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...

[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...

[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.

[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.