On the one hand, Science is the observation and study of everything down to it's most accurate facts and details. On the other fiction is all about what isn't real, no matter what inspirations you take. It depends on what you want. For example: If I want my character to have a robotic suit powered by the electricity generated in his brain, I will. But is it possible? Maybe, but probably not. But I'll have it anyway. If I want my character to have a plasma gun that teleports the plasma a set distance ahead to combust inside something, I will. But is it possible? Maybe, but probably not. But guess what? I'll have it anyway. BUT. If I am going to try to rationalize how these things work, I'd have to do a lot of observation of my own on what is theorized now. For the plasma gun? Spatial relocation similar to Event Horizon? For the suit? The suit has a metal that constantly amplifies electrical currents by stealing electrons from the air around it? If you're going to use an already established idea in science, you need to understand that idea first. Take for example Heisenberg's Uncertainty principal. I spoke with a physicist friend of mine, and he explained it as a way to mapping possibilities of things to a degree of uncertainty. He couldn't think of an example, so I offered one which he agreed with: Take that you are looking at a molecule under a powerful microscope. While you are looking at it, you can say "It's right there." but that's not entirely correct. Because light takes time to travel, the molecule could have moved a fractional distance in the time it took for the light to reach your eye and for your brain to interpret it, so it may have moved. What you can do though, is to map where the molecule could be in that time in an area around it's position so you can then say it is somewhere within those boundaries.
I like how John Scalzi got around this particular stumbling block in Old Man's War. He had a guy with 'good math skills' explain it to someone who was shit at math. Every time a really technical thing came up, the math guy would say, "You don't have the math to understand this, so I won't go into detail." Priceless.
I haven't read the thread so I'm probably interrupted a conversation. I'M NOT SORRY. As a sci-fi fan... this can ruin a novel for me or it can be of no consequence whatsoever. There's no rhyme or reason to it. For example, The Martian: the moment he started talking about potatoes I was thinking, "But you're a botanist. You must know raw potato is toxic?" However... I didn't care that he went on to eat raw potato daily for months without consequence. But when I read a novel where a type 1 diabetic injected insulin into her veins as a matter of course, not a suicide attempt, it annoyed me so much I still remember the book and author (negatively) 15 years later. That's not the best example because it wasn't even a sci-fi novel, but I can't think of a sci-fi one off the top of my head. I guess it might be to do with my level of interest in the science? I tend to get really annoyed by errors in areas of science I'm particularly fascinated by (evolution comes to mind--I hate when aliens or monsters clearly could not have evolved to be the way they are) but not so much by physics errors, which I only have a passing interest in.
They aren't. Their toxicity only appears when they are mishandled, and in that case cooking them doesn't actually help anything. Eating raw starches like that isn't good for your digestive system, and will make you pretty uncomfortable, but it absolutely won't kill you. http://nutritionmyths.com/can-raw-potatoes-make-me-sick/
I didn't think he was eating them raw, I thought the Hab had a working microwave or something, it was just that he was eating them without any sort of condiments or toppings after he ran out. But it does all come down to a couple things for me. First is the story, which The Martian had plenty of, even if it was a story that's been recycled by dozens of writers. The Martian was also tech-heavy. but in a way that someone (Neil Tyson maybe?) described science as another character in the story. But whether or not you use lots of scientifically accurate tech, internal consistency is extremely important. Look at the late Iain M. Banks' "Culture" series. We've got spaceships that are hundreds of kilometers long, with populations ranging in the billions of humanoid/roughly human sized sapients. Some ships are capable of traveling multiples of thousands of the speed of light, AI is everywhere, force fields are unremarkably common, they've got working antigravity, and the "hows" are almost never mentioned but. . . everything follows an internal logic that is immutable. The speed of a ship depends on the physical size of its engines, so to be very fast, a ship has to be very big, and mostly engine. Force fields are everywhere, but they have defined capabilities. Antigravity is true anti gravity, there's a scene where a character tries to use it on a Ringworld type thing and falls to his death. All of these things are basically magic, but Banks kept track of their capabilities and never handed out "special" versions. He also avoided the Utility Belt / James Bond Gadget trap of having incredibly useful weapons or tools appear once, and only once. Most importantly, the tech was just background to some (IMHO) incredible storytelling about some deeply screwed-up characters.
I'm not sure where you learned that raw potatoes are toxic, but I assure you it isn't true. I'd never heard of this until you brought it up in your notes on the garden scene in ADBATK. I've eaten raw potatoes myself. Not a lot; it's not exactly pleasant. And just out of curiousity I went a-Googling just now and found out raw potatoes contain antinutrients... whatever they are. So, maybe that's what you heard or maybe you heard that green potatoes, even the green parts of mostly-ripe potatoes, are poisonous and the poison can't even be cooked away (which is probably why potato sprout soup isn't a thing). Anyway, bottom line: raw potatoes aren't poisonous, but green ones are.
I don't remember if he was eating them raw or not, but I was just Googling this whole thing and found that raw potatoes contain something called antinutrients. I'm not sure, but that sounds like eating scads of raw potatoes would have the opposite effect to what he was trying to achieve. So, let's hope he did have a microwave.
