What's some dumb science you've seen in fiction?

[Keith&Co.]

There's some good science in scifi.
Sometimes there's good science in bad scifi. Some people are better at the science than at dialogue, plot, pacing...adjectives.

And of course, there's old science. Computers in the 50's or 60's were big and slow, a lot of scifi only imagined much bigger and slightly faster. Or they went with such fast and tiny computers they're more fantasy than scifi.

But what are some really egregious examples of poorly used, poorly thought out, poorly engineered science you've come across? Stuff so shockingly bad it brought you completely out of the story.


I read a scifi story in the 70's where the computers were huge, but slow. But the author had stipulated a form of time travel. If you entered a problem into a computer, it transmitted the data to the time of the computer's assembly and started working on it. So when you at some future date hit 'enter' the answer would be available immediately.
Or not. Sometimes the problem was too big for the amount of time available and the computer was still working on it. So you'd hit enter and receive "We're sorry, but this computer has not existed for long enough to compute the solution."

Wow, i thought, that's stupid. If i can send the question back to the beginning of (the computer's) time, why can't i send the answer back to whenever the question was entered?

 

[Sarpedon]

I read one (unpublished) that suggested that an underground base on Venus would be cooler than on the surface.

 

[BH]

I didn't care for The Martian Chronicles that much because when Bradbury wrote it scientists knew Mars had little to no atmosphere, with hardly any oxygen at all. I can still reread War of the Worlds and enjoy it because at the time people didn't know as much about Mars as they did 20 or 30 years later.

 

[repoman]

The Core

 

[ronburgundy]

Virtually everything in TV or film attempting to portray anything about clinical practice or accepted theories in psychology gets the science wrong.
Then again, most clinical therapists get the science wrong too.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

I once saw a Denzel Washington movie where some incriminating evidence was on a desktop computer. The bad guy then shot the monitor and that got rid of this evidence and they had to come up with some other way to convict him.



Then there was this other show I saw where the CIA wanted to start a program where they tortured suspected terrorists for information. They didn't have any professional torturers on staff, so they hired a couple of psychologists who helped special forces guys resist torture and put them in charge of doing things the other way and then had low ranked, untrained idiots implement this program without any oversight or standards. Who the hell writes these scripts and why would they think that's a believable plot?

 

[fromderinside]

Then there was this other show I saw where the CIA wanted to start a program where they tortured suspected terrorists for information. They didn't have any professional torturers on staff, so they hired a couple of psychologists who helped special forces guys resist torture and put them in charge of doing things the other way and then had low ranked, untrained idiots implement this program without any oversight or standards. Who the hell writes these scripts and why would they think that's a believable plot?

Foul. Those are findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee's torture report. Not a movie. Not dumb science. Dumb intelligence.

Jon Stewart interviewed the director of 0 dark thirty about the findings of the report and she shrugged. The movie made good theater, not truthful, but one that sold tickets and stoked preconceived notions.

My favorite dumb science movie is Interstellar. Just not going to get from here to disentangled time and space by shredding people in a black hole aurora and sending the complete solution via tapping in code with a spoon.

 

[Keith&Co.]

and why would they think that's a believable plot?

Science, not plots. Computer monitors being integral to memory storage, exqctly what was was looking for.

I was thinking there aren't enough people on the board claiming the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics prevents evolution, or such, so figured we could pick on someone slightly more knowledgeable about science: Hollywood writers. Hollywood directors. Hollywood prop masters.


And whatever James Cameron is...

Picking on the dumb choices the US government makes would be a step down from creationists. Beating up kittens because there aren't any declawed show cats handy....

 

[thebeave]

A few years ago I began dating a woman who had just read the best seller The Time Traveler's Wife, about some guy who travels back and forth through time to meet up with his wife, have sex, argue and go back in time to meet again later. Sumthin' like that. It was classic "chick lit", full of romance. She was trying to get me into it, but I kept focusing on the bogusness of the physics behind the time travel (apparently the dude had some sort of DNA mutation which enabled him to time travel ), and she wanted to talk about the romance, etc. She got pretty annoyed with me and called me a nerd and said I wasn't really her type. We broke up not too long after that. Anyway, I digress. So, yeah, time traveling because you have DNA mutations is dumb science!!

