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

[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.