CoE Collective Hindsight: Awful science....

[Lindley]

I've been reading the Aftermath TPB lately, and I'm currently working on Collective Hindsight.

After some very good stories in this volume, this one just pushes the scientific credibility right out the window. How is such a massive collection of errors allowed past the first draft, seriously?

The first sign of something amiss was when Tev decides to analyze the mystery ship by cross-referencing all ships which are known to travel in a straight line.

Seriously. Because I guess most known ships prefer loopty-loops.

Now, we go to the flashback. Another eyebrow-raising moment when Patty comments on how it's extremely warm in the ship. Oh, and by the way, there's no atmosphere.

Temperature is defined in terms of molecular motion speed. Technically you could have any temperature at any air density so long as you had at least one molecule's motion to study, but that wasn't the way it came across in the dialog. Also, Patty could have been talking about the heat in the walls and floor, but again, that isn't how it comes across. I quote:

The crystals, for their part, were visibly throbbing, and the glow radiating from them lit the entire room easily. They also provided noticeable warmth that could be felt even through the cooling systems of the suits, making this room even hotter than the corridors beyond. Salek, who came from Vulcan's desert environment, actually found it comfortable, though he suspected the humans were not having as easy a time of it.

You can't feel radiative warmth without some medium of propagation. And they claim there's no air.

But wait, it gets better. The reason there's no air is because it all burned away when the interior momentarily super-heated. According to Stevens, this vaporized the air.

Yes. The air was "vaporized." Does the author even know what that word means? He's claiming that combustion converted oxygen and hydrogen into water vapor. Fair enough. But where did this water vapor go? Given a lack of outside atmosphere to replace that which was burned, it would probably remain as a gas. The overall pressure in the environment hasn't changed, after all. Thus there would be atmosphere, when the characters claim there isn't.

Next up: the da Vinci crew is startled to realize that the vessel doesn't use an antimatter reactor. Instead, they detect "nuclear" signatures from it similar to a star, and it's suggested that maybe the thing is running off an artificial star. But no; it just passively absorbs solar radiation.

That's right. They're getting nuclear reaction signatures off the ship because it runs on solar power.

The novella then goes back and forth on exactly what that means. Once it does say explicitly that the ship isn't actually gathering stellar material, just reacting to heat and light. Yet apparently this somehow enables it to shoot solar flares at Cardassian warships.

Then we get to the heart of the story: The crew incinerated themselves because they were afraid to dump their excess heat outwardly, since it might set off a nova in the local star. I'm not even going to try on that one. It just doesn't make a lick of sense.

Apparently this ship uses an action/reaction drive system; they describe hydrogen rockets as the primary propulsion system. And somehow this simplistic system is able to propel the ship up to Warp 1.75. Yeah.....you can't break the warp barrier with reaction rockets. It just isn't going to happen, sorry.

I could forgive the science if the characters worked. But they're not much better.

Selek's plan was totally illogical. So he manages to get the Cardy shields down. But then, instead of pressing the assault externally, he figures he needs to flash-fry himself (somehow---still no air!) and beam some of that energy over to the Cardassians to do the same to them. It's totally unclear what is being beamed; clearly not any superheated gas, since there is supposedly none, just "energy". Well, I got news for you: Once those shields went down, the da Vinci could have just beamed a quantum torpedo aboard with much the same effect. Plus, while Selek's doing all this beaming, he doesn't think to beam himself to safety at the same time. There's no good reason for that except that this-is-a-flashback logic demands that he die.

Tev, who think's he's God's gift to engineering, back-plots the ship's trajectory without thinking to account for gravitational effects. That's just silly. No halfway competent engineer would make that oversight, much less someone as supposedly smart as Tev. As complaints go that's a minor one, though.

Both Tev and Soloman act as if the character development from the last few stories didn't happen, even though those stories are referenced. Jeez.

The main conflict of the present-time portion of the story is that this ship is going to slam into a planet shortly. Does the author not realize that space is really, really, really, really, really big, and that this extremely unlikely event deserves comment? As in, maybe someone aimed it at this world? Not so far. But then, I haven't finished the thing yet.....

 

[Christopher]

Now, we go to the flashback. Another eyebrow-raising moment when Patty comments on how it's extremely warm in the ship. Oh, and by the way, there's no atmosphere.

