Examples of terrible science in fiction

[Proginoskes]

Not in fiction, but one of my friends used to think that being, say, blue-green colourblind meant that you couldn't see things that were green or blue - that they were invisible to you.

So if I hid a red object in a blue box, would your friends think a blue-green colorblind person could see the hidden object?

Dogs have this problem as well: red and green are the same color to them.

Superman's inhalation implies pressure in his lungs well below vacuum.

Tolkien would frequently describe something as "flying faster than the wind". Anything actively flying downwind moves faster than the wind even if it's incredibly weak/ slow.

Not if the wind was travelling at the speed of light! (JK. I don't think we can fault Tolkien for not knowing his science, or William Golding (Lord of the Flies contains two well-known doozies).)

There's even some basic science in modern science fiction that is inexcusible. In one of the stories in Alfred Bester's anthology Virtual Unrealities, there is an explosion several miles away, and the sound gets to the main character before the image.

[jaap]

I think the film makers get judged far too harshly for this one because people get the intended chain of causality wrong. Superman goes faster than light (which is about 7 times around the earth per second), and because of this he travels back in time. We viewers go back in time along him which is why we see time flowing backwards and the earth spinning the other way. It is still bollocks of course, but merely the standard trope of FTL equals time-travel. It would have been clearer if they could have showed things other than the earth moving backwards too (e.g. the moon or a comet).

[WarDaft]

I think the film makers get judged far too harshly for this one because people get the intended chain of causality wrong. Superman goes faster than light (which is about 7 times around the earth per second), and because of this he travels back in time. We viewers go back in time along him which is why we see time flowing backwards and the earth spinning the other way. It is still bollocks of course, but merely the standard trope of FTL equals time-travel. It would have been clearer if they could have showed things other than the earth moving backwards too (e.g. the moon or a comet).

Except he stops and the Earth keeps spinning backwards, and he has to go the other way to set it back to normal again. I suppose you could posit some sort of frame-dragged vortex wake of backwards flowing time, but then you know you've gone off the deep end.

If they had just left it at just going faster than the speed of light, then they'd only have been wrong, but no, they had to go on into not even wrong territory.

Not to mention that the speed the Earth was rotating at before he started, a day would be 2 minutes long tops, maybe 1.

[Proginoskes]

I think the film makers get judged far too harshly for this one because people get the intended chain of causality wrong. Superman goes faster than light (which is about 7 times around the earth per second), and because of this he travels back in time.

That would be the perfect way to fight crime, right? Go back in time and wipe out someone before they commit it.

I know, he was told "Don't interfere", but still ...

[Frenetic Pony]

Doctor Who.
There, I said it.

Wibbly Wobbly, Timey Wimey. There, now it's solved!

Anyway, it would be easier, but less fun to list fiction with GOOD science rather than the mass of stuff that is bad.

Personally I hated Mass Effect 2 (especially after the first game actually sorta tried at least). So in order to preserve humanity the scary bad guy things are collecting humans, and then draining all of the blood from there bodies, killing them (obviously), and then injecting the blood into a giant robot. Not separated either, just like, throwing a bunch of mixed up blood in their, into a vat I guess. Apparently the "goal" was to preserve the humans DNA. Which was weird, considering they could have just taken small blood samples and stored the analyzed genomes on a hard drive or something. I'd thought they were sacrificing the blood to the giant blood god robot demon, which would have made a hell of a lot more sense.

[Proginoskes]

Doctor Who.
There, I said it.

Wibbly Wobbly, Timey Wimey. There, now it's solved!

I actually bought a paperback adaptation of one of the Dr. Who episodes, and the plot and terminology was directed towards a 4th-grade reading level.

Anyway, it would be easier, but less fun to list fiction with GOOD science rather than the mass of stuff that is bad.

I'm working my way through Tau Zero by Poul Anderson, considered to be one of the best of the "hard-science-fiction" genre ...

[Xanthir]

Doctor Who.
There, I said it.

Wibbly Wobbly, Timey Wimey. There, now it's solved!

Anyway, it would be easier, but less fun to list fiction with GOOD science rather than the mass of stuff that is bad.

Personally I hated Mass Effect 2 (especially after the first game actually sorta tried at least). So in order to preserve humanity the scary bad guy things are collecting humans, and then draining all of the blood from there bodies, killing them (obviously), and then injecting the blood into a giant robot. Not separated either, just like, throwing a bunch of mixed up blood in their, into a vat I guess. Apparently the "goal" was to preserve the humans DNA. Which was weird, considering they could have just taken small blood samples and stored the analyzed genomes on a hard drive or something. I'd thought they were sacrificing the blood to the giant blood god robot demon, which would have made a hell of a lot more sense.

