I never read the book. My comments are only about the movie. Life is too short to read Michael Crichton.
Fair enough. He may do it too much in his fiction, but in Jurassic Park specifically (and I admit, I've only seen the movie also) it is a good allegory for humanity's reliance on technology versus the pure animal aggression of the dinosaurs. Advanced vs primitive. Without our techno toys we're weak animals.... But yeah, it is a bit much to swallow from the plausibility standpoint, apart from the 'bad guy' factor mentioned earlier.
Using the excuse of advanced technology to break physics. "Ooh, I got this science doohickey that turns off gravity!" WE DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT CAUSES GRAVITY, DR. DING DONG!
I don’t think you have to understand it to have an antigravity device in SF, providing it is handled well. People had treatments for infection long before there was an understanding of what actually caused them. Some of them even worked
But that fun shit is part of the point of sci-fi. To experience cool and wondrous technology that is beyond our grasp. The point of sci-fi is for technology that we don't have yet, or may never be possible at this moment in time. It's not science fact, it's science fiction. I mean we don't have spaceships nor can we travel in the deep space, nor travel through wormholes.
Yeah we do, it is the rotation of the Earth. There's also gravity in space, as planets rotate around the sun and the moon satellites around their host planet. Also the whole galaxy is spinning as well, and at some point the Milky Way will collide with Andromeda. that's a hell of a sight l.
People who believe the Earth to be flat, also don't believe in gravity. So the notion of something anti-gravity might be difficult for them to even try and understand that gravity can be repelled.
Uh, actually anything with mass has gravity, the force of rotation only adds to the effect of the force that is gravity. So, if the earth stopped spinning, we would notice the decrease on our bodies due to the lack of extra inertial force. Though we won't float away, because the mass will keep us still held down to the planet, only to a lesser degree.
Erh.. forgot about the Mass part. I thought the spinning was more important then I guess it is in regards to gravity though. I did know Mass was important though
The Rotation of the Earth gives us centrifugal force, which helps provide the outward force keeping us from sinking to our nips into the earth. Scientists haven't figured out what causes gravity. Scientists haven't figured out what actually causes it.
*facepalm* Gravity is defined as the force of attraction between two objects with mass. There are a hundred theories as to what causes it, but none that have been conclusively proven. I would usually suggest the graviton theory for this scenario of the doohickey that turns off gravity, but at the same time, that has a hole in the theory since in these scenarios, the doohickey is often tiny, and I seriously doubt that something the size of a cell phone can release the oppositely charged ion to gravitons in enough of a quantity that it completely or even partially counters the gravity of an area for any length of time.
Remind me not to go to Sci-fi movies with you. You're critiquing a genre that's about future Tech, regardless of how realistic or fantical it is. We don't read sci-fi for science we already know or can have some grasp on. The fact that we cannot comprehend nor reproduce this Tech is irrelevant to the genre. I mean, we can't go into deep space nor warp jump. How about the Klingons cloaking device. And don't forget about the flip tricorder from the original Star Trek. Now we had at one time flip phones. Hell, centuries ago they said man couldn't fly. We seem to be flying now. And have a lot of Wonders that our ancestors couldn't even comprehend.
it does depend which theory you are looking at - relativity says its not so much a force as a result of space time curvature newtonian physics says its to do with mass However a break through in the early 21st century called the moose aschendale theory of specific gravitational latency - demonstrated conclusively that it actually results from the latent attraction of lepton like particles known as pillocks. Working from the earlier writings of Moose, Aschendale used the Lunar Hadron Collider to demonstrate that whenever a number of pillocks were gathered together that specific area of space time became both dense and heated. The addition of too many pillocks caused the gravitational coalescence of mass and time before the explosion into a fiery nebula. Sadly Aschendale only received recognition for his work post mortem after his death by vaporisiation was brought about by having to deal with one pillock too many.
Ok, hypothesis? Also what the hell is 'Synergy"? Never really got that one, but businesses think it is something fancy sounding, yet don't know what it is or means.