 

[Keith&Co.]

Which reminds me of a story i read in an Alfred Hitchcock collection.
Someone decided that alligators would benefit from having four-chambered hearts. Apparently they only have 3 chambers, so not all of their blood gets oxygenated when it cycles through.

He performed surgery on two gators who started swimming around their tank, 'sporting like dolphins.' They got really active and started to change. Turns out that alligators are really dragons who suffered a mutation. The mating pair of now-dragons-again gators flew off into the wilderness. When they came back with all their little dragon-offspring, they destroyed human civilization except for tiny pockets here and there, as reported by the narrator who lived in a subway.

One fo my classmates thought this would be so cool, to have real dragons, that he decided he'd become a vet so he could make this happen.

I pointed out that the babies of gators with surgical enhancements are called 'alligators,' not 'dragons' because surgical sutures are not inheritable.

 

[NobleSavage]

The idea that humans were being used as a power source in the Matrix.

Any sound effects in outer space.

Any time an airlock goes SNAFU and people are hanging on for dear life trying not to get sucked into outer space.

 

[dx713]

Anytimes authors or scriptwriters cannot let go of their dualist preconceptions and have a netsurfer character stuck in the matrix when you unplug them.
Like they have an immaterial soul that has been transfered into the net and thus isn't in the body anymore and has to be retrieved, and can continue to act independantly in the net while the body/brain is NOT CONNECTED ANYMORE !!!

If you want the matrix to be dangerous, and the free get out of jail card of disconnection not to work for your plot, plenty of authors have dreamed plenty of possibilities, like "your mind makes it real" (the shock of being "killed" in the matrix will kill you for real and/or put you in a coma), and same with the shock of a sudden physical disconnect.
But NOT an immaterial soul in what is supposed to be secular science-fiction! If the brain isn't connected anymore to give orders, the avatar CANNOT ACT!

 

[bigfield]

Anytimes authors or scriptwriters cannot let go of their dualist preconceptions and have a netsurfer character stuck in the matrix when you unplug them.
Like they have an immaterial soul that has been transfered into the net and thus isn't in the body anymore and has to be retrieved, and can continue to act independantly in the net while the body/brain is NOT CONNECTED ANYMORE !!!

If you want the matrix to be dangerous, and the free get out of jail card of disconnection not to work for your plot, plenty of authors have dreamed plenty of possibilities, like "your mind makes it real" (the shock of being "killed" in the matrix will kill you for real and/or put you in a coma), and same with the shock of a sudden physical disconnect.
But NOT an immaterial soul in what is supposed to be secular science-fiction! If the brain isn't connected anymore to give orders, the avatar CANNOT ACT!

William Gibson, the creator of the original 'matrix', added tension by populating the network with security software that counter-attacked against any intruder and used the hacker's own uplink to render them brain-dead.

What is the point of setting a story in a virtuality if the author is going to make it mostly analogous to the real world? As in, the agents virtuality have to kill you as if your avatar is your real body. In most systems, you should be fucked as soon as the enemy identifies your access route.

 

[bigfield]

Nanotechnology as a piss-weak plot device.

 

[dystopian]

The new Total Recall movie had an elevator...

...then went through the Earth's core...

...which was necessary because air travel is restricted on account of the air being toxic; and as everyone knows, toxic air is much more dangerous to air travel than the danger posed to elevators by traveling through a giant ball of molten magma with a temperature of 6000 degrees celsius and a pressure of more than 3 million times that of the atmospheric pressure at sea level.

 

[Emily Lake]

There's a ton of them out there, but I can't bring them to mind at the moment. Instead, I'll take this opportunity to complain about the amazing number of glaring holes in House, which I've been watching on Netflix (which is the devil and a most masterful time-suck). The actual medical information aside, for which I have no knowledge... I've simply lost track of the number of times I've shouted "You can't do that" at the TV screen when Dr. House proceeds to experiment on his patients, or force them into a treatment they don't want, or tries something on a whim that causes more injury. Let's leave aside for the moment all the sexist and racist things he says (despite their value as humor). If any doctor actually practiced medicine the way Dr. House did, no matter that he saved lives in the end, he simply wouldn't have a license very long... and would probably be behind bars very quickly.