They actually liquify the whole body. There's no DNA in blood (blood cells don't have nucleuses!).

The point is to make a super-being with the essential qualities of the race. It... doesn't make a lot of sense, no. But whatever.

[ahammel]

They actually liquify the whole body. There's no DNA in blood (blood cells don't have nucleuses!).

Of course there is. Red blood cells don't have nucleii, but there are cells in your blood that aren't RBCs. It's a relatively poor source of DNA compared to, skin cells, for example, but there's more than enough there for most modern molecular biology applications. The Human Genome Project used mostly blood samples.

I can swallow the time travel in Doctor Who, but I've always had trouble with the part about "yes, humans look exactly the same a billion years into the future because *handwave handwave* evolution."

[WarDaft]

I can swallow the time travel in Doctor Who, but I've always had trouble with the part about "yes, humans look exactly the same a billion years into the future because *handwave handwave* evolution."

Actually, time travel makes that make sense too. If people are skipping back and forth through time, one single generation can have an unbounded amount of impact on the total history of the gene pool.

[ahammel]

Actually, time travel makes that make sense too. If people are skipping back and forth through time, one single generation can have an unbounded amount of impact on the total history of the gene pool.

I could swallow that as well; but that's not the explanation given by the Doctor in any episode I've seen*. The explanation he gives is that evolution keeps returning to the human form. Because, you know, that's a thing that evolution does even when it isn't constrained by costume budgets.

Humans don't even develop time travel independently in the Whoniverse, do they?

More bad science: just saw The Hunger Games last night. In the finale:

Spoiler:

Bad Guy is making his requisite Bad-Guy-Speech-While-Holding-Love-Interest-Hostage. Katniss solves the problem of shooting him without killing Love Interest by putting an arrow in Bad Guy's hand, which is wrapped around Love Interests's neck at the time. Conveniently, the arrow is stopped dead by his metacarpal.

[Morbo]ARROWS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY! GOODNIGHT![/Morbo]

*_{disclaimer: I haven't seen any of the Matt Smith ones}

[Robert'); DROP TABLE *;]

Humans don't even develop time travel independently in the Whoniverse, do they?
*_{disclaimer: I haven't seen any of the Matt Smith ones}

They have (something like) it by the 51st century, since Captain Jack apparently got to 1941 under his own power.

[ahammel]

Humans don't even develop time travel independently in the Whoniverse, do they?
*_{disclaimer: I haven't seen any of the Matt Smith ones}

They have (something like) it by the 51st century, since Captain Jack apparently got to 1941 under his own power.

Ah, of course. Forgot about that.

[Angua]

Yeah, and the big bad from the last season definitely had time travel.

[Angua]

Double posting for rage at the entire 'Going Viral' storyline on body of proof.

Spoiler:

Pretty much every bit of the stuff about how to treat a quarantine, and patients suffering from an incurable disease, and figuring out what the pathogen was was wrong. A massive outbreak, spreading quickly by an unknown mechanism, with an unknown dormant period, and you just let the people who've been exposed to patients out because they don't have a fever? The doctor who pricks their finger with a sharp used on a dead person doesn't quarantine herself immediately? They know that IFN at least slows the virus down, and they don't start treating patients because it's not a cure (even though this is killing people in 72 hours, while the only other patient who was on it for another reason lived for a lot longer than anyone else)??????? Vaccines 'fight' viruses, and do so instantaneously.

There was a lot more, but I can't be bothered

[MotorToad]

New low point in movie physics: Another Earth.

I didn't watch this very closely, but it was on the tube while I was internetting. The reason I didn't watch closely is that it hurt to. As my friend put it "I'm not nearly cool enough for this movie."

[SlyReaper]

I've not watched the film, but I have today learned that the reason behind the apocalypse in the film 2012 is "the neutrinos have mutated". Yeah...

[Angua]

The film doesn't make it sound anywhere near as funny as Dara O'Brien makes it out to be.

[SlyReaper]

THE ELECTRONS ARE ANGRY!!! ಠ_ಠ

[Proginoskes]

THE ELECTRONS ARE ANGRY!!! ಠ_ಠ

THE ELECTRONS ARE CHARGING!!!

[WarDaft]

THE ELECTRONS ARE ANGRY!!! ಠ_ಠ

You're missing a dramatic pause there.

Also

THE LIGHT FROM THE SUN... it's gone off..

