incredible and were difficult to accomplish, but they have all been within the realm of what we know is possible in physics. For these sci-fi "technologies" to be true, then much of what we "know" would have to be wrong. Stunningly wrong. Yet, we can't find any evidence of that after long and careful study. People 200 years ago were ignorant about electronic devices; we are not ignorant about the physics relevant to galactic travel and communication.

[RichL]

Originally Posted by rkomar

However, it's hard to imagine how discoveries in that field are going to help us travel around the universe and communicate instantly with each other. Even gravity waves travel at the speed of light.

Are you suggesting that quantum entanglement been shown to be wrong? Or, perhaps, not shown to be correct?

[rkomar]

Originally Posted by RichL

Are you suggesting that quantum entanglement been shown to be wrong? Or, perhaps, not shown to be correct?

No. Are you suggesting that you can use it to transmit information?

[RichL]

Originally Posted by rkomar

No. Are you suggesting that you can use it to transmit information?

Yes, I was thinking that it could be used that way if someone figures out a way to control the events. Being a totally none scientific type I have no idea of the probability or even possibility of that happening.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by rkomar

No. Are you suggesting that you can use it to transmit information?

Depends on what you mean about "use it to transmit information".

It can indeed be used as a truly secure communications channel.
Hasn't been done but it seems eminently doable. It is moving into the same R&D space as quantum computing.
https://www.livescience.com/59502-ne...nt-record.html

What *current* theory doesn't allow is for classic ftl communication.

"Non-classic" FTL? One of the James Blish stories I cited above, QUINCUNX OF TIME, used Paul Dirac's quantum work to postulate a time-independent communication system that broke speed of light restructions in a unique way.

Look, the key conceit in SF, which is why a lot of writers tried to rebrand it as "Speculative Fiction", is the idea that our knowledge of the universe is incomplete (and in some areas, flat-out wrong) and that a good way to explore the frontiers of knowledge (Clarke's Second Law, above) is via rationalist speculation in stories. In effect, as close kin to the Thought Experiments of physicists and others.

Focusing too strongly on "known facts" and deprecating the "not known to be wrong" is too tight a worldview for a genre that exists to examine ideas. Which is why Hard Sf is a separate (minority) subset of the field.

The problem with classifying all non-hard SF as "fantasy" is that it pretty much says there is no real SF since sooner or later all hard SF fades under the weight of new discoveries and thus becomes "fantasy".

That is a wee bit limiting.
Also kills most of the fun.

"To boldly go", and all that...

[rkomar]

I'm a fan of sci-fi, and I'm fine with it using fantasy physics. I did claim that if you were using fantasy physics then you shouldn't worry about hand-waving. Of course, that moved into "We don't know everything, therefore anything is possible", to which I replied: "We don't know everything, but there are things we know not to be possible".

Physicists themselves play with fantasy physics, much of it inspired by sci-fi. They are always trying to find out if what we "know" is wrong, so they try to push outside the realm of what we presently understand to be true. It's legitimate science, but these fantasies need to be demonstrated before we lose confidence in the classic core theories. The existence of research in these areas does not mean that they have a good chance of being validated if we just work hard enough at it. Finding dead ends is normal in the scientific process. So, pointing to current research is not proof that it is possible, let alone imminent.

That said, I think that stories are as important in our lives as science, and I don't want anything to get in the way of good stories. I'm not trying to be a wet blanket and claim that there is no difference between most science fiction and fantasy. I'm just quibbling over what exactly hard sci-fi is.