Yeah Star Wars science doesn’t jive with reality, but could it?
We all know that TV and movies often don’t jive with science, as Star Wars turns 30 this week Bob MacDonald of the CBC reflects on how lots of Star Wars really didn’t jive with science.
Don’t get me wrong: Science fiction is wonderful. The imaginations of fantasy and fiction writers carry us beyond the ordinary to places where the good guys wear white, the bad guys are cloaked in black, good triumphs over evil, hero and heroine make a perfect couple … it’s Roy Rogers riding a white spaceship, the Three Musketeers with light sabres, what fun. But Star Wars, and the long train of imitator movies that followed, began the miss-education of science, where people believe that sound travels in space or gravity magically appears as soon as you step inside a spaceship – even though the ship itself is floating weightless in the void.
Of course you can’t hear explosions in space, and I think the recent Battlestar Galatica did a good job at having the space craft behave as they should in space, which is decidedly more boring IMHO, but I wonder if artificial gravity isn’t a possibility. Maybe the much vaunted “warp field” can allow faster-than-light travel, but not mess with Relativity.
Who knows. And you have to keep dreamin’ Remember people thought Edison, Marconi, and maybe others were nuts and their ideas violated the laws nature/physics/science.
Tags: Science Fiction, Star Wars, futurist
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