[Chen]

More bad science: just saw The Hunger Games last night. In the finale:

Spoiler:

Bad Guy is making his requisite Bad-Guy-Speech-While-Holding-Love-Interest-Hostage. Katniss solves the problem of shooting him without killing Love Interest by putting an arrow in Bad Guy's hand, which is wrapped around Love Interests's neck at the time. Conveniently, the arrow is stopped dead by his metacarpal.

[Morbo]ARROWS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY! GOODNIGHT![/Morbo]

Spoiler:

I thought it hit his arm not his hand? And of course that still doesn't make sense unless you read the book and know that his care package (the one where she got the medicine for Peeta) had a set of body armor in it. I wondered why that got taken out of the movie.

[WarDaft]

Well, that makes a lot more sense that if it had been say, a gun. You kind-of get to choose the piercing strength of an arrow each time.

[SlyReaper]

Well, that makes a lot more sense that if it had been say, a gun. You kind-of get to choose the piercing strength of an arrow each time.

As anyone who has ever done archery properly can tell you: not really. If you want any accuracy at all, you pull the string back to full draw.

[ConMan]

Humans don't even develop time travel independently in the Whoniverse, do they?
*_{disclaimer: I haven't seen any of the Matt Smith ones}

They have (something like) it by the 51st century, since Captain Jack apparently got to 1941 under his own power.

Ah, of course. Forgot about that.

And I suspect he alone would explain much of the consistent humanoidness of the universe (except you'd think it would be better looking a bit more often).

Spoiler:

Although he only has one confirmed child.

[Diadem]

Well, that makes a lot more sense that if it had been say, a gun. You kind-of get to choose the piercing strength of an arrow each time.

As anyone who has ever done archery properly can tell you: not really. If you want any accuracy at all, you pull the string back to full draw.

Plus, arrows have a lot more penetrative power than bullets. This may be somewhat counter-intuitive, since bullets go a lot faster. But arrows are a lot heavier than bullets. Their total momentum is a lot bigger. So they penetrate deeper.

[Ephemeron]

This one stood out from the recent Avengers film. It's standard issue movie technobabble, but it puts the field of troll physics to shame.

"Call every lab you know, tell them to put the spectrometers on the roof and calibrate them for gamma rays. I'll rough out a tracking algorithm based on cluster recognition. At least we could rule out a few places. Do you have somewhere for me to work?"

Problem, science?

[Yakk]

Gamma ray spectrometers exist.

Suppose there is a strange signal that the tesseract is emitting. If it was strange and strong enough, the labs near the tesseract might all show a similar "cluster" of an unusual signal. If there is a cosmic source, it would show up among many detectors at once -- if there was a local source, it would show up stronger the nearer the lab is, and go away really rapidly once it goes under the horizon significantly.

The roof -- well, that would increase the distance to the horizon, and while few things (barring really thick walls) block gamma rays, going through a good chunk of the earth is one of those ways to block gamma rays. (At first, I was like "why bother with the roof, gamma rays would barely notice the walls", but then I worked out "ah, horizon problems!").

A problem might be that any gamma ray source strong enough to generate that kind of signal over that long of a range would be quite fatal at short range? But maybe not: after all, long-range gamma-ray based science was done to detect water on Mars. So parts of the spectrum must be (relatively) clean: if the tessract is broadcasting on those clean areas of the spectrum, it might stick out reasonably well. Of course, other stuff (like rocks) also emit gamma rays, so determining which signals where from the local granite and what are from a tesseract would be a non-trivial problem.

I, however, am not anywhere close to an expert on statistical clustering algorithms, nor on gamma rays.

[WarDaft]

Avengers does commit the 'all smart people know everything' error a number of times though.

[Yakk]

They lampshaded it nicely. "Since when where you an expert on gamma rays?" (or something to that extent, aimed at Tony Stark)

Avengers spoilers:

Spoiler:

I also liked how they played Loki. Loki gets captured, Black Widow figures out what Loki is trying to do, but it still works (partially because Loki is obviously cheating using his scepter, but still...)

And the entire bit where Loki gets captured is explained before hand. In a sense, it doesn't make sense that Loki is taking the Avengers seriously -- but the reason behind it is mentioned in a throw-away line before hand. The entire plot of Loki getting captured is about distracting Tony Stark (personally) while Loki's minions use Stark tower to open the gate. And Loki being captured as part of the plot is just a matter of arrogance: they aren't a threat, even if he's in captivity, as far as Loki is concerned.

