Can science fiction ever get the science right?

  • 14 October 2013
  • From the section Magazine
Movie still from Gravity showing George Clooney and Sandra Bullock floating in space

New film Gravity promises to rekindle the debate over how "hard" - or accurate - science fiction should be. Should film-makers adhere to basic scientific principles, or should audiences just feel the magic instead, asks Peter Ray Allison.

The relationship between science and science fiction has always been tempestuous.



Through a series of posts on Twitter, Tyson - who later emphasised that he "enjoyed the film very much" - highlighted various errors.



Sandra Bullock's hair: the subject of scientific debate

There has always been a drive for scientific accuracy within science fiction, especially within the "hard science fiction" literary sub-genre. But sci-fi, especially in film, tends to have a more flamboyant approach, where realism is often dispensed with in favour of visual flair.



A scene from Armageddon shows earth-level gravity on an asteroid's surface

Despite the presence of physicist Prof Brian Cox as a scientific adviser on Danny Boyle's Sunshine, artistic licence seeped in. There's a communications "dead-zone" around the Sun - not something easily explicable using real world rules.

Despite claims to the contrary, Red Planet was riddled with scientific implausibilities, from the compatibility between modern equipment and 30-year old Russian technology (imagine attempting to connect a modern PC with a Sinclair Spectrum), to the Martian "nematodes" which had been eating algae that had been sent from earth for the past 30 years. The nematodes should have been worms but looked closer to beetles. And there was no explanation as to how they had evolved to eat non-Martian algae nor what they had eaten before.

The science across the film was so "creative" that Nasa refused to act as scientific adviser on the film.

But perhaps the biggest example of scientific licence occurs in a plethora of space-based dramas.

"The most commonly lauded example of 'bad science', intentionally placed into science fiction, is that of sound," says Ed Trollope, spacecraft operations engineer at technology firm Telespazio VEGA Deutschland. "Because space is a vacuum, there is no sound, which means all those explosions and engine noises shouldn't be there."

There's a simple cinematic reason for having the sound of an explosion when a spacecraft blows up - it feels right to the viewer. But other conventions are more difficult for scientists to accept.

"My pet peeve is inertia," says Trollope. "There are many good reasons for keeping your engines on in space, but 'maintaining speed' is not one of them. If you turn your engines off, you don't stop."

Some do it slightly better than others. "I'd prefer not to single out a single film/book/series for this particular error, because it's so common - but I will laud the old television show Babylon 5, for doing a wonderful job of representing the mechanics of spaceflight inertia so nicely," explains Trollope.

2001: A Space Odyssey's silent scenes of space craft, with their rotating Stanford torus design, were closer than many later examples to the reality of travelling in space.

"A classic case of scientific inaccuracy was the first edition of Ringworld by Larry Niven, a novel which won both the Hugo and Nebula awards in 1971," suggests science fiction author Charles Stross. "The author inadvertently set up a series of scenes which implied that the Earth spun on its axis in the wrong direction." Niven fixed it in the second printing.


Jodie Foster in Contact (1997)


Science fiction is not just expected to accurately portray science but also to anticipate future developments.

"Science fiction hits some predictive targets," says science fiction author Neal Asher, "but rather in the way that a clip fired from an assault rifle will hit some of the enemy hidden in the jungle, but mostly hits trees and leaves."

"One of the past criticisms of science fiction has been that it's all 'zap-guns and rocket ships'," suggests Asher. "Now the science fiction writer can smugly point out the LaWs - the US navy laser system - knocking down drones, and then wax lyrical about the X Prize, Virgin Galactic and Elon Musk's SpaceX."

Leonard Nimoy as Spock (right) in Star Trek

Richard Blott, principal consultant at Space Enterprise Partnerships, recalls an early episode of Star Trek ("Spock's Brain", 1968) where the latest space ship is described as having an "ion drive".

"Nowadays most new communications satellites have ion engines and they have powered missions to Vesta and Ceres," says Blott.


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