The Expanse was very hard scifi in my opinion, at least most of the first season. One particular space battle in particular, the prep they did and how the battle went really blew my mind. But there is one developing aspect to the show that is pretty out there.
The Man In The White Suit, a wonderful 1951 Alec Guinness Ealing comedy which shows the social, economic and personal consequences of a scientist inventing a miracle fabric. Small, perfectly formed, and thankfully, it has never been remade with Eddie Murphy or Adam Sandler in the title role.
Isn’t giving dangerous drugs to your workers to enhance their performance something that could happen in any era? Or was there something interesting about the drugs, I can’t remember? The fact that it was a remake of Western tends to make me think the science wasn’t significant at all.
A few more…
I, Robot (they may be doing interstellar travel, but it has nothing to do with the plot)
Flash Forward
Elysium
Well, I have myself suggested that a wormhole would violate causality just like FTL, but on this subject I’m out of my depth, though ISTM that Kip Thorne disagrees with the idea that all wormholes are (necessarily) FTL. He does touch on the time travel issues in the book but suggests that we know almost nothing about how quantum gravity might resolve causality paradoxes, and I’ve heard that Brian Greene has advanced similar ideas. What seems clear is that special relativity equations break down at speeds > c, while general relativity leads to at least the theoretical possibility of wormholes. This may turn out to not be the case at all, but we’re discussing the plausibility of movie science, and the point is it’s a lot more plausible than Star Trek warp drives.
I’ve seen it - yes, it would definitely qualify as hard SF. It was a good movie from a story standpoint, too, if you can get a copy I suggest watching it.
Sure there are some strange details like the “radium drill” but they never get into the specifics of it, and in real life to drill the Chunnel we needed some specialized drilling equipment designed specifically for the project so, yeah, take it in that sense.
Apollo 13 did it by using a vomit comet, which means it was actually shot in real free fall for some scenes (free fall is different from microgravity in the details but for movie shooting purposes is an adequate doubling technique). Of course, that did have the problem of freefall side effects, like vomiting camera men. For that matter, OK Go shot a music video in a vomit comet, too. If I recall, the video they made about making the video mentioned 58 “vomit episodes” among the crew. Admittedly, vomit comets do add to the expense and for a lot of work CGI is probably cheaper.
You are referencing movies. In TV, try to sign an actor to an open-ended deal where they have to do wire work on every single scene. Then try to cast it where all the actors do wire work every single scene.
The cost would be insanely prohibitive, the casting impossible. That is why it isn’t done.
Same thing with CGI. It’s really not as cheap as you imply, especially for television, especially if you have to CGI every single scene.
So the decision to give most space-based television sf normal gravity isn’t because the producers hates science, it’s because to do otherwise adds a vast amount of complexity and cost to the production.
You could make a (moderately fanwank) argument that since that reason is told to one of the characters by one of the characters, it doesn’t have to be correct. The machines are keeping the humans alive and busy being simulated in goop pods for some reason but who knows if it’s really the reason the renegades think?
It apparently was otherwise in the original script (exactly what it was isn’t clear) but was allegedly changed because some suit figured that audiences were too dumb.
I like to assume that it’s sort of a First Law of Robotics gone awry. Yes, the humans are fine. Perfectly safe in their goop pods and false reality.
Does the rest of the movie hold up to the OP’s rules? Probably. You can do anything you want in a simulation, right?
The problem is that Neo was able to shut down the HK spermbots in the real world, after they got out of the hovercraft.
Wait a minute, was the hovercraft actually full of eels?
Flying robotic ones, with lasers, but yeah…
FYI, The Martian is on FX in about 5-10 minutes. First broadcast on cable, they are saying.
There can’t be any serious doubt that the tech in Alien included faster-than-light travel. There’s an explicit line that the planet they’ve been diverted to is “ten months” from Earth, and the news is received with annoyance. Needless to say, even at light speed, ten months isn’t going to get a ship from Earth to even the nearest star system.
By the time of the sequel, a fast military ship like the Sulaco could make the journey in significantly less time, though evidently it still took long enough that putting the crew in hypersleep was preferable to trying to maintain life-support for them the entire way.
To the extent that there’s any difference between “free-fall” and “microgravity”, the correct term for what astronauts experience is free-fall. Microgravity is a terrible term for that, since it implies that there’s some gravity, just not very much, and there’s no sense in which that’s true. The only difference between what you get on the Vomit Comet and on the ISS is the duration.
Sure there is. There is a small amount of acceleration from both atmospheric drag and tidal forces (on the order of 10[sup]-6[/sup] g for the ISS, so “micro” is apt). Acceleration is acceleration, so there’s no sense in which you can’t call that gravity.
Here is an editorial by John Campbell from 1948 on the same theme - and I swear I saw a similar one in the early 1960s.
My favorite example is not so sophisticated. Why not go back in time 300 years or so and hand Bach an iPhone with his music on it, stick the earbuds in his ears, and hit play. Magic would be his very best explanation for how an orchestra got into that tiny box.
I don’t disagree with you, but if those aren’t the constraints, then what are they? Again, this isn’t about what is legitimately sci-fi or what is good sci-fi and bad sci-fi. Some of my all-time favorites run afoul of many of these constraints. It’s just about a certain category of science fiction, and if we allow science that cannot reasonably be derived from what we know now, then in a way it’s really just a kind of fantasy with space and aliens and stuff. And I’m not against fantasy, as I mostly love Game of Thrones. I’m just trying to define genres here.
QFT. You killed it! And wolfpup, the fact that Kip Thorne enthusiastically supports the movie doesn’t really prove anything. Plenty of respected physicists love Star Trek too, and I’m pretty sure there’s also a book about the physics of Star Trek.
Ha, true. The Martian and Gravity are kind of on the fictional side of this coin.
Again, this is an awesome aspect of Passengers which becomes an important plot point. There is also a spacewalk scene reminiscent of one in Gravity, quite possibly inspired by it, but correcting the earlier film’s greatest flaw in terms of Newtonian physics.
I don’t see why even relatively low budget sci-fi can’t get this right. The pilot of The Expanse does. And as Kenobi notes, so does the middle section of 2001.
I love that this film trickery itself involves math! Do you know of any examples where this was done?
I realize that you are just talking movies, but this definition means that Stephen Baxter and Hal Clement don’t write hard science fiction. I don’t think that would be a widely held position.
I’m not so sure. They didn’t have what we call recorded music back then, but they did have mechanical music boxes. Bach would certainly be amazed at how intricate a sound this music box could produce, and wonder at how the parts could be made so small as to fit in that tiny case, but I don’t think he’d think it was magic. The actual technology doesn’t work at all in the same way that he would assume that it does, but I think that he’d still correctly recognize it as technology.
Now, some of Bach’s less-educated contemporaries might think it was magic, true. But then again, most people nowadays think that iPhones are magic, too.