Five SF Novels Inspired by Disproven Scientific Theories

[james_davis_nicoll]

Plenty of exciting hypotheses eventually fall out of scientific favor — but not before they've found their way into science fiction!

Five SF Novels Inspired by Disproven Scientific Theories

Comments

[james_davis_nicoll]

Tor dot com article 479, 2024 article 24.

21 articles to go to article 500

[roseembolism]

You could probably do a "5 things Niven got wrong about science" article...

[patrick_morris_miller]

Boy would you get lots of "HOW COULD YOU FORGET XYZ FNARR FNARR..." comments.

[neowolf2]

"Superconductors of electricity are also superconductors of heat!"

Um, no.

[bunsen_h]

That one annoyed me, as I assumed that it was true when I read it in Ringworld (or whatever it was) and had it debunked a few years later. Not as badly as when I found out that leprosy is far more treatable than was stated in Donaldson's books about Thomas Covenant. I wouldn't be surprised if the described leprosy treatment had been true a few decades earlier, but I never got the impression that those books were set so early.

[bolindbergh]

Per Wikipedia, curing the leprosy infection once and for all wasn't possible before the early 1980s. The first Thomas Covenant series was written in the 1970s.

[patrick_morris_miller]

And Donaldson spent much of his childhood in India where his parents were physicians, so his leprosy probably works like it did back then.

[sturgeonslawyer]

ReacTor doesn't seem to want to let me post a comment, so I'm sticking it here...

1. Ovenden hardly originated the missing planet 5 idea; it goes back to Kepler's16th-century statement, "Between Mars and Jupiter, I put a planet," an idea which was taken up in Bode's Law nearly two centuries later.


2. Any writer who has used wormholes as a way of getting around the Universe is most likely in this club; they have repeatedly been shown to be too small and too unstable for the purpose. (I'm looking at you, Forever War.)


3. There are also writers who use theories that they know to be disproven long before they wrote. My favorite example of this is the late Howard Waldrop's lovely story "...As We Know't," in which an intrepid scientist of the 19th Century sets out to isolate phlogiston and succeeds all too well...

[davidgoldfarb]

In a sense Kepler was right: as I understand it, the so-called asteroid belt is thought to be planetesimals that were kept from coalescing into an actual planet by gravitational effects of Jupiter.

[ba_munronoe]

There probably isn't enough matter there: the total mass of the asteroid belt is only about 3-4% of the Moon, if the internet isn't lying to me.

[(Anonymous)]

From memory of a scholarly article several years ago, there was probably a lot more mass there to start with. Solar system building simulations tend to have several up to Luna size bodies form in the asteroid belt region which then either collide with each other starting the process all over again, or narrowly miss each other and get thrown into a Jupiter encounter which ejects them from the solar system entirely. I think it's 50-50 whether one of them wins out or we get the Ceres and rubble situation we see today.

[dwight_benjamin_thieme]

I'd never heard of the 'Wandering Jupiter' aka the Grand Tack hypothesis until a few months ago. If anything like it is true, there could have been planets or planetisimals of substantial mass between Mars and Jupyter. But this would been coeval or even slightly prior to the formation of Earth (turns out the inner four were formed after five and up.) Oh, the things you learn.

[ba_munronoe]

"Ovenden hardly originated the missing planet 5 idea; it goes back to Kepler's16th-century statement, "Between Mars and Jupiter, I put a planet," an idea which was taken up in Bode's Law nearly two centuries later."

It certainly shows up in SF of the pulp era: an exploded 5th planet is part of the backstory of Jack Williamson's "Seetee" stories, in which the culprit is a rogue anti-matter planet (would probably do the job - and sterilize the Earth into the bargain, to be sure).

"There are also writers who use theories that they know to be disproven long before they wrote. My favorite example of this is the late Howard Waldrop's lovely story "...As We Know't," in which an intrepid scientist of the 19th Century sets out to isolate phlogiston and succeeds all too well..."

Then there's Richard Garfinkle's "Celestial Matters", in which ancient Greek "science" is 100% correct. (Of course, so is Chinese Taoist "science"...)

