I hate hate hate in popular science fiction (so you mostly see it on TV and in movies) when the writers simply can’t get the idea of a light-year right. It is NOT a measure of time, morons, it’s a measure of distance! All that using the unit wrong is to make the character (and by extension, you the writer and everyone else who didn’t catch it) sound like a fucking idiot.
In a related rant, news organizations that mix and match their units. I saw it done earlier today in an article about SN 2006gy that gave the distance of SN 2006gy at 238 million light-years but then gave the distance of Eta Carinae in miles. I shouldn’t have to sit there and convert from way too many miles to an actually useful unit like light-years. Hell, I wouldn’t mind if you used light-years in one part and parsecs in another, but don’t go using fucking miles. Miles are basically meaningless outside the solar system and even inside the solar system using the AU makes sense. Or hell, even light-minutes or light-hours when the story is about, say, radio communication with a probe somewhere. There was another article several weeks ago about HD 209548 b that gave the distance only in miles. I had to sit there and figure out the proper conversions to get an actually useful number. (Then I found myself trying to explain the basic idea of time dilation to a couple people in a store, which is worth a pit thread in itself.)
Really, is so hard to use a unit of measurement properly?
I reread some of Fred Hoyle’s SF a few years ago, and was shocked to come across that exact error.
IIRC, it was in A for Andromeda.
Having seen Hoyle screw up his units, I’m now willing to cut lesser lights a little slack.
If I had a camera with me, I would take a picture of the sign that is one of the elevators at work. Lacking one, I’ll describe it to you. The sign reads something like this: During ongoing construction the fifth floor is “absolutely restricted” to construction workers “only”.
Approximate duration of work: 5 months.
Quotation marks theirs, but that’s a whole different topic.
[ul][li]Someone has crossed out the word “months”, and written in “years” above in black ink.[/li]
[li]Someone else has added “light-” in front of “years” in blue ink.[/li]
[li]Yet a third person has (at right angles to the rest of this) drawn an arrow to “light-” and added the comment “This is a measure of length, idiot!”.[/li]
[li]And a fourth person has drawn an arrow to the above comment and labeled it “Dork.”[/ul][/li]
Back when I was a High School nerd (rather than just a nerd), there were a series of conferences in town to which several of us nerds went. One of them was by an astrophysicist.
He spent the whole conference referring to stuff that was happening XYZ lightyears away as if it was happening there now.
My question was something like “what we see now in spots that are a million lightyears away is light that was emitted a million years ago, so… how do we know that what’s a million lightyears away now doesn’t look like our immediate environment? Isn’t looking at stuff a million lightyears away more like looking into the past than like looking into the distance?”
Poor guy never understood the question, but the other nerds present in the audience did understand it just fine!
I understand the question, but contend it’s functionally meaningless - we can never have more current information than that delivered by the speed of light. So while watching a star, say, 200 lightyears away, it’s true in some absolute sense we’re seeing light that’s 200 years old, and, if we had a really really really good telescope, such that we could discern events on a planet of that star system, we’d be seeing events that happened 200 years ago… functionally, that is the present with respect to that system; we can never have any more updated information.
A long time ago in a Galaxy Far Far Away.
If the people over the atlantic can’t even speak English right, what makes you think a Galaxy far far away is gonna get it?
I get more narked about the way Evolution is displayed in Sci-Fi. StarTrek and StarGate have both messed it up, and I’m sure many others too. They seem to think that exposure to nanites or subspace inversion field can speed up some biological march toward an advanced version of human and call it evolution.
Uh guys, Evolution is a responce to a change in environment over generations. There is no end product. No predefined forms based on changes over the last sixty million years. Any trends are not part of some grand scheme. Atleast not within the theory of Evolution. And I have to think that there are no I.D. people in Startrek for the same reason there are no Arabs.
I think most of that is simply because it’s more interesting that way, and they can get more plotlines with that sudden change. I did see evolution prtrayed correctly in a story in (Niven? Pournelle? Someone’s) The Nine Billion Names of God, in which this reclusive scientist created life that had a very short generation, and over several years, applying natural pressures, caused the stupider ones to die off. Then they invented loads of stuff for him under the same constraints he used to guide their evolution. (For example, he’d put an slowly descending iron bar in the cage, and the only way they could survive was to make really strong aluminum and use it to prop up the bar. That was fairly late in the story, when they had the capacity to do that.)
You’re somewhat mixed up. “The Nine Bllion names of God” is a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, but neither it nor any of the stories in his anthology of that name have the plot you describe.
The plot you describe belongs to Theodore Sturgeon’s “Microcosmic God”, which, like, The Nine Billion Names of God is a classic SF short story. They might even both be in the same anthology somewhere (“The Science Fiction Hall of Fame I”?), which might explain your running them together.
We don’t. Everything we see here is what happened there in our past. When you look at your wrist watch one foot away from your eyes you see the time as it was, at the watch, a nanosecond ago.
It is looking into the past but I’m not sure it is more that than like looking into a distance.
And none of this changes the OP’s point that a light year is defined as the distance that light travels in a year and is a unit of distance and not a unit of time.
Good for you, OP. Fight the good fight. Give 'em an inch, and they’ll take an hour.
[QUOTE=mischievous]
[ul][li]Someone has crossed out the word “months”, and written in “years” above in black ink.[/li]
[li]Someone else has added “light-” in front of “years” in blue ink.[/li]
[li]Yet a third person has (at right angles to the rest of this) drawn an arrow to “light-” and added the comment “This is a measure of length, idiot!”.[/li]
[li]And a fourth person has drawn an arrow to the above comment and labeled it “Dork.”[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
You should draw an arrow to that last comment, and write “No, I don’t want fries with that.”
Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, makes the same argument. Makes sense to me.
Anybody can mix up his terms from time to time; what bugs me more is when it’s clear that the author has no real conception of what they’re talking about. In the old “Twilight Zone” show, I don’t know how many times some imaginary Earthlike planet was described as being, say, “80 million miles from Earth!”.
[QUOTE=mischievous] During ongoing construction the fifth floor is “absolutely restricted” to construction workers “only”.
Approximate duration of work: 5 months.
Quotation marks theirs, but that’s a whole different topic.
[ul][li]Someone has crossed out the word “months”, and written in “years” above in black ink.[/li]
[li]Someone else has added “light-” in front of “years” in blue ink.[/li]
[li]Yet a third person has (at right angles to the rest of this) drawn an arrow to “light-” and added the comment “This is a measure of length, idiot!”.[/li]
[li]And a fourth person has drawn an arrow to the above comment and labeled it “Dork.”[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
It is now officially your duty to write on that sign: “Light-years, dork-years, who cares?”