Was debating whether or not to respond to some of this. Gravity is a dragon, it’s by a very wide margins the most complicated of the forces. I’m going to explain gravity the best I can while being as simple as I can. First and foremost, unless you’ve taken advanced physics, everything you think you know about gravity is heuristic. You have to have be able to do things like visualize integrals in 4 dimension. That’s beyond most peoples abilities, even if you conceptually understand it. And if you want to do field equations, you not only have to know how to do that, but also do it with complex numbers (n + m(sqrt(-1))) Neither mass nor motion have anything to do with gravity. Energy density in spacetime is the only thing that matters. Mass is energy, and matter is sort of like congealed energy. In fact, you may know that protons are made of three quarks. Protons have a mass and quarks have a mass. Both are well known to a high degree of accuracy. So you’d expect a proton to be about three times the mass of a quark right? Well it’s actually more than a hundred times as massive. The rest of the weight comes from the energy of the strong force that’s keeping the quarks together. Gravity is also not a force in the same sense that the others are. There is no pushing or pulling going on at all. Two massive objects APPEAR to attract each other, but this is an emergent behavior. Someone said we don’t know what makes gravity and there are multiple theories for it. That is bullshit, there is one theory for gravity that works in every situation we can test or observe. Unlike QM, there are zero experiments that violate the predictions. It works at the extremes: the radius of the event horizon we recently took a picture of is exactly where it was expected to be. It works at the size of galaxies: in the few galaxies we’ve discovered with no dark matter, orbits are exactly what we predict. It works close to big objects: Mercury does not follow the orbits predicted by Newton but perfectly follow Einstein’s. The only hint that it’s wrong is that it can’t be quantized and it should be. Someone said there is no mechanic for gravity, and there is, I’ll get to it in a minute. I feel like people expect forces to have some magic mechanics, but it doesn’t, it’s just math. Same thing with electricity. What causes electricity? Well virtual photons. Okay, what makes them? Why do they interact the way they do? Not knowing the underlying axiom doesn’t not negate the theory. Why would it? As for what gravity is: take a cubic meter of space and remove everything from it. What’s left? It’s got an energy density (for this example, it’s 0, but it still has that property.). It has geometry: height, width, depth. It also exists in time, so it has a clock. It has more properties but these are the most important ones. Gravity is an emergent behavior of the simpler behavior that increasing the energy density affects the geometry. It stretches it slightly as well as changes how fast time passes. The ratio at which this happens is related to c, the speed of causality. Now something moving through spacetime will always take the path of least resistance. In order to move from tightly curved space to flatter space, you have to get some energy. Likewise if you go from flat to strongly curved space you have to get rid of energy. If there nothing pushing it, it will stay at whatever energy level it’s at, so it wants to stay in the same curvature. It’s gonna move in a straight line through 4space. For us living in 3D where visualizing time as a dimension is hard, it appears to us that things bend around big objects. For further reading, the term is “geodesic” and the theory is “general relativity.” I gotta make dinner, I’ll come back and source this later.
I like the explanation, though it’s a bit contradictory to say mass has nothing to do with it, it’s all energy density, and then to say mass is energy.
@newjerseyrunner I respectfully disagree on a couple of points, but I think they can all be summed up in your implication that general relativity is the "correct" interpretation of gravity. It is not. It is the theory that most accurately models the behavior of gravity on all but quantum scales. The emphasis here is on "models". You actually touch on this yourself when you say "Not knowing the underlying axiom doesn’t not negate the theory." The point is we don't know for sure that energy density actually bends spacetime, we just know that the math that describes this behavior maps directly to such an interpretation. That said, you give a good explanation of the theory and why it works, and I'm well aware I'm more or less arguing philosophy rather than theory.
I fear imaginary numbers.... Poor Billy of Ockham has gone down the drain. Tis sadness tis sorrow tis pity tis true.
This is incorrect. Billy of Ockham would have loved imaginary numbers. They make equations that would otherwise be ridiculous solvable. They even make sense. Guys like me (electrical engineers) faff around with Fourier transforms and other stuff that simply can't be done without imaginary numbers. A universe with imaginary numbers in it is so much simpler than a universe that only has real numbers.
I am disappointed whenever audience ignorance of basic science or just plain common sense is assumed. Scientists jumping into alien environments without taking any precautions about possible contamination. Then they are shown as totally baffled by the results. As if it never occurred to them that contamination was possible. Even non-scientists know that microorganisms can be harmful. So how is it that these scientists don't know? In Prometheus, we have one scientist picking up what resembles an alien cobra about to strike and treating its gestures as friendly. Another scientist looks in the mirror, sees things swimming around in his eyeball, ignores it and goes out on a mission. In the film Alien, Ripley takes time out to calmly fix her hair up in a bun while being in danger of getting savaged. In the same film, crewmembers don't ask the ship physician, who turns out to be an android, why he didn't detect that alien growing inside his patient and why he told them not to harm it when it emerged. Both question would be immediately asked by normal people.