But Hugh Laurie is still pretty cool, so I'll keep watching anyway.

 

[lpetrich]

Then, of course, there's what people have thought of in the past. It's a good idea of what people had thought plausible.

I think that some of the oldest science fiction on record is in Greek mythology, even if it was not called anything close to that. I call it SF because it was putting technology to work. In particular, I'm thinking of the story of Daedalus and Icarus. Daedalus and his son Icarus wanted to escape from Crete. So they made wings for themselves and flew off. Daedalus warned Icarus about flying too close to the sea, because his wings would then get soaked, and also about flying too close to the Sun, because the wax he'd used as a glue would then melt. Daedalus was cautious, and he survived the trip. But Icarus decided to fly higher and higher. The Sun melted his wings' wax, making them fall apart, and Icarus then fell into the sea.

We've now learned a lot since when some storytellers invented that story and first passed it down. The giant-bird-wing approach of that story is almost hopelessly impractical. Furthermore, the Sun is very far away, so one wouldn't notice oneself getting any closer. Also, the air gets cold and thin. Putting aside the issue of flying, a more realistic version would have Icarus say "I've been flying higher and higher, but I'm not any closer to the Sun. I can barely fly up here; the air is cold and hard to breathe. Brrrrr!!!"

The planetary-science journal Icarus was named in honor of that legendary hero.

Closer to our time, we've seen some interesting stereotypes of artificially-intelligent systems. Before World War II, they were mostly roughly human-shaped robots. Nobody thought of disembodied artificial brains back then, but when real-life electronic computers started appearing after WWII, the SF writers quickly caught on.

Also interesting is how SF writers often imagined the other planets a century ago. Edgar Rice Burroughs's Mars series was the prototype -- vaguely Earthlike, with lots of adventures for wayward Earthlings to have. Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan had grown up with such stories, and CS was inspired to get into planetary science on account of them. But CS was involved with the first few decades of planetary missions, and he helped discover what the rest of the Solar System was really like. A BIG come-down compared to those old SF stories. Most of the Solar System is extremely hostile to us, and the most Earthlike place, Mars, makes Antarctica seem like Club Med. IA (Is Anyone There?, p. 320) wrote

No, no, the stars are not enough. It's the solar system we want, the solar system they took away from us thirty years ago. The solar system we can never have again.

Also, not many people imagined anything like the Internet, a generalized data network. IA in The Naked Sun imagined the people of Solaria living in estates tended by robots, with them hardly ever visiting each other in person, but preferring to "view" each other in two-way TV systems. I don't recall how close it was to a generalized data network.

Then there are IA's positronic robots. He thought of that as a future-tech detail, but it's not really relevant to how his robots work. In any case, his positronic brains could not possibly work. It takes the equivalent of a million-volt battery to make an electron-positron pair, and that's the amount of energy a positron releases when it runs into an electron. It's usually 2 or 3 gamma rays, and those can be dangerous for electronics.

 

[Jayjay]

The idea that humans were being used as a power source in the Matrix.

Any sound effects in outer space.

Agreed about the first point.

But while sound in space is common in movies, it's actually very rare for that to be a plot element. Wing Commander being the only example I can think of right now.

 

[Jayjay]

G.I. Joe: Retaliation was of course by no means even trying to be serious, and it had too many stupid plot points to count, but in terms of science blunders, there is one that stuck out...

Terrorist organization Cobra was blackmailing the planet with a fleet of satellites capable of orbital bombardment by dropping solid tungsten rods to any major city in the world. The movie made it clear that the rods were dropped, not launched. Nevermind, that the satellites could not be stationary above the cities, but the end solution to disable these satellites was to blow them up just in the nick of time.

Hello? Wouldn't the rubble from the satellites, including dozens of those tungsten rods, just drop in that case on the cities? Way to go destroying the world G.I. Joe!

 

[dystopian]

The idea that humans were being used as a power source in the Matrix.

Any sound effects in outer space.

Agreed about the first point.

But while sound in space is common in movies, it's actually very rare for that to be a plot element. Wing Commander being the only example I can think of right now.

There's some sci-fi where the sound effects in space is explained as being simulated for the purposes of positional immersion and what not.

I don't remember if that was the case in Wing Commander, either the games or the movie (which was horrible); if that's what you meant.