This week: Getting It Wrong Edited by: Robert Waltz  
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Another advantage of a mathematical statement is that it is so definite that it might be definitely wrong; and if it is found to be wrong, there is a plenteous choice of amendments ready in the mathematicians’ stock of formulae. Some verbal statements have not this merit; they are so vague that they could hardly be wrong, and are correspondingly useless.
-Lewis Fry Richardson
It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing than to believe what is wrong.
-Thomas Jefferson
Almost right is no better than wrong.
-Isaac Asimov |
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One thing that will break immersion for me whilst reading a book or viewing a video is when they get something just plain wrong.
Now, I'm not saying I'm right all the time. No one knows everything. But given the number of people working on a show or movie, you'd think someone would call them on goofs.
Some of these things are done for the mood they evoke in the viewer. I understand that. But they spread misinformation, so I'm going to list a few here. Note: Most of these apply more to science fiction, but fantasy writers need to be aware of some of them as well.
Sky Full of Planets: This is more of a SF book cover trope, but it happens in movies too. It's set on an alien planet, and they want to make it absolutely clear that it's not Earth, so they plaster five or six giant planets / moons in the sky. At least one of them always has rings like Saturn's, that somehow haven't been dissipated by the various gravitational pulls. Yes, yes, I know, it looks cool, but it's misleading. In reality, that many worlds that close together - or giant worlds further apart - would rip everything into little rocks from tidal forces, thus creating an asteroid field. Speaking of which...
Rocky Road: So your heroes are being chased into an asteroid field. Putting aside for the moment the fact that space has three dimensions, you show this by scattering a dense mass of tumbling, potato-shaped rocks that they have to dodge and, hopefully, trick the bad guys into wiping out on. This would only be the case if the asteroid field were newly created (say, from the rubble of six or seven planets / moons that got too close to each other) - otherwise, the asteroids would present little, if any, hazard to navigation. (I should note that I give a pass to Guardians of the Galaxy 2 for this one, because that was a quantum asteroid field, with rocks randomly tunneling through space itself, and that was funny.)
In Space, Everyone Can Hear Your Drive: I mean, really? Come on. I guess no one with half a brain will mistake that for reality, but still.
Free Fall Frolic: Thanks to certain science fiction TV shows and movies, lots of people think that... er... intimacy in microgravity would be fun. I assure you it would not, at least not without special equipment. Anyone who depicts this as something desirable is ignorant of either a) the way sex works or b) Newton's Laws of Motion - and despite the inevitable cheap jokes to the contrary, this knowledge is not mutually exclusive.
Spin Is Gravity: We know of three ways to mimic the effects of gravity. 1) Mass. 2) Thrust (unrelated to the last item above). 3) Spin. Now, for the sake of SF movie budgets, I can accept that artificial gravity has been invented, though such a thing would have implications beyond just keeping everyone oriented in the same direction. But if it hasn't, it's pretty common to depict ships, stations, etc. that spin. This provides centripetal force, which has the net effect of keeping people, aliens, cargo, pets, and robots stuck to the inside of the spinning part. But centripetal force is not exactly the same as gravity, especially when the radius is small. For an extreme case, imagine a capsule that's twice as big around as you are tall, spinning fast enough for your feet to stay on the wall. If they are, though, your head would be near the center of the spin, and be weightless. This would suck.
Lightspeed Sound: Forget space for a moment. You're on a planet, preferably one with no other planets nearby. Someone sets off a nuke. The SFX team spends a lot of time and effort creating a realistic mushroom cloud - which makes a loud BOOM when it appears. In reality, if you hear a nuke at the same time you see it, that's the last thing you hear. Or see. As anyone who's watched thunderstorms approach knows, you'll always see it before you hear it - regardless of the gas composition of the atmosphere.
The Superman Save: Try this. Find a friend, if you can, and have them get ready to drop an egg from two stories up onto concrete. But you can save the egg just in the nick of time! Just hold your hand about 1 centimeter above the concrete, simulating Superman's last-second save of Lois Lane (or any random falling person). Your friend drops the egg and you perform a spectacular last-second catch - leaving you with egg innards all over your hand. Bonus if you can swoop your hand in from the side and grab the egg just before it hits the concrete. Oh, wait, you still have egg all over your hand. I don't care if you're Superman or concrete; stopping a fall at just the last second may look awesome on the screen, but the falling thing still hits something at a high velocity.
Like I said, this list is more SF-oriented - in fantasy, most of these situations don't come up, and you can hand-wave a lot more stuff. But as there's a good bit of crossover, in both writers and fandom, I wanted to get these annoyances off my chest.
Anything bug you when you see it and know it can't be right? Let me know in the comment box below.  |
In keeping with the science fiction theme, here's some SF from around the site:
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Last time, in "Day Time" , I talked about how we measure time.
Paul  : Your grimoire spell never worked. Midnight is the mid-point between sunset and sunrise and because that is a constantly changing value as we orbit around the sun without very accurate clocks you can’t know the moment.
A clock a second off at the equator puts you .29 miles off course. Many fewer ships sank after John Harrison invented a clock in 1730 that was accurate to a second at sea.
Sorry, being an engineer I love technical stuff like that.
You have a point, but what I meant was that since local midnight can be more than an hour different from clock midnight, even if there's some slosh in the original spell (as a fellow engineer, you should be familiar with the concept of tolerance and the difference between accuracy and precision), it's unlikely that the Forces That Be would allow said slosh to exceed a few minutes.
This is all speculation, of course; the spell never worked because it's a spell. But I make some allowances for fantasy.
A note for the vast horde of non-engineers out there on the difference between accuracy and precision.
The accurate-clock thing is an important note, though, for anyone writing historical fiction - and I recommend to anyone that they look into it, because the history of clocks and timekeeping is fascinating.
And that's it for me for now - see you next time! Until then,
DREAM ON!!! |
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Fantasy: July 03, 2019 Issue [#9632]
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