Temperature is defined in terms of molecular motion speed. Technically you could have any temperature at any air density so long as you had at least one molecule's motion to study, but that wasn't the way it came across in the dialog. Also, Patty could have been talking about the heat in the walls and floor, but again, that isn't how it comes across. I quote:

The crystals, for their part, were visibly throbbing, and the glow radiating from them lit the entire room easily. They also provided noticeable warmth that could be felt even through the cooling systems of the suits, making this room even hotter than the corridors beyond. Salek, who came from Vulcan's desert environment, actually found it comfortable, though he suspected the humans were not having as easy a time of it.

You can't feel radiative warmth without some medium of propagation. And they claim there's no air.

No, that's not right. You can't feel conductive or convective warmth without a medium of propagation. But radiative heat is exchanged by electromagnetic radiation (typically infrared or visible light), and thus it doesn't need a material medium. That's how the Earth is warmed by the Sun despite the 150 million kilometers of vacuum between them.

However, radiation is the least efficient means of heat transfer, so you would feel less heat from a radiating source if you were in vacuum than you would if you were in atmosphere. But if the source were intense enough, you would definitely feel warmth, just as you do when you're in sunlight.


Otherwise, I find no fault with your criticisms.

 

[Stevil2001]

The main conflict of the present-time portion of the story is that this ship is going to slam into a planet shortly. Does the author not realize that space is really, really, really, really, really big, and that this extremely unlikely event deserves comment? As in, maybe someone aimed it at this world? Not so far. But then, I haven't finished the thing yet.....

I don't know much about science, but I know what I like, and this last one has always niggled at me-- we're not told that it's going to hit one planet, but a dozen! What are the odds!?

 

[mattburgess]

I find bad science to be extremely cringeworthy. The only saving grace (and it is a thin lifeline) is when the science can be creatively altered to suit this 'bad science,' or when the characters themselves comment on the unlikelihood of such events.

In Mission Gamma #1: Twilight, the Defiant is on a planet that gets "shot at" by a pulse from another world (and has been, repeatedly, for many, many years)
Arriving at that second planet, they discover the pulse is a byproduct of a 'being' trying to make it's way through to our universe from it's own, and the crew have about 3 days before another pulse is thrown out into the galaxy, one which they know will actually destroy the first planet this time.

But hang on...

What are the chances that the next pulse will fire anywhere near that first planet again, when you take into account the rotation of the second planet, the rotations of both planets through their own solar systems, and the movements of their solar systems through the galaxy?

Wouldn't that be like one blindfolded person with a gun, spinning around on the spot, standing on a carrousel, which is also moving, and shooting an extremely distant, moving target every single time for years?

Are these planets so perfectly aligned, and these pulses so perfectly timed, that a pulse will fire precisely from one planet to the other, missing all other objects in space, and accounting for interstellar drift?
What an amazing discovery!

 

[Christopher]

I don't know much about science, but I know what I like, and this last one has always niggled at me-- we're not told that it's going to hit one planet, but a dozen! What are the odds!?

Infinitesimal. Less than infinitesimal. Effectively zero. Space is so vast and empty that the odds of any given straight-line course intersecting any body at all, ever, are infinitesimal. Any given straight-line course through the galactic disk will probably go clear through the galaxy without touching anything other than a few atoms of interstellar gas and dust.

And given that most bodies in the galaxy are not inhabited, the odds of hitting an inhabited planet are exponentially more infinitesimal. So the odds of any random course through the galaxy intersecting with a dozen inhabited planets would be zero to quite a few decimal places.


This same problem cropped up in one of Malibu's DS9 comics, "Dax's Comet." Not only was the science in that comic so dreadfully inept that the comet was depicted as a huge, deadly fireball rather than just a clump of ice and rock, but the characters were unwilling to divert the comet from its Bajor-threatening course out of the belief that doing so would inevitably endanger countless other planets in other star systems (even though comets don't travel between star systems).

 

[mattburgess]

Of course, "science" is always changing in the modern world, and who knows what our understanding of the universe will be 400 years from now.

But does anyone else have any examples of truly awful science from Star Trek literature that they would like to get off their chest?

 

[Christopher]

Of course, "science" is always changing in the modern world, and who knows what our understanding of the universe will be 400 years from now.

That's not the way it works. Science is always learning new things, but that doesn't mean the things we already know, things that have been definitively verified by experiment and observation, are in any danger of disappearing. Einstein revolutionized our understanding of why apples fall out of trees and the Moon orbits the Earth, but that didn't change the observed reality that they did so.

