Why science fiction needs a little magic
01/12/2008 . Source: Mark R. Leeper 
Mark's wife Evelyn has been reading the book Beyond Star Trek by Lawrence M. Krauss. Krauss is the author of The Physics of Star Trek, in which he looks at the science of Star Trek from the point of view of a physicist. He is not just a physicist... Buy Beyond Star Trek in the USA - or Buy Beyond Star Trek in the UK  As one web page says "Lawrence Krauss is chairman of the physics department at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH, US, where his research focuses on the interface between particle physics and cosmology."
So he should know what he is talking about. Perhaps this book is not so much Beyond Star Trek as beside it. In this book he looks at the physics of Star Wars, The X-Files, and more to the point, Independence Day. It was his first chapter that Evelyn commented on. There is where he talks about Independence Day. He begins by describing the scene of a spacecraft hovering 5000 feet off the ground over a major city, a disk fifteen miles in diameter. From there it serves as a base from which to send out hostile ships, not unlike an aircraft carrier.
He notes that telemetry said that the mother ship was one-quarter of the mass of the moon. Krauss then points out smugly that a ship of that mass in geostationary orbit would be a lot more deadly just being there than as a flying aircraft carrier. He says that the real geostationary orbit would have to be at one-tenth the distance to the moon. (He does not point out that this already contradicts the assumption that the craft is less than a mile off the ground.)
So to compare the pull from this craft one gets a mass factor or 1/4 that of moon. It also gets another factor for its proximity. The force of gravity drops off as the square of the distance. Being 1/10 the distance from the moon the factor for proximity is 1/(1/10)^2 or 100. Multiply the two together and you get a pull of 25 times the pull of the moon. Its mere presence would cause huge and deadly tides more destructive than the fighting ships it sends out.
While I do not have Dr. Krauss's credentials, I am less than happy with his analysis. While I cannot believe that it is me saying this, you can be too close to the science and the mathematics to really understand what is going on. I think Dr. Krauss was correct in stating, even if he did not especially note it, that the altitude of the spacecraft was wrong for a geostationary orbit. What he did not mention was that the location was also wrong. These craft are hovering over cities like New York, Los Angeles, Moscow, and Oklahoma City. What immediately struck me as odd was Krauss's assumption that the ship was in geostationary orbit.
These cities lack what I shall call for want of a better term 'equatoriality'. Geostationary orbits can be only over the equator. Dr. Krauss seems to have missed the significance of them getting both the location and the altitude wrong. That rules out geostationary orbit. Dr. Krauss does not recognize that the alien craft could be sitting there motionless only if it were somehow nullifying gravity. "Ah, but you cannot nullify gravity," I hear Dr. Krauss protesting. True, but you cannot fly between stars either currently. The whole story falls apart if you assume that our current laws of physics bind the aliens. Like faster than light travel, it might or may not be possible at some time in the future. And if spacecraft could nullify gravity, they probably would not create the disastrous tidal forces that Dr. Krauss predicts.
But Independence Day is not science fiction; it is sci-fi. It is not grounded in physics and certainly not contemporary physics. Like fantasy it is grounded in imagination. Dr. Krauss makes a lot of assumptions about what we see in Independence Day being based on real current science. But there is more than enough evidence in the film that the aliens are tapping into some sort of super- science that is beyond us. And it is not at all clear that it is any less accurate. In the July 8, 2005, issue of the MT VOID I commented on how really absurd the technology of the film The Invisible Boy (1957) seemed when I was learning about computers in the 1970s.
What was this ridiculousness about a huge computer with nearly all the knowledge of the world? What kind of a computer can you just ask questions in English and it will tell you the answer? How can one computer "enslave" another by just getting connected to it? How likely is it that a person can connect to a computer and just take it over? In the 1970s I was pretty smug about my knowledge of what a computer is and what it can do.
There was just too much that said that the computer science in that movie was absurd. So my answer to Lawrence Krauss is that he says some interesting things in his book, but I am not ready to accept that huge ships might not be able to nullify gravity and hover above cities.
This is all the upside of Clarke's Third Law that a sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. That allows a little latitude to put some magic in sci-fi stories.
At the time I wrote it I knew the computer science had proved to be accurate, but I knew that the invisibility part was, of course, pure fantasy. It is physically impossible to make a person invisible. That was part of the magic of the story. That was in 2005. And now three years later *that* is becoming possible.
Mark R. Leeper
© Mark R. Leeper 2008 |
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