[dragoness_e]

In the Dr. Who episode "Image of the Fendahl", it was revealed that the Timelords had destroyed the 5th planet of our solar system and time-locked it to keep anyone from time-traveling to the pre-destruction period because of the sheer noxiousness of the race inhabiting it. (Parasitic, predatory mind-controlling creatures that assimilated less mentally-powerful races--namely humans--into group minds controlled by the Fendahl leader, IIRC).

[philrm]

Any writer who has used wormholes as a way of getting around the Universe is most likely in this club; they have repeatedly been shown to be too small and too unstable for the purpose. (I'm looking at you, Forever War.)
While the possibility of traversable wormholes has now been excluded by physicists to a high degree of confidence, I'm not quite sure why you're singling out The Forever War, since it was written decades before that was established.

[sturgeonslawyer]

Fair enough; I'm not clear on when those calculations were made. And FW really doesn't deserve the gripe: it's much better than (say) the "Honorverse," which uses stable wormholes as a major plot device.

Steven Baxter, on the other hand, has used them extensively in the Xeelee stories, and he is someone who should know better.

[philrm]

I'm not clear on when those calculations were made. Mostly post-2000(ish). By the time Nolan was making Interstellar, pretty much everyone who actually does research in the field had come to the conclusion that there are sound physics reasons for believing that you can't have negative energy densities (the thing that is actually required for 'exotic matter' to keep the throat of a macroscopic wormhole open) on large enough spatial and temporal scales, i.e., big enough and lasting for a long enough time, to have traversable wormholes. That's why for Interstellar's wormhole Kip Thorne used the suggestion that if our four-dimensional spacetime is actually embedded in a higher-dimensional 'bulk', it might be possible to hold a wormhole open without needing exotic matter in our four-dimensional spacetime. But that suggestion reflects ignorance of the physics of such a universe as much as anything else.

And no way in hell am I getting in a discussion with the guy over at Reactor who thinks the Alcubierre drive and exotic matter-stabilized wormholes are still a thing.

[patrick_morris_miller]

Yah, FTL Reply Guy really takes away my will to fight the forum software there.

[(Anonymous)]

Doesn't Elizabeth Bear use the Alcubierre drive concept in her White Space novels? And those are quite recent.

-Awesome Aud

[scott_sanford]

Any writer who has used wormholes as a way of getting around the Universe...

Honorable mention to Greg Egan's Diaspora, in which some very smart characters[1] spend a lot of time and resources constructing some traversable wormholes only to discover they're not worth the effort.

[1] Greg Egan doesn't write any non-smart characters, only smart or mathematically brilliant characters.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think Greg Egan has ever used FTL in any story. He even has a story where explorers on an alien planet have to make up a fake method of interstellar travel, and even that is slower than light.

[patrick_morris_miller]

He did write a story involving sending signals backwards in time, which is kissin' cousins to FTL.

[(Anonymous)]

Technically the ship in the Orthogonal series travels faster than light, but since the whole story is set in a universe designed entirely around having no lightspeed limit, I'm not sure it counts. There's not even a single "speed of light" there.

[scott_sanford]

The flight plan in Orthogonal is more like a relativistic journey, except that in that universe the "relativity" works very, very differently.

[neowolf2]

And do you remember Tom Van Flandern, who was very active on Usenet? A big proponent of "asteroids are fragments of a lost planet" idea. Never mind that meteorite oxygen isotopes rule that out.

[philrm]

That was probably the least wrong of van Flandern's...let's go with idiosyncratic astrophysical theories.

[austin_dern]

James Blish's genetically-engineered-giants novel Titan's Daughter (and its seed, the story Beanstalk) relies on the premise that humans have 48 chromosomes, a thing any biologist would have sworn was true up until like three years after the story was published. (It turns out chromosomes are hard things to count especially with the technology available before the 1950s.)

[dragoness_e]

The link to Project Rho for Bussard ramjet math doesn't say what you imply it does. If you read the article, the math does work out, but the technology required is advanced beyond anything we know. It's not a near-future thing.

An addition to "disproven scientific theories": a great many 19th and early 20th century "lost world" pulp fantasy/adventure/scifi was based on isostasis, the theory at the time of how continents rose and sank. "Sunken continents" due to tectonic activity (as opposed to glacier melt) were up-to-date science back then. "Continental drift" was a laughable fringe theory at the time.