 

[Lindley]

I finished the novella. It's not a bad story if you accept the premise the author was going for. It's simply not the best storytelling. The presentation got in the way of the content too often.

 

[ToddCam]

That's not the way it works. Science is always learning new things, but that doesn't mean the things we already know, things that have been definitively verified by experiment and observation, are in any danger of disappearing. Einstein revolutionized our understanding of why apples fall out of trees and the Moon orbits the Earth, but that didn't change the observed reality that they did so.

I thought that was Newton.

 

[Sci]

That's not the way it works. Science is always learning new things, but that doesn't mean the things we already know, things that have been definitively verified by experiment and observation, are in any danger of disappearing. Einstein revolutionized our understanding of why apples fall out of trees and the Moon orbits the Earth, but that didn't change the observed reality that they did so.

I thought that was Newton.

It was both.

 

[Christopher]

Newton was the one who figured out that both the fall of the apple and the orbit of the Moon were manifestations of the same phenomenon. Einstein figured out how that phenomenon worked. Each advance brought new insights, but that didn't erase the old data. Too many people use "We don't know everything" as a basis for claiming "Nothing we know can be trusted," and that's just plain wrong.

 

[mattburgess]

Originally Posted by mattburgess:
Of course, "science" is always changing in the modern world, and who knows what our understanding of the universe will be 400 years from now.

Originally Posted by Christopher:
That's not the way it works. Science is always learning new things, but that doesn't mean the things we already know, things that have been definitively verified by experiment and observation, are in any danger of disappearing. Einstein revolutionized our understanding of why apples fall out of trees and the Moon orbits the Earth, but that didn't change the observed reality that they did so.

I don't see what you're arguing. You seem to have taken my point and said it back to me as if I had said something completely different.

Science IS always changing in the modern world - the act of science, how we go about studying physics, chemistry, biology, etc. Modern technology and modern techniques are always changing, always updating.
And our understanding of the universe is all about "why" these things do what they do. A lot of scientific theory is just that - theory. It may be proven to within a 99.9% probability, but it is still theory.
I'm not saying that apples will stop falling out of trees, or that we never saw them do it before Newton, but our understanding of why they do it will be even better with time, "and who knows what our understanding of the [whole] universe will be 400 years from now."

 

[Christopher]

^In the context of this thread, it sounded like you were saying that the critiques of Collective Hindsight were illegitimate because the scientific principles on which those critiques were based might poof out of existence -- as if there were any conceivable way future science might reveal that space is not empty after all but actually incredibly cluttered with populated worlds or that comets actually are big radioactive fireballs. Hence my response that those things are so solidly established by actual hard data and direct observation that any advances in theory won't erase them but simply clarify the context in which they exist.

If that's not what you intended to convey, then why did you make your comment at all? How did you intend it to connect to the specific topic of conversation in this thread?

 

[mattburgess]

It dovetails with my immediate follow-up question "But does anyone else have any examples of truly awful science from Star Trek literature that they would like to get off their chest?"

The reason I put these sentences together is because an individual could be forgiven for saying "But wait, you don't know what will be possible in the future, so how do you know it's bad science? Maybe it just seems like bad science now, but in 400 years time (the approximate setting of the stories) it totally makes sense, because our understanding of the universe has changed."

I could have made that clearer.

One day, Christopher, you and I might end up on the same page

(And on that day, posting will seem so much more... boring )

 

[Christopher]

^But this is science fiction written in the present day and directed at a present-day audience. It reflects present-day culture, values, language, beliefs, and concerns, and by the same token it also reflects present-day science. So that's an appropriate standard to judge it by.

By analogy, it's possible that 400 years from now, the English language will have changed so much that a sentence like "Dese is da voiage of starsip Enderpize" will be correct spelling and grammar, but that doesn't mean it isn't bad spelling and grammar in a book published in the 21st century. You can't say anything useful based on standards as they might exist in a hypothetical future. Criticism is about evaluating a creative work by the standards of competence, skill, and knowledge that apply in the era when it is written.

By analogy, a lot of Shakespeare's spelling and grammar are incorrect by today's standards, but scholars understand that the language was still evolving in his time and the rules were far less codified. And so critics evaluate his work by the standards of his time, not our time.

Besides, if a story contains a claim that's wrong based on current science and future science reveals there's a way it could happen, it's still bad science, because science is not just about facts, it's about the process of discovery. Science isn't just what you know, it's fundamentally and crucially about how you know it. It's not good science unless you arrive at it through a valid process. A lucky guess doesn't count.

 

[mattburgess]

So whereas I'm saying "ignore what we might know 400 years from now",
you're saying "only pay attention to what we know now."

We're saying the same thing again.

That being the case - just ignore the first bit of my original questioning post, and only pay attention to the second bit - the question.

 

[Wes-Cutting]

To me you both are saying the same thing just using different words, therefore are confusing eachothers thoughts. Frankly I got lost trying to pin-down who was agrueing what here so....


I was reading through the Genesis Wave books and thought that was really bad science there. I may not truly understand the concept behind it but I had it my head that the wave itself would require so much energy at the source that it just wouldn't work. I mean its a nice fictional concept but an ever expanding wave losing no energy or speed and destroying most everything in it's path. I could believe the Genesis Matrix working for a single planet but a huge tidal force rollling through the galaxy?

 

[Rosalind]

To me you both are saying the same thing just using different words, therefore are confusing eachothers thoughts. Frankly I got lost trying to pin-down who was agrueing what here so....

To me, they are arguing different things.

Originally Posted by mattburgess:
Of course, "science" is always changing in the modern world, and who knows what our understanding of the universe will be 400 years from now.

Unfortunately, this particular post followed directly from Christopher's post which said "Space is so vast and empty that the odds of any given straight-line course intersecting any body at all, ever, are infinitesimal." So, when reading them together, it sounded like mattburgess is arguing books that had objects bumping into each other in space might not be bad science because "science is always changing".

Originally Posted by Christopher:
That's not the way it works. Science is always learning new things, but that doesn't mean the things we already know, things that have been definitively verified by experiment and observation, are in any danger of disappearing. Einstein revolutionized our understanding of why apples fall out of trees and the Moon orbits the Earth, but that didn't change the observed reality that they did so.

while Christopher's post here says what we learn in science now might only be the tip of an iceberg in what we will learn in 400 years time, but that knowledge is still part of the same iceberg.

Originally Posted by mattburgess: And our understanding of the universe is all about "why" these things do what they do. A lot of scientific theory is just that - theory. It may be proven to within a 99.9% probability, but it is still theory.

This, on the other hand, is one of my pet peeves. Dictionary.com give the following definition of 'theory':

1. a coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomena: Einstein's theory of relativity.
2. a proposed explanation whose status is still conjectural, in contrast to well-established propositions that are regarded as reporting matters of actual fact.
3. Mathematics. a body of principles, theorems, or the like, belonging to one subject: number theory.
4. the branch of a science or art that deals with its principles or methods, as distinguished from its practice: music theory.
5. a particular conception or view of something to be done or of the method of doing it; a system of rules or principles.
6. contemplation or speculation.
7. guess or conjecture.

So, a "scientific theory" and the normal everyday use of the word "theory" is very different. In science, theory can mean a group of propositions but it is also used to talk about one subject. While in everyday talk, we often use theory to mean #6 and 7 up there: guess, speculation, conjecture. These meanings are totally different from one another.

A scientific theory is NOT 'just a theory', in other words, it is not a guess or speculation, for something to be called 'theory' in science you'll need to show proofs, otherwise, it's called a hypothesis.

 

[Christopher]

In vernacular, a theory is something that hasn't yet been proven to be a fact. In science, a theory is something much bigger than a fact. A fact is simply a single data point -- an observation, a measurement, a result. A theory is something that takes a body of facts and explains what they mean. It takes those measurements, those data, and explains what causes them and how they fit together into a greater whole. And most importantly, by putting isolated facts together into a single overarching framework, it allows you to make extrapolations beyond the mere facts -- to predict what would happen in cases you haven't observed or tested yet. And it's the tests of those predictions that determine whether a theory is sound or not. So disproving a theory doesn't erase the facts it's based upon, it merely provides a new foundation for understanding their meaning. The raw data, the observations, the measurements of what's right in front of us, those will remain even if our understanding of their root causes undergoes change.

 

[mattburgess]

Oh My God, I cannot believe what a huge thing you people are making of all this -

Does anybody have any examples of so-called "awful science" in Star Trek literature that they felt was worth a mention?

Simple as that.