Loki is "too smart" in that he ends up knowing so much about Earth and the heroes that he can needle the heroes using off-hand remarks into doing pretty extreme things -- it is pretty Xanatos-gambit like. On the other hand, his most nasty/tricky comment (why didn't they contact Tony Stark if they planned on using it for clean energy?) was aimed at the person Loki was most trying to distract...

[Mike Rosoft]

I remember watching some adaptation of "Voyage to the Center of the Earth". At one point, the heroes were sailing on an underground ocean, and suddenly, their golden items start flying away. We're told that this is caused by the magnetic field, because they are now at the Earth's center.

* The obvious: Why are golden items affected, and not iron?
* There's no way the Earth's center would have looked like this - if the Earth were hollow and contained an underground ocean, wouldn't the ocean concentrate around the center? (There are probably other reasons why this would have been impossible.)
* For that matter, if the Earth were hollow, the Earth's magnetic field would have probably never worked.


Mike Rosoft

[ahammel]

In the Sherlock episode "The Hounds of Baskerville", the list of rumors of scary, vaguely biotech-related shit that might be going on at the Baskerville military base included "genetic mutation". For one thing, that's redundant (what other kind of mutation could you possibly be talking about in that context?) and for another, it's totally non-descriptive. Are they doing site-directed mutagenesis? Is it just really radioactive in there? Or are we using "mutation" in a really broad sense to include things like transfection? Inquiring biology nerds want to know.

Although to give them credit:

Spoiler:

it's totally possible to make a glowing green rabbit using GFP.

Come to think of it, I believe the main character mentioned "genetic mutation" in a list of fringe-science topics in the pilot of Fringe (about which: the less said the better).

[sam_i_am]

I'm a little bit out of my depth here, but something tells me that Spiderman's strategy might be a little bit counter-productive

[Ikillu]

I was watching Fringe the other day, and though they usually stay away from subjects that can actually be disproven with science, they completely botched this one. This particular scene involved a corpse who seemingly disappeared as it had been picked up by people moving the speed of light.

1. I would posit that quickly accelerating a body to the speed of light would be very damaging to it (and to anything around it according to the baseball what if)

2. The main characters discovered the cadaver capers because they took security camera footage and using a special machine that could slow the film down enough to see things moving at light speed. Seriously? CAMERAS DO NOT WORK LIKE THAT. I thought that frames per second was a fairly simple concept that the writers are obviously unaware of.

[sam_i_am]

I was watching Fringe the other day, and though they usually stay away from subjects that can actually be disproven with science, they completely botched this one. This particular scene involved a corpse who seemingly disappeared as it had been picked up by people moving the speed of light.

1. I would posit that quickly accelerating a body to the speed of light would be very damaging to it (and to anything around it according to the baseball what if)

2. The main characters discovered the cadaver capers because they took security camera footage and using a special machine that could slow the film down enough to see things moving at light speed. Seriously? CAMERAS DO NOT WORK LIKE THAT. I thought that frames per second was a fairly simple concept that the writers are obviously unaware of.

they just interpolate it :p

[Quizatzhaderac]

they just interpolate it :p

It's probably like the "enhance" feature.

Come to think of it, I believe the main character mentioned "genetic mutation" in a list of fringe-science topics in the pilot of Fringe (about which: the less said the better).

I'm guessing they meant X-men style genetic mutation.

[SlyReaper]

Warehouse 13. Just everything about that show really, but I could forgive it if it was at least internally consistent. Season 4 spoiler:

Spoiler:

Having established in a previous season that backwards time travel is impossible, Arty uses an artefact to go back in time.

[ahammel]

Come to think of it, I believe the main character mentioned "genetic mutation" in a list of fringe-science topics in the pilot of Fringe (about which: the less said the better).

I'm guessing they meant X-men style genetic mutation.

Well then I guess I was right about the bolded bit.

[Quizatzhaderac]

.... Fringe (about which: the less said the better) .... Well then I guess I was right about the bolded bit.

That's not how discussion works.

You can bring something up if you want to talk about it, or leave it alone if you don't. If somebody else brings something up you'd rather not discuss, you can ask them it drop the subject. You can even ask to drop a topic you yourself accidentally raised.

What you can not do, is intentionally raise a subject then be categorically snippy to anyone else discussing the subject.

[SlyReaper]

He can. He just did. And this is the Fictional Science forum, not SB. Feel free to discuss Fringe and ignore ahammel's derision.

[ahammel]

I didn't mean to be snippy or suggest that we shouldn't discuss Fringe; I just meant that your example lends support to my thesis that Fringe is pretty stupid.