Popular Beliefs

Rating: Null/10 (7 February 2007)

Plot summary follows popular belief
I believe I can prove that the popular beliefs about the technology in this movie are wrong. Some of the evidence comes from Clarke's early work in space radar and radio, and in his article about meteorites. Copies of two of his articles can be found on my web site at www.geocities.com/gregu10/geek/geek.htm Later in life Clarke became an expert in two other areas of space exploration, predicting how the astronaut will behave, and predicting when radio signals can be corrected for errors. All of these obscure technologies add up to a better explanation for the pods behavior, for the AE-35, and for HAL not letting Dave back in the ship.
The first issue I have is the pod. Clarke's 1940s paper on meteorites concluded that a large space ship in the asteroid belt would not be nimble enough to dodge meteorites, nor powerful enough to destroy them. In the movie we see meteorites just before the fatal scene. Then the pod warning light turn on, then we see the severed air hose and the dead astronaut cross in front of us followed by the pod. The pod crossed the astronauts path after his death. The pod was trying to save the astronaut from a meteorite. This scene might be a pre-view of what happened to Apollo 13. That would be true if we could prove that Apollo 13 was hit by a meteorite and then the oxygen bottle failed. Similarly the accident on Challenger happened not because the wing failed, but because the wing had been hit by ice, and was the part of the wing most likely to fail if it got too much ionization.
The second issue is the AE-35. Using filtering techniques such as the Viterbi algorithm for radio communications was well known in 1968. Viterbi developed his algorithm for the Venus spacecraft, and prior to that Wiener and Kalman had developed filtering algorithms used in television screens for radar applications. Hal never says the AE-35 failed. He predicted when it was going to fail, in the future. This is possible when using error correcting algorithms. Hal does not understand why the astronauts are so upset about his prediction. Despite something like 76,000 systems on board, Hal expects the astronauts to know all about the AE-35 unit at the base of the microwave. Hal has never seen anything quite like it. Hal suggests putting it back, and waiting for it to fail!
The question is why does Clarke know it will fail. His 1947 article on radio range to Jupiter shows clearly that power and range are available for communicating to earth. Furthermore, Clarke showed that none of the other radio problems such as Doppler, ranging or tracking will create any unsolvable problems. So why was Hal waiting for the AE-35 to start error correcting? Why did Hal think the astronauts would want to know as soon as Hal knew? Was there some fact of radio that Clarke missed back in 1947? The answer is yes - Clarke failed to consider that a spaceship near Jupiter would accelerate to 35,000 mph or more, causing relativistic changes in wavelengths of the radio nearly one part in a million. This relativistic change is the reason the AE-35 unit started doing error correction, and led to the prediction of the failure of all microwave communications in a few days. But the AE-35 never did fail. They turned it off. In the 1960s book Making of 2001 Clarke is quoted saying the computer was perfectly correct, it was ground control who messed up. Ground control was not traveling 35,000MPH!!!
At this point Hal knows that Dave is a threat to the ship. If you read the 1962 US Navy study about conflict resolution on my website by Mesarovic you will see the prediction that crew performance will decline rapidly if the two crewman talk to each other. This is what happened, and Hal was well aware of the fact - he observed their lips moving while they were together in the pod - talking paranoia about Hal. Early NASA studies such as the NASA 1962 University Symposium have simpler mathematical models for astronauts and test pilots. It was Mesarovic who worked out the case of two astronauts on a ship being controlled by the ground with a seven hour communication delay.
If you think critically during the time that Hal is doing the psychological workup - you can tell that Hal doesn't know what they are talking about. Hal is just filling in the blanks for the psychologists at NASA. He is a boring chess partner too, not intelligent at all.