If beating up on "The Martian" is still active then I feel the scene where he punctures a pin hole into his glove to use to move him around in space was a huge stretch. The pressurized air in a spacesuit is most likely at least somewhat less than standard air pressure on Earth so the force of the air molecules streaming out of a pin hole, not even a formed nozzle, would be miniscule compared to the mass of the Martian with spacesuit, etc. He might start drifting and if he got lucky it would be towards his target but it certainly would not bounce him around in the cabin. I honestly don't remember how that scene was written in the book, you just wanted him to succeed so it didn't matter if it was scientifically accurate or not. I am thinking when the science is bent in a way that seems logical to our way of seeing things, such as a balloon released and flying around the room, things like a space suit leak causing transport seems acceptable for sci-fi. We think a giant flea would jump over buildings since a tiny one can jump so many times higher than itself but in reality the energy needed for a flea to jump say a foot high is directly proportional to our jumping a foot high based on mass, it is not the size of the object jumping it is the distance we cover times the mass that is the controlling factor. (and remember the mass is constant for an object despite the distance) The feather and the cannon ball dropped off the tower defies what we generally see but I think we accept the concept of gravitational acceleration without fully understanding the physics involved because we are taught that. But the ant's ability to lift things, the flea's tremendous jumping ability, are taught to impress us without the rest of the science being told, so we end up with scientific misconceptions in our heads that are hard to overcome.
He did. Watney cooked every potato and then stored them for his trip to Schiaperelli. If you mean the part near the end where Watney (in the MAV) is leaving Mars to link up with Hermes, then no, actually. In the book he doesn't even move out of the MAV until Beck climbs in, retrieves him, and then uses his jetpack (or whatever it was) to match Hermes speed. Then Vogel reeled them both in with the tether that was attached to Beck. Hollywood never gets anything right.
That's one reason why my son and I find reading Isaac Asimov a bit tedious. He tends to stop the action to wax melodic about the intricacies involved in the technology being represented. Then there is the other extreme where fantasy is mixed in with sci fi to the degree that sci fi is almost a misnomer.
There's many a great story where I can see that one or another thing isn't actually plausible when you stop to think about it – but I also realize that if the author had made it scientifically flawless, it would have required a great amount of text and added very little in entertainment value. So it's quite all right that he left this little inconsistency unperfected. When you have become a famous writer and have fans all over the world, you might find yourself a little embarassed that they are dissecting your early works in the forums and showing how this or that wasn't actually physically possible. But, IMHO, it is too early to worry about that now.
This is probably been said before, but if you change the laws of physics, I think this is classed as future fantasy rather than Sci-Fi. Science fiction although is fiction needs to have some sort of thought behind the actually possibilities in Science. That being said, nothing to stop you from creating new laws of physics that haven't been discovered yet. Who knows you may inspire a scientist to explore that possibility. For example aliens have neither been proven to exist or not exist so is scientifically possible, however aliens who can create something from nothing breaks the laws of thermodynamics. Energy can not be created nor destroyed but converted from one form or another. Before anyone says that laws of physics are broken in Sci-Fi such as star trek when considering faster than light travel. Warp speed/hyperspeed isn't necessarily velocity based movement but rather the assumption that you distort space around you such that the distance between a and b is smaller.
I'm one of the people who tries to be scientifically accurate in my science fiction stories, and this is the reason. I don't plot out every little technical detail and bit of minutia, what I aim for is something that sounds like it's plausible. Why, the reader's suspension of disbelief. That is the reader's willingness to go along with scientific hocus pocus in a story because it at least sounds possible. If the hero of the story is in a fight with someone and they're both firing plasma pistols at each other, and the hero survives a direct hit to the chest, there'd better be a good reason. If the writer explains his survival as 'because science fiction and he's the hero' most people will stop reading at that point. A great example of good science fiction in my opinion of the basis of the TV series Stargate SG1. The reason being they use real scientific theory, wormholes, as a means to travel other planets. The series explains the Stargate establishes a stable wormhole between two points allowing people to travel. Admittedly some episodes do have Carter getting rather technical about stuff, but then she's the group nerd, and a hot one at that, so it's her job. The series never explained every last detail of how the gate worked, but there was enough there to make for a good setting and subsequent series. I also believe this is in part due to the internet believe it or not. As information, including science, becomes more readily available and people begin to absorb it, especially sci-fi fans who do tend to be more technology and science savvy than your typical genre fan, writers have to be more technical. Otherwise fans will call bullsh*t rather quickly and lose interest.
I always think that the accuracy of science depends on what kind of sci-fi your doing. If it's in deep space and/or deep future (star trek/star wars), do whatever you want and make up your own science system. If its the less distant future, or still entirely on earth, maybe make it a little more accurate. The important thing though is what your trying to say. Sci-fi isn't about trying to predict the future, its about either exploring "what ifs" or warning your audience about something in an entertaining way. Since the science part of the story is almost never actually the point, the accuracy to real science is just a thing for fans/critics to nitpick on.
Maybe it depends on how close the science is to the central drama. If the story is about a guy being disappointed meeting his shitty dad for the first time, we don’t care how light sabers work. However, if the problem is caused by a pharmaceutical product and the fix is a race to find a cure, the science being off would really rob the story of power.
Also, even the earliest science fiction wasn't accurate to real science. Frankenstein, which is often considered the first sci-fi novel, is about a person made of other people. The point of science fiction was never to predict the future, it was to raise questions about society, or explore a different version of ours.
This topic amuses me. My WIP is a reboot, of sorts, of the Solar Guard from Tom Corbett, Space Cadet tv show and books from the very early fifties. As in 1950. It was technically “hard science fiction” with Willy Ley as the tech advisor. But now, it is so outdated...
Kind of like 'Doc' Smith's Lensman books. Probably in the 'hard' SF category when written. Some of it holds up and a lot doesn't.
