Matt, as the scientific adviser, were you happy with how the series turned out?
Kenzie: The writers of this show really know a lot about science. They’re very well read, and they think about things very carefully. They’re not just asking [me for advice] to make themselves feel better, they really think about things. The level of attention to detail that they showed was something that impressed me. I was not really expecting it, to be honest.
Those quotes are from people who worked on the show, though. If they say, “The science in the show is garbage, and they ignored everything we told them,” they’re probably not going to be asked to advise the show again, and probably won’t be approached to work on any other shows, either. There’s a bit of an incentive for them to say positive things about it.
“When a compensated scientist states that a show is scientifically inaccurate he is almost certainly right. When he states that a show is scientifically accurate, he is very probably wrong.”
I don’t mind that aspect. It has to be depicted on screen in a way a lay audience can relate to. Having experiments suddenly behave randomly and in a way that’s not consistent with past results would certainly be a noteworthy event. (ETA: I would have expected to see hints of major scientific bodies investigating the “New Unreliable Physics” and its causes.) Of course the new observations don’t erase the old, but how can any further progress be made? And the baddies may also be able to alter the archived numbers from past observations, for all the humans know.
Sophons are made in pairs, one is fired off toward Earth at relativistic speed, while the partner remains in the Trisolaris system, giving the Trisolarans real-time intel and control of the sophons.
In the book, the physicists only start losing hope, after the three newest and most powerful particle accelerators all start spitting out garbage results due to the sophons’ interference. It’s not stated in the book, at least not that I recall reading, but the implication is that the problems in physics have been going on for a long time, several years for sure. Which helps explain why there is a nefarious and powerful group already assembled and working on a war footing by the time the main characters become aware of the issues in physics. People were trying to understand the reason why the results were chaotic and unpredictable and the only explanation was interference.
By advancing our understanding, observations or predictive / inferential power?
Quite a tangent here, but I’ll split it into a new thread if there’s interest…
The science youtuber Sabine Hossenfelder recently did a video concerned that the rate of scientific progress is slowing. I share her concern, but her reasoning that science *actually is* slowing was based on an analysis of scientific papers that tried to measure how “disruptive” papers were, and did so by inferring how much a paper contradicted / refuted past well-cited papers.
But this analysis seems like a really flawed approach to me. I think it’s quite possible for someone to, say, revolutionize our understanding of consciousness without particularly contradicting past papers. That’s partly because scientists try to avoid making broad brush claims, and partly because it’s basically acknowledged to be a phenomenon with a massive number of open questions.
Sure, but how do you advance predictive power if you can’t measure reality? Can our understanding of neutrinos advance if it’s no longer possible to observe neutrinos reliably? Can string theory / loop quantum gravity / gravity waves be validated or invalidated if the numbers from the experiments no longer make sense?
Stubby wings on creatures capable of carrying a person always bug me. Dragons and winged horses. They never have the necessary wingspan. Just them flying solo they’d need at least the wing footage of a hang glider.
Speaking of which, Willis O’Brien got pterosaurs right in King Kong and The Lost World, but his protege, Ray Harryhausen deliberately got then wrong in One Million Years B.C. and The Valley of Gwangi
Here’s a publicity shot from King Kong (staged, not from the movie)
The wing is correctly shown as being supported by an enlarged last digit on the “hand”
Here’s the pterodactyl from One Million Years BC. The wing is supported by several fingers running through the wing, the way a bat’s wings are.
I think Harryhausen thought the Batwing was more visually interesting. That’s why he gave bat-like wings to the harpies in Jason and the Argonauts and the flying homunculus in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad.
I haven’t read this trilogy, but this sounds problematic. Real time in which frame of reference? Time dilation would take the sophons into the future with respect to the origin system. If you then sent a sophon back to the origin system you’d have a nice little Kip Thorne time machine.
I’m not sure this is accurate. Can you explain with an example?
Let’s say that today I fire a sophon off to Proxima Centauri. It gets there in 30 years, because it’s super fast, and then it slows down to match Proxima Centauri’s orbit. Because it’s quantumly entangled with gibbergabbertechnobabble to the sophon I’ve kept here on Earth, it’s sending information back.
It gets there in 2054 (30 years from now). Are you saying the information it sends back via entanglement on May 14, 2054 doesn’t arrive on Earth on May 14, 2054? Or am I misunderstanding?
As for the scientists and their sadness: the sophon is basically an elite hacker able to get into every single particle physicist’s systems and consistently fuck up their results. At least in the book, I found their existential frustration plausible. This isn’t “new results that can be wel-studied,” it’s “somebody’s fucking with us, but we can’t find a single piece of evidence for how they’re fucking with us, and until they stop, our careers are at a standstill.”
If the link were a wormhole, then yes, the link would be from the past to the future. Read up about Kip Thorne’s wormhole time machine. It’s an extension of the Twin Paradox.
But if the link is via entanglement then there may be the possibility of a simultaneous link of some sort. Still the problem of simultaneity remains: there is no such thing as simultaneity across interstellar distances, because there are no shared frames of reference between moving locations. At the very least there would be differences in temporal speed between the two locations.
