From: heintzelman-george@CS.YALE.EDU (George Heintzelman)
Subject: Re: SF or FF (Future Fantasy)?
Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.misc
Organization: Yale University Computer Science Dept., New Haven, CT 06520-2158
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 1992 16:25:54 GMT

In article <1992Jul29.152035.8662@cs.umn.edu> thornley@cs.umn.edu (David H. Thornley) writes:
>In article <13839@mindlink.bc.ca> Nick_Janow@mindlink.bc.ca (Nick Janow) writes:
>>> thornley@cs.umn.edu (David H. Thornley) writes:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Failing one test, or having one element that does not fit the "hard SF"
>>> definition does not necessarily remove a book from that category.  The story
>>> can have strong "extrapolation from basic laws" elements elsewhere in it.
>>> 
>Again, what would you say of a story that presented a FTL system with its
>own laws, implicitly or explicitly, and extrapolated from that?
>
>Some time ago, I wrote a(n unpublished) story in which a careless FTL
>navigator arrives back on a planet before he left, and causes havoc.
>Since this is an extrapolation of FTL and general relativity, would it
>feel SF to you?
>
>>>+ In any case, telepathy does not invalidate anything we know about physics
>>>+ like most defensive force fields do;
>>> 
>>> Actually, I think it does invalidate (or rather: violate) what we know of the
>>> laws of our universe.  It doesn't seem to use any known force or particle.
>>> Hey!  That's it!  The missing "dark matter" is psionic particles!  :)
>>> 
>Your first two sentences seem slightly inconsistent.  Does anything that
>doesn't "seem" to work by "known" means violate what we know of physical
 >laws?
>
>To put it differently, consider three basement inventors.  One devises an
>anti-gravity machine.  One devises an FTL drive.  One devises a training
>method that allows people to be reliably telepathic.  All are SF staples.
>The first two immediately screw up general relativity, which must be
>drastically modified to accomodate the new inventions.  The third doesn't
>screw up anything known to be true or any fundamental theories I know of
>(there is no Grand Unified Theory, and I know of no fundamental theory that
>says there are no forces we don't know about).  Therefore, on a strictly
>scientific basis, I claim that psionics is less offensive than FTL travel
>or artificial gravity.
	On the other hand, there is nothing definitively saying that
what we think we know about causality is right, either. If you
postulate an FTL drive working via some extradimensional means (again,
not forbidden by current physics), then you don't screw up general
relativity, per se...you screw up some of the assumptions that caused
Einstein to come up with his theory in the first place.  Relativity
theory could still hold, as long as you were restricted to three
dimensional space, and so on.
	It should be pointed out that, although the theory of General
Relativity is quite well-supported, it still depends on a number of
assumptions, not all of which can be conclusively shown. It is not
inconcievable that there is another explanation, just highly unlikely.
>
>The problem with psionics, as I see it, is that the whole issue is rather
>emotional.  I can find you people who believe such things happen, and they
>will run the range from obviously deranged to apparently rational scientists.
>(Whether I can get the apparently rational scientists, or any other
>successful people, to admit this in public is another matter.  Everyone
>I have known who has, as an adult, publicly claimed psychic powers, struck
>me as a loser.)  Equally, I can find you people of any degree of rationality
>who think either that psionics doesn't exist or that it's the work of the
>devil.  (Yes, I have hung around with strange people during a partially
>misspent life.)
	Quite true. Very emotional topic. I'm not going to say that
its impossible for psionics to happen, but then again, I don't think
FTL travel is impossible either. I haven't found any really
satisfactory explanations of them to date, in any SF, however.

>However, the rap against psionics is we haven't reliably observed it and we
>don't know how it could work, and the rap against FTL is that it violates
>fundamental laws of physics, so IMHO psionics is at least as valid a SF
>topic as FTL.
>
	I think any speculative fiction except the hardest is going to
run into trouble here. There are VERY few SF novels that manage to use
absolutely nothing that one can object to scientifically (Lucifer's
Hammer comes to mind. Maybe not terribly likely, but possible, and
though I'm not a geophysicist or meteorologist, those effects seemed
reasonably well thought-out at the time.) ... My opinion being that
both psi and FTL violate accepted principles of physics, just in
different ways, and with a large dependance on how the author chooses
to 'explain' his effects. However, such violation does not make it an
invalid topic in any way, unless the author is hell-bent on making the
work scientifically plausible, which is the case for only a miniscule
fraction of SF published today.

Followups directed to rec.arts.sf.misc.

George Heintzelman

heintzel@cernapo.cern.ch -- ignore the above address, its just where I
read news.