Sci Fi TV science or fiction?

BaldFriede wrote: By the way: All these "Star Trek" movies give a totally wrong impression of what it is like to see in space. It is simply laughable when you are being shown empty space and suddenly a grey object comes into view, on which you can read the inscription "U. S. S. Enterprise". That is, however, totally ridiculous and not what you would see at all unless you yourself use a strong spotlight. What you would actually see is some dark indefinitely shaped object that blots out the stars behind it, that's all. That's because the view in space is quite different from the view on Earth. On Earth light comes from every direction because it is being reflected from all the objects around you. But in space light does not come from every direction at all, it comes from the stars. What you would actually see is that the stars behind the object are being blotted out as it passes you. you could most certainly not read any inscription on the object unless you use a strong light yourself.

BaldFriede wrote: The point is to show how accurate the physics of "Star Trek" actually are.

BaldFriede wrote: Dean wrote: BaldFriede wrote: The point is to show how accurate the physics of "Star Trek" actually are. It is not a question of accurate physics but of cinematic licence to depict an entertainment. Depicting exactly how a starship would look in space makes for boring television. That does not mean that Star Trek was wholly a product of inaccurate and/or bad physics, it is remarkably (for a mid-60s TV programme) something quite the contrary.   When Professor Brian Cox was scientific adviser to Danny Boyle's Sunshine he accepted that some compromises had to be made to the real science to produce a visually entertaining piece of theatre - in his words: "Sunshine is not a documentary. It's trying to just, in an hour and forty minutes, get across a feeling of what it's like – not only to be a scientist, because obviously there's much more in it than that. So, I found it interesting to watch the kind of people that get upset because the gravity is wrong." (they used slowmotion during weightless sequencies because it looked more convincing to the audience) I totally agree with you, Dean. But then one should not talk about technical devices from such a series like the Klingon cloaking device as if they were actually feasible.

Oh no, next you'll be telling us that we can't be beamed up either.

BaldFriede wrote: Dean wrote: BaldFriede wrote: The point is to show how accurate the physics of "Star Trek" actually are. It is not a question of accurate physics but of cinematic licence to depict an entertainment. Depicting exactly how a starship would look in space makes for boring television. That does not mean that Star Trek was wholly a product of inaccurate and/or bad physics, it is remarkably (for a mid-60s TV programme) something quite the contrary.   When Professor Brian Cox was scientific adviser to Danny Boyle's Sunshine he accepted that some compromises had to be made to the real science to produce a visually entertaining piece of theatre - in his words: "Sunshine is not a documentary. It's trying to just, in an hour and forty minutes, get across a feeling of what it's like – not only to be a scientist, because obviously there's much more in it than that. So, I found it interesting to watch the kind of people that get upset because the gravity is wrong." (they used slowmotion during weightless sequencies because it looked more convincing to the audience) I totally agree with you, Dean. But then one should not talk about technical devices from such a series like the Klingon cloaking device as if they were actually feasible.

Dean wrote: BaldFriede wrote: Dean wrote: BaldFriede wrote: The point is to show how accurate the physics of "Star Trek" actually are. It is not a question of accurate physics but of cinematic licence to depict an entertainment. Depicting exactly how a starship would look in space makes for boring television. That does not mean that Star Trek was wholly a product of inaccurate and/or bad physics, it is remarkably (for a mid-60s TV programme) something quite the contrary.   When Professor Brian Cox was scientific adviser to Danny Boyle's Sunshine he accepted that some compromises had to be made to the real science to produce a visually entertaining piece of theatre - in his words: "Sunshine is not a documentary. It's trying to just, in an hour and forty minutes, get across a feeling of what it's like – not only to be a scientist, because obviously there's much more in it than that. So, I found it interesting to watch the kind of people that get upset because the gravity is wrong." (they used slowmotion during weightless sequencies because it looked more convincing to the audience) I totally agree with you, Dean. But then one should not talk about technical devices from such a series like the Klingon cloaking device as if they were actually feasible. That would be because I don't (I would have thought that with all the post I have made in this thread it is pretty evident that I am perfectly capable of seperating fiction from fact and feasible from wishful), I merely point out the technical aspects of the science and technology found in Science Fiction that are feasible. And as David pointed out many many pages back, even in the 60s they were aware that bending light was possible but required a lot of energy and managed to work that into the dialogue of a teatime TV light-entertainment programme, again, I merely poitned out that the objections you raised were also covered by whoever gave technical advice to the script-writers. Science fiction science and technology (again, as I have pointed out before) is more often an extrapolation of existing science, it is not purely fanciful invention from the imagination of an uneducated hack.

That's exactly what I am doing, Dean: I point out what is feasible and what is not. When you use a fictional device the use of it should be logically consistent though. Which in the case of the Klingon cloaking device it is not, as I tried to point out.

When it comes to scientific predictions in SF I prefer to go with Polish author Stanislaw Lem. His "Summa technologiae", which is not fiction but a list of predictions Lem made about future technology, some of which turned out to be astonishingly accurate. Lem's books, fiction or nonfiction, are highly entertaining, and often extremely satirical. Unfortunately for those whose native tongue is English many of Lem's books have not been translated into that language, or actually in any language but German. There are German translations for most of his books. That's because the GDR was a brother state of Poland. Some of his books are simply hilarious, like for example "Wizja lokalna" ("Observation on the Spot"; not translated into English yet, but translated into German as "Lokaltermin"), which is an extremely funny satire on both the capitalist and communist systems. It describes the two different societies on the planet Entia, one of which bears a certain resemblance to the capitalist, the other to the communist system. Both are carried to the extreme though by Lem, with hilarious results.

f course Science-Fiction is an extrapolation of existing science, or at least it should be.

BaldFriede wrote: That's exactly what I am doing, Dean:

Starfleet ships have running lights which is mostly why we and other ships can see and ID them--  and when orbiting, there's plenty of light reflecting from the planet.  

^ the second article is derived from the first, there is only one story on proposed research and that was repeated everywhere. They are not saying that the universe is a simulation, they are say that if it is a simulation then the lattice framework that holds it together will be detectable... not really the same thing.

Scientists consider all kinds of hypotheses. People (not saying you) get too carried away by it.

Gerinski wrote: Dean wrote:   Gerinski wrote: In a sense, the laws of physics themselves are a wonderful example of compression consider your future state of the Universe example - the magic formula is a transformation that can predict a future state of the Universe from a previous state - the future and previous states are equally as complex and contain a vast amount of information - without knowing the previous state (aka "the initial conditions") you cannot apply the transformation and get the desired future state, so the amount of information that is actually required to predict the future state is not compressed at all. As I said "That's not information compression, it does not even sound like information compression." It may not be when you consider just the initial and the final states, but if you should express the state of the universe at every second from the initial state to the final state 1 million years later, the formula is certainly a powerful way to compress that information. The first laws of physics such as the elliptical planetary orbits by Kepler or the motion laws by Newton were derived only after collecting and arranging lots of data (such as recording the position of a planet in the sky day after day). Before the laws were formulated, lots of data were needed to guess where a planet would be located after a certain period in the future. Finding out that all those data could be expressed by an initial condition plus a simple formula was a huge compression achievement. For determining the path a spaceship to Mars should take, NASA does not make a list of the space coordinates of the path second by second along the journey.