Science fiction that get RL science right?

Inspired by this thread:

Years ago, I happened to read a book called “the Physics of Star Trek” (don’t know if it’s still in print), which as you can imagine takes apart many aspects of Trek. For instance, the book laid forth the the interesting idea that the very existence of transporters pre-supposes an atheist universe (taking a body apart on the molecular level and being able to reassemble it elsewhere with no ill effect suggests that living beings have no immaterial souls animating them.)

Surprisingly, the book singled out a “Voyager” episode for praise. ST:V of course is often derided as having the hackiest writing, and relying on the Deus Ex Machina of dreaming up some kind of particle that gets shot through the deflector dish to solve every problem. But apparently, at least one early episode got the physics right - the plot had the ship discovering an ancient wormhole that had so degraded, it was the size of a pinprick - too small to get even a shuttle through, although subspace messages could still be transmitted through it. The other end of the wormhole connected to an isolated sector of Romulan space, and there was a lone Romulan scientist at a station in range to communicate with them. Later, they discover that not only did the wormhole connect two different points in space, but that it breached time as well - the Romulan they were speaking to was from 40 years earlier. Of course, prime directive, fear of polluting the time stream, blah, blah, blah, and the Voyager remained stuck at the far side of the galaxy. But the physicist writing the book “Physics of ST” explained that a real wormhole would actually do exactly what it did in this episode! So, props to “Voyager.”

Anyway, what are instances where science fiction stories surprised you with realistic, or otherwise plausible hard science when you didn’t expect it? Especially in shows you really don’t expect to have a factual base? (A show like “Doctor Who” for example, while fun to watch, I certainly don’t expect to feature anything remotely like real science on it.)

My favorite example is The Angry Red Planet, produced by Norman Maurer (Moe Howard’s son-in-law! Who used to be a Stooges cartoonist and later on went on to make their movies!) Not a great flick, but at the end one of the astronauts has an arm covered with Space Amoeba that’s slowly eating him. The way they get rid of it is — beautiful! It’s hard-SF, something I didn’t expect from this movie.*

2001, of course, is the ultimate Hard SF movie. I think that 2010, despite some hedging, does pretty well, too.

A lot of other hard SF movies tend to be boring – Destination Moon and Marooned among them.

Godd Hard SF background 9or at least logical SF thinking) for:
**Forbidden Planet

The Day the Earth Stood Still

The Thing** (both versions)

The Andromeda Strain (original version only)

**The Terminal Man

Creator

Operation Moonbase
**
As for SF fiction, although the number of good “hard” sf stories and novels is dwarfed by the number of bad and of “soft” SF (no discredit in being soft or ambiguous), there are still way too many to list.

I don’t understand the reasoning. When I get up and walk across the room, my soul doesn’t stay sitting in the chair; it moves with me. Why can’t a soul stay associated with a bunch of subatomic particles beaming across space just as easily as it can stay with a body moving through more conventional means?

For the OP, Contact (both book and movie) does a great job, though that’s only to be expected, coming from Carl Sagan.

When you get up and walk across the room, your body remains intact. A transporter (theoretically of course) effectively vaporizes the body, like being at ground zero of a nuclear blast, only your body gets reassembled. By most faith-based accounts, the abrupt schizm between a soul & body means death.

I was really surprised when I saw a silent space battle… think it was from Firefly? It was kinda nice.

Well…? How did they get rid of it?!?

I don’t think it’s the schism that results in death as much as our subsequent inability to repair that schism.

Since the transporter perfectly rearranges all the molecules and the organs and such resume their prior functioning almost immediately, that’s not a problem.

I think most atheists would agree that being vaporized is gonna pretty much kill you too, though. The subsequent creation of an exact duplicate some distance away doesn’t make you any less dead.

The whole point of an immaterial soul, I would have thought, is the continuation of the personality independently of the physical body. If it’s possible to transmit all the information and energy needed to assemble a human body over a distance, it should be a doddle for a spooky magical soul to zip right along with it, and take up residence in the new carcass.

Funny you should mention Doctor Who, though. Some of the fans are a little touchy about his sonic screwdriver, since it’s sometimes been overused in the past as an all-purpose magical “get out of jail free card”. A few of them have criticized Steven Moffat for coming up with ludicrous, never-before-seen uses for it, like “resonating concrete”, “re-attaching [previously severed] barbed wire” and even lighting candles. Which I think is odd, because – if we’re assuming the existence of highly advanced sonic multi-tool – those are just the sort of things it should be able to do. They may not be actually possible in quite that way in the real world, but they’re much more plausible than the uses he usually puts it to, as a universal remote control or a lockpick – or even a screwdriver, come to that.

And Doctor Who eliminated the sound of explosions in space back in the Tom Baker days. They used a music “sting” instead, which is perfectly acceptable (unless you want to complain that there’s no coordinated soundtrack in real life).

For TV, the SF show that got the science right was Star Cops. No artificial gravity, and the laws of physics were immutable (like in “Conversations with the Dead,” where they “dead” were the crew of a spaceship whose rockets had gone off for too long and were on a trajectory they couldn’t change and which no one could intercept before their air ran out).

They noted that, in a petri dish, an amoeba will move away from an electrical current. So they ran a low current through the infected crewmember, and the amoeba removed itself from his arm.

Soul or not, atheist or not, I think philosophers would struggle with whether a person who was disassembled atom by atom, then reassembled, is still the same person. Do you really have the experiences you had before, or is it a new you with those same memories?

Dragon’s Egg, by Robert Forward.

Intelligent civilization on the face of a Neutron star.

Very good science.

Tris

I think that the idea is that the particles of a transported object maintain the same sorts of correlations between each other during transit as the original particles had in the original object. This also gets around the problems with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: You don’t have to measure the entire quantum state; you just transmit the quantum state across a quantum information channel.

In 2001; space is silent. And David Bowman does not blow up when exposed to vacuum.

Well, philosophers are always going to struggle with stuff like that, and fair play to them: they’ve got a job to do like anybody else. :slight_smile:

My point is that – at least in my understanding – for those people who believe in souls, it’s the soul that’s the “real” you. It survives the death, or indeed complete evaporation, of your body of mortal clay, and according to some beliefs can be reincarnated into another body entirely. While it’s by no means certain – if your body were disintegrated in one place and then almost instantaneously an exact copy were created elsewhere – that your soul would automatically zip from one to the other, the possibility must at least exist. In which case transportation is a relatively trivial matter, ethically speaking; because while the (comparatively unimportant) physical body is destroyed, another is made available, and the essential soul suffers no more than the momentary inconvenience of relocation.

From an atheist point of view, on the other hand, every time Captain Kirk dematerializes on the transporter pad, Scotty is guilty of murder. The fact that an exact duplicate of Kirk has suddenly been whisked into existence is no defence at all – in fact that in itself is surely deeply questionable, both moth morally and ethically.

Obviously the whole thing’s a philosophical mine-field from any angle, I just think it’s actually more of a problem from the point of view of a materialist atheist than that of a survival-of-the-personality-after-death theist.

Incidentally, one episode of the new Battlestar Galactica also has an exposure-to-vacuum-without-a-suit incident. The subjects don’t come out of it unscathed, but they do survive, and I think the injuries they did suffer were plausible.

That is one mistake in 2001, when Dave blew the hatch the pod should have accelerated away from the airlock.

Look for James Patrick Kelly’s story “Think Like a Dinosaur” for an intriguing take on the subject.

While the basic premise of Them! was silly science, the ants in them behaved in a scientifically accurate manner (other than size).

Robinson Crusoe on Mars was fairly accurate given the knowledge of Mars at the time.

An old bumper sticker: “Very funny, Scotty. Now beam down my clothes.”

Yup. In the series, every shot from outside the ship is perfectly silent. No engine roar, no explosion sounds, no background music. It’s quite stunning, really. Of course, Hollywood being the soulless, artless machine it is, the pinheads put the sounds back in for the theatrical movie :confused: