General Relativity was known when Smith wrote the Lensman series. He just ignored science for the sake of telling a good story. From a story perspective his way of faster than light travel is genius, the best in any story that has FTL-travel I've come across, and he uses it in some creative ways throughout the series. That's all that matters.
Yes, GR was known, but the more relevant question is how well was it known to the general public or even to educated non-specialists. Even today, if you show a person a document with a d'Alembertian in it, they'll probably be more likely to think they're missing a font than know what mathematical operation it represents. I think it's entirely possible that Smith's understanding of GR was pretty limited, probably not anything past what he might have read in magazines like PopSci at the time. He was, after all, educated much earlier than he wrote the books. Concepts like relativistic viscosity, time dilation, c as a universal maximum speed, the existence of a limited number of fundamental forces--all of these had very little, if any, physical evidence supporting them in 1950 and were likely not well-known by anyone outside of physicists working specifically in those fields. Even what ideas got out to the public, how many of them ended up oversimplified or just plain wrong in the public eye? Look at the double-slit experiment and how some reasonably intelligent but untrained people view it today. Even in modern times, I did only one semester of GR in undergrad, and it was optional in grad school. I find the topic interesting but my Ph. D. was for studying ultracold atomic physics. What was interesting to me was how his FTL idea "works" if you ignore GR and put in some reasonable numbers. I wonder if Smith did some kind of basic calculations like that, but I suspect he probably was content with his explanation and left the rest to hand-waving and the assumption of gradual improvements in basic technology, such as rockets.
There is what is known scientific fact and then there is "how sophisticated is the audience". Nowadays the audience is familiar with more of the facts that might constrain science fiction. No more sailing to the moon on a wooden ship with no helmets. Alas.
@@wanderlking8634 I was quite aware of how Smith´s science didn't add up when I read Lensman and it didn't bother me one bit. It's fiction. You are allowed to make up rules of your own as long as you implement them coherently within the story. (I do hate it when authors get their science wrong for no reason. Like how in the Three Body Problem the author misunderstands tidal forces) Using wooden ships to the moon might be going a bit too far, turning it into fantasy, but it could still work as a story. A good author can convince you that in his world it makes sense.
@@RudolphKohn I can't speak for the Lensman series, but I know that in Smith's Skylark of Space, two scientists invent a spaceship and are surprised to find its velocity increasing to many times the speed of light. One scientist says that going faster than light is impossible according to the theory of relativity, while the other says the theory of relativity is still just a theory, while their spaceship's speed is hard fact.
I wouldn't consider Doc Smith's work to be hard SF myself, but that's not to say that he was scientifically illiterate or mathematically inept; he was a PhD chemical engineer (and one of my favorite writers when I was in high school in the 1970s) and could do the work from known science, but that doesn't mean he always stuck to it. His book series before the Lensman novels, "The Skylark of Space" and its sequels, got into superluminal velocity travel with the simple mechanism of, "Einstein's theory is still a theory, and our speed is an observed fact." But on the whole, you're correct, a writer in the first half of the twentieth century had fewer known rules to worry about when trying to create SF that held consistently with the scientific knowledge of that era, compared with one today. I recall Isaac Asimov mentioning in his autobiography, a story he wrote that was legitimate SF at the time of writing but obsolete by the time it was published!
@tometraveler I think the "hard" SF that Rudolph refers to is that it dealt with hardware ( spaceships, blasters, etc) rather than soft issues. Star Wars is "hard" (first nine) UFO is "hard" whereas Dr Who is decidedly "soft" nowadays
Oh, I agree he wasn't trying to write "hard" sci-fi. He's way too floppy and hand-waves a lot of details away. Which is fine! In my review of "Triplanetary," I joked about how the ships seem to basically just be big orbs bristling with guns and rockets, only to laugh out loud when he described the standard ship to be literally "spherical" in "First Lensman." I just thought it was interesting how his simplification (basically, ignoring GR effects and working in an entirely classical fluid dynamic regime) actually works out if you plug in reasonable numbers. I also think it's possible he was fairly ignorant of many of the more subtle effects of GR as well as the details of the Standard Model. After all, he was a specialist in a very different field, and he was educated much earlier than the 1940s. His knowledge of GR probably came mostly from magazines like Popular Science around that time. It's highly unlikely that he was up-to-date on tensor operations and GR metrics. Plus, at that time, most of the conclusions of GR and Standard Model physics had very little, if any, physical evidence behind them. Members of the public, even educated non-specialists like Smith, could have been very skeptical that all of the goofy math actually translated into reality (per your quote of "our speed is an observed fact"). At that point, there were no particle accelerator experiments (to flesh out the Standard Model and show there aren't any "unknown" forces with alternate speed limits, such as Smith uses for his Spy Rays etc.) and pretty much the only physical evidence for GR was a prediction of a star's light's deviation around the sun during an eclipse. On a related note, I just recently re-read Stephen Baxter's "Massacre of Mankind," which is an official sequel to H.G. Wells's "War of the Worlds," and there's a similar phenomenon going on there as well, only with different concepts, such as the structure of the Solar system and various biological concepts. The public-facing "scientific" literature during the early 1900s had a bunch of really bizarre conclusions about various planets, because (for instance) spectroscopic examinations of Venus were not yet possible, so we knew it was hot there, but not how hellishly hot!
I was perhaps a little too vague, but I wasn't trying to call the Lensman series "hard" sci-fi at all. I think it's likely that Smith didn't know much about General Relativity beyond the general public of the time, so I wanted to evaluate his classical fluid dynamic model as if it were a serious idea, just for the fun of it. Imagine my surprise when it kinda-sorta works! Yes, it completely ignores GR effects, but even educated non-specialists of the time probably had as many incorrect ideas about relativity as people do now about quantum mechanics! It was "easier" to write "hard" sci-fi when we knew so little!
@@RudolphKohn I read somewhere, meaning I don't remember the source, that Smith knew full well that he was writing space fantasy and not science fiction.
Old pulp SF is my joy. Librivox / Gutenberg are a great resource for the oldest out of copyright titles. Titles such as "Voyage to Arcturus" and the Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars series float my boat. I have the Lensman series on my TBR list.
As others have said, Smith definitely knew enough of relativity to know he was ignoring it, even if he wasn't so cavalier in the Lens books as in the Skylark books. He wasn't pushing for scientific accuracy so much as verisimilitude. The parts where I think he can make any claim to hardness in his science fiction is where we do see things like the drag equation as described here coming in and affecting the books. Early spaceships are spherical, but when they need increased speed, they switch to teardrops. When they're preparing for an intergalactic journey, they calculate expected travel time based on estimates of the intergalactic medium (and then discover that those estimates were way too high, allowing them to travel much faster than expected).
I think his justification for ignoring relativity is actually pretty clever. Remove "rest mass" (somehow) and things snap back to classical physics. Everyone loves a simplified problem. I don't think Smith was aiming for scientific accuracy, but part of making an immersive world is to know how and where to play with the rules to make the result serve the desired purpose and seem clever... while still maintaining some amount of self-consistency, and avoiding the potential for the reader to see Dei Ex Machinis around every corner. The thing that really got me was how "realistic" numbers in those classical drag equations actually could get you superluminal. I suspect Smith didn't bother to play around with relativistic equations, but he knew those fluid dynamic equations really well, and probably could find estimates of interstellar medium density and existing rocket thrust numbers. It worked out well enough that I wonder if he tried playing around with those numbers and came to a similar conclusion as I did. To give an example, in my recent writing, I needed a minimum allowable orbit time for a ship around a gas giant. What I did was look at known statistics of mass and radius for existing gas giants, make a scatter plot, pick a point within the "cloud" of real data for my fictional planet, and calculate orbital times for orbits marginally larger than the atmospheric radius. If I had gotten a number like... 72 hours, I might have tried something else. Instead, I got 5 hours, which worked well with the events in the story.
Lensmen series and Skylark series were and are space operas , not hard science novels. As a reader of these books in the late 60s to mid 70s, they were a fantastical and rollicking good read, but I never confused them with hard facts. Sometimes we need to chill out and just go along for the ride.
So I'm guessing you're not a fan of the Doc Savage series, huh? Because that's all the science I need. Ray gun? Daring hero? Evil villain? Check! Check! Check!!! Let the adventure begin! (just my preference, obviously)
I actually really like the one Doc Savage book I've read, the one where he took on the Shadow. There were actually some cool instrumentation details in that book that made me smile (as someone who has used a mass spectrometer before). My purpose here wasn't to say only hard sci-fi is good sci-fi, but rather that 1) having a more complete (and therefore restrictive) understanding of science can tie down writers who want to maintain some hardness in their stories, and 2) that coming up with plausible explanations for things, even when breaking the rules, is a virtue and helps make stories more believable when examined in detail.
@@RudolphKohn We like what we like, and folks should be happy just to know other folks are reading, right? I enjoyed your takes in this video, so thanks. I am aware that I have "lowbrow" tastes - Conan and Doc Savage amongst many other pulp auteurs, but Jack Vance was wildly talented, and will always be my very favorite author. Anyway, thanks, and keep those great productions coming!
I think I understand what you mean. The original 'War of the worlds had Martian canons shooting rockets, because the rocket engine wasn't invented yet . Asimov uses nuclear energy for everything in Foundation , because that was considered the solution for everything in that era. But I really doubt modern readers know about 'rest mass' . Most modern Sci-fi (or even older SF ) just skips the 'how' of physics . They just go into 'hyper space 'or something similar.
When the Lensman stories were written, it was perfectly well understood by scientists that the speed of light was a fundamental limit and that removing mass from an object would simply cause that object to move at that speed. E. E. Smith and others, however, either didn't understand that or simply chose to ignore it.
So glad to see anyone talking about the man who, in my opinion; single handedly Created Modern SF for television and cinema. (I’m looking at you, Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Babylon 5, Stargate …) Smith has all of this and more. - below are some fans & doubters. Calling Smith ignorant is to misunderstand the history of science and fiction … just because current science was successful, doesn’t mean that they are correct, even now Big G is running into brick walls of their own design. Smith’s Free-Drive is a Blister-Field system that gave rise to the bizarre functions of The Warp in Star Trek. It ‘separates’ the ship from Space, or more precisely; Moves space/time around it. Inside the ship everything is normal gravity along the axis of force. Like light through a Lens 😉 - Older SF offers the imagination to speculate into the how and why of its Sciences, like one does when reading a magic system in fantasy. - also, Smith’s lack of computers may be more historical, but actually is becoming more clear to us as AI blurs Facts and Reality. Never forget that The Lensmen series is about Truth and Justice through FACTS! So, all maps are physical, and so are their calculation devices. (My head canon includes impossible slide rules made of steal tape sliding in a separate Free-Drive Field) 🥰 Let Fiction drive Imagination.
Thanks for the comment! I totally agree that the Lensman series isn't trying to be hard sci-fi, I just thought it would be fun to look at it through that lens (no pun intended) for a bit. I wasn't trying to use "ignorant" as an insult; far from it. As a physicist, I've studied enough of the weird and counterintuitive results of modern understandings of relativity and quantum mechanics that I've learned that a certain amount of ignorance about the subtle details of these fields is normal, and probably healthy. Because the alternatives are: 1) spend a huge amount of time going through all of the derivations to convince yourself or 2) blindly believe that what the scientists say is the last word. Neither choice is great for the average person, for a variety of reasons. Plus, I firmly believe we are way too used to the rapid information flows of these times. Nowadays, there's always some person to say "Actually, relativity says..." Smith finished his degree in 1914, before any significant tests of relativity were done. It wasn't his field, either! So it's highly likely that what he knew about the mathematics and measurements around relativity were probably from magazines like Scientific American. Even if he had wanted to make hard sci-fi (which I don't believe he did), he would have had a hard time incorporating the mathematical conclusions, since many of the paradoxes were still the subjects of massive scientific debate. Even more important, there were practically no experimental tests of relativity when he was writing the Lensman series, so it's perfectly reasonable (even from a hard sci-fi perspective) to imagine possible loopholes or flaws in it.
Doc Smith did know relativity quite well. He just ignored it. Early on in the Skylark series, one of the characters mentions the speed of light limit and they just observe that their spaceship using the 4th order drive goes faster than the speed of light. Oh well I guess Einstein was wrong then :)
Being aware of a few aspects of General Relativity doesn't necessarily mean a full understanding of all the little implications. Someone else mentioned that crack at Einstein in one of the later books, but I think it's likely Smith's understanding of GR was at the level of an educated non-specialist, and not someone working specifically in that field. Basically, someone who learned about GR from publications aimed at educated laymen, and not the specialized scientific journals, and "educated layman" publications get things incomplete, or wrong, or assume too much often. For instance, the proof that gravitational waves travel at the speed of light comes from some intermediate-level mathematics looking at vacuum space-time metrics. I had to go look it up, since GR isn't my field. It's not super difficult, but I had to remember some mathematical stuff that I haven't used in years. Smith was also writing at a time when efforts to unify the different forces was much less advanced, and had practically zero experimental backing. The possibility of an unknown force that might propagate at greater speeds than light was not too far out there. Smith's notion of eliminating the rest mass of matter, ignoring GR, and simply equalizing classical drag-thrust equations was, I thought, pretty neat, especially since plugging in reasonable numbers can get you to superluminal speeds. That's why I highlighted that method here. It's got just enough plausibility to fly in a sci-fi setting. Eliminate rest mass (somehow), and classical drag equations work again! It's a cool idea! People, including intelligent people, are quite prone (for good reasons), to be skeptical of purely mathematical descriptions of how the universe works... consider the early years of LIGO, when it was still fairly common for people to express skepticism about gravitational waves. Considering how much slower information propagated in the 1940s, it's likely Smith's understanding of GR and its implications was fairly surface level, and the same goes for his understanding of the Standard Model and its four forces.
Followed your argument up until you said 'this gave them more leeway' Well not really - the 'constraints they were aware of then' and the constraints we are aware of now are different yes - but the amount of 'leeway' (from those constrains) that we allow ourselves is a choice. And that choice could be as broad or narrow then as it is now with modern day writers. But having said all that I suppose the difference then - which is when I started reading SF (I'm in my 70's now) was if the author could 'ground his novel in 'scientific' jargon - then it would past as 'hard sf' I suppose a good science based story also had the benefit of making science fiction 'legitimate fiction' - more worthy somehow. Thanks for the video!
You can just make up alternate laws of physics and follow them consistently to get hard sf that is very strange, see "Dichronauts" by Greg Egan for an example.
I read, and have read, a huge amount of Golden Age SF, and there was definitely an advantage to the writer in a more-limited understanding of the universe. Skating on the frozen canals of Mars (Red Planet, Heinlein) was a great image that has been overtaken by better knowledge. Which is to say that I agree with your basic premise. But I have some comments about the Lensman series. 8-) I was a huge fan of the Lensman series when I was young. (They're kind of unreadable for me now, but I read them at the right time.) There's a pretty good chance that it was Doc Smith and RA Heinlein that led directly to my going into Physics in college. (Not that I stayed in Physics; I'm a tech writer these many years later.) The drives in the Lensman series removed inertia, not rest mass. Postulating the result of dropping rest mass to zero isn't really on point, since the principle is a decoupling of mass and inertia. And if you don't care how much the mass changes, since that's not what you're acting on, you get to break the universal speed limit. That said, making things inertialess had way more problems: How do you get thrust when the particles in the thrust stream are inertialess? How do people breathe when the air is inertialess? For that matter, why don't all the gas particles form a thin film on the floor as soon as you get acceleration? Why don't the characters get thrust away spinning at a ridiculous speed (momentarily, anyway) every time they fire their Delameters? For the sake of the story, these were just handwaved away, of course. (Doc Smith was _not_ a physicist, FWIW.) The conceit was just a zeroth-level attempt at creating plausibility, not a serious attempt at physics. But it was absolutely brilliant for 14-year-old me.
That was my immediate thought also. No inertia (or rest mass), no thrust, thus no going anywhere. I think I read one one of the Lensman books decades ago, but was a bit turned off by the slightly wooden characters. Alastair Reynolds (astrophysicist) postulated an inertia-reduction drive in at least one of his Revelation Space books, but had the characters get sick if they got too close to one.
I still dream about the Skylark series- and just re-read all four last spring/summer. Also re-reading Farmers World of Tiers as well as brand new stuff. But still love me some Skylark, or Red Planet ( first read in ‘59: forthright grade)
I really enjoyed your video. The algorithm worked for me today. Is this your only channel? I am a concept artist and musician trying to make my first sci-fi work (quite a daring temporal theme, tough to work out in a viable way) . I hope you make lots more content. Subscribed!!
While yes the rest mass could be zero, but friction of the ship travelling through space, which is not empty. However the drive in both Seaton and Lensmen series was able to vastly exceed the speed of light. Initially Seaton was limited by the level of acceleration the crew could accommodate. It was only after he was able to secure inertia less drive from the Fenecrom and moved to a torpedo shaped ship was he able to achieve far higher speeds. EEDS knew all about the real science, but it just did not work for his stories. The material X enabled full liberation of copper and then uranium into energy that could be used for power or thrust.
Lensman stuff was fun. To me the most interesting thing about it is that as far as I know, to this day it is the only thing ever to solve the fundamental right wing political problem. The right wing is all about the idea that if superior people are in charge, they will solve everything. The problem is getting the right people. Aristocracy, people "better" by birth, didn't work. Capitalist "meritocracy" sometimes puts able people in charge, but they are generally selfish bastards who are capable mainly at stealing everyone else's stuff, so that doesn't work so good. Religious leaders claim they're the right people because God said so, but God probably did not, in fact, say so. And so on. The Lensman series grapples with this directly, and the main characters are seriously worried that there's no way to solve it. But then they get Mentor of Arisia . . . all-wise, all-benevolent, telepathic, pretty much God manifest. Mentor can evaluate people you send to him, pick only the ones who are both hypercompetent, benevolent, and incorruptible, and give them Lenses, which both directly give them power and serve as unfakeable credentials of fitness to lead. It's a foolproof method of putting the definitively right people in charge. Unfortunately for that kind of politics it sort of underlines that this is not possible in real life. (The converse problem for egalitarian leftists is getting a system with strong democracy and weak or nonexistent leaders to function without everyone having to spend 300% of their time in commitee meetings)
The "folded paper" explaination has always bothered me. "Punching a hole through" aside, this drive folds the universe in half? It would have been easier to break the speed of light
@@oldsoul3539 It is an imperfect visual aid that somehow made its way into popular culture. It would be more accurate to paint a dot on the paper and fold it, observing that the dot "ends up" where the folds touched. As for energy, my understanding is that the amount of energy needed to produce a large but finite curvature of space-time is also huge but finite, whereas (according to special relativity) the amount of energy needed to accelerate any mass to light speed is theoretically infinite. In the end, it's one of many choices an author can make, and it has a sort of surface-level plausibility in light of the public perception of the limitations imposed by relativity.
Consider, how will people 80 or a 100 years today view our modern hard sci-fi when scientific knowledge progresses further and some of the assumptions we have at the moment prove false?
This will never happen, since in all important scientific disciplines we are RIGHT NOW at the verge of 'knowing it all', and especially in Physics, the 'theory of everything' is right around the corner... Or at least most 'serious' scientists always behave like this is the case 😅 And only after something they postulated for decades with all their conviction and built their whole careers on it turns out to be wrong, they immediately pull the card of 'science being always just provisionary'. But seriously... As an older guy who has always been especially interested in the history of science I came to the conclusion a long time ago already, that the way we practice science mainly suffers from the fact, that many MANY interesting questions are not even being asked in the first place - for reasons that are mostly as un-scientific as it gets...
@joechip4822 It does feel to a certain extent like we've plateaued. Technology has certainly continued to improve at a pretty rapid rate, but the only tangible impact it seems to have is making devices smaller and more powerful. It feels like all the real modern breakthroughs in science are so abstract and beyond layman's understanding (the Higgs Boson is probably the best example of this) that the notion of the future a 100 years from now being more or less the same seems reasonable. People 100 years ago, while often hilariously inaccurate, could envision a future that actually is decently similar to our own. Meanwhile our modern sci-fi either just predicts magic with stuff like FTL or presents Distopia as we cybernetics and AI makes us less human as a whole. The only really major thing I can think of that could really be attainable within the next century that would be a game changer is viable Fusion reactors (often more a handwaved in sci-fi for where energy is obtained than a serious examination of what such energy access would mean for society), but much like your comment, fusion has been right around the corner for about seventy years now. Who knows what the future holds really, maybe we are about to figure out all science and mathematics our, or at least all of it that will tangibly impact the average human, or perhaps everything we think we know will soon be overturned. Only time will tell. Hope I'm around to see it.
@@Jotari For me, as a philosophical idealist, there is only one way I can look at any possible 'plateauing': the overdue realisation, that we threw the baby out with the bathwater when science mainly had the focus on distancing itself from everything that deemed in any way philosophical, mental, spiritual - not to speak of religious. But don't get me wrong here... I am an atheist myself - but philosophical idealism and deeper insights into eastern philosophical thinking has told me, or at least opened me to the idea, that the next step in scientific evolution could be, or even needs to be accepting the mental being the basic and only fabric of reality. At least the 'reality' as we are at max able to comprehend it.
You're using binder paper. It already has holes in it. You didn't need to poke through it with a pen!😉 As soon as I saw the video title I knew this was what you'd be talking about and you're right, it is interesting. I miss the days of SF when the Solar system planets had Intelligent life. Ray Bradbury's Martians and Robert Heinlein's Venusians. I want Jules Verne's rifle that shoots pellets and deliver an electric charge on contact.
The thing is superluminal speed is impossible for anything having mass. Doesn't matter if its normal positive mass or negative mass as long as the atoms have mass the energy required to reach 100% of light speed or faster becomes infinite! And it takes an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an infinite mass to light speed. But going very close to c is no problem, like 99.99% is perfectly fine.
Oh, yes, I have noticed that too. I tried very often to listen to old sci-fi, but similarly often I cannot suspend by disbelief long enough. And apart from the totally wrong physics and astronomy, I also often dash against the social norms depicted in these stories. Mostly the fact, that women either don't exist at all, or only exist as love interests for the men.
Yeah, for this I wasn't so worried about a factor of two, so I just went to Wikipedia, which is written poorly or wrong (it says "primarily in molecular form" in the article). However, it does cite a Ferriere 2001 paper that I dug into a bit and it is still being cited today. Because of that, I assume its data are still good enough to be relevant, but I didn't do an extensive literature search. Anyway, Table 1 says minimally ionized cool atomic hydrogen has the most mass by far (6e9 solar masses versus 1.6e9), but hot ionized atomic hydrogen takes up the most volume (0.6 versus about 0.4). The mass of molecular hydrogen is about on par with the mass of ionized hydrogen, but molecular hydrogen is concentrated in relatively dense molecular clouds that take up very little volume (compared to the volume of the Milky Way). Just for fun, I wonder what was the best estimate for ISM density in the 1940s, but it's probably not worth the time to dig into the historical literature that much.
@@RudolphKohn It's an amazing job. I loved seeing an analysis of Doc Smith. In 1939, they came across the H+ / H2 dichotomy. This tends to be the difference between intergalactic deep space and diffuse nebulas that form the superstructure of star formation. So there is a sound case for using either figure in the sci-fi.
Oh how I dislike the Event Horizon way of space travel. So many other pieces of fiction have stuck with it and always act like it's some big brain hard to understand method
Hard science fiction? Like what? “The Martian”, “Frankenstein”? I think “Nightfall” is the only one I know. “Black Mirror” has some great hard science-fiction. On the whole I enjoy the “fiction” in sci-fi, more than the science. Sometimes the speculation is more prescient than the “science”. For instance the idea of telepathy is far more evocative of the possibility of instantaneous communication inherent in entanglement.
2:07 You're already on the wrong foot. We have, literally dozens, of theories thesis, concepts and ideas on how we can cheat relativity. There's nothing wrong with writing a science fiction story that uses the same type of old-style classical hard SF concepts. It's a story. As long as it is consistent with itself and intellectually/emotionally stimulating, write it how you want. The only thing keeping people from writing those kinds of stories are that people tell themselves we can't.
And sometimes, new science opens up *more* possibilities rather than shutting them down. When I was little, we didn't know about subsurface oceans. Or super-puff planets! An interesting technological challenge of today that the first few Lensman books address is around identity and authority - how do you know if someone is who they say they are, how do you know if someone is to be trusted to do the right thing? The Lens, in addition to its less symbolic powers, was a mark recognized as meaning this person could be trusted.
In a sense it's an age-old challenge: how do I know, for example, that the author of the Donation of Constantine was actually Constantine? How do I know that this person will not lead a party of Persian soldiers via a goat path, thereby surrounding my fellow Greeks' forces? What the increasing complexity of technologies does, essentially, is widen the scope & complexity of the problem.... (I had to last-minute edit "scop" to "scope" tho I am amused by the thought of a wider, or thiccer, owl....)
that's all very nice, but SPECIAL relaitivity was already well understood by then, so no, such vehicles could not function. also, you should consider the POWER source that drove the RAVENING beams and projectors. some sort of copper disintegration, off the top of my head.
every type of mass has inherent energy,it's just that elements like uranium,Pu,and Th are more easily fissionable. find a way to make copper fissionable and you would get energy,I suspect.
@@JayWye52 no, that's not what i'm talking about. i did a quick check just now. the power source in the skylark series is a form of "unobtainium", and uses the complete DISINTEGRATION of copper - definitely NOT fission.
What's the Speed of Gravity? Probably near infinite! The Speed of Light isn't the universal speed limit, although it is a limit to our perception! Authors are always going to be influenced by the writings of contemporaries. And nowadays we have AI increasingly coming into the picture. Then again, Sci-fi is also coming under increasing political attack... YT is recommending I watch "Science Fiction and the Alt-Right!"
The speed of gravity is the same as the speed of light. That was proven a few years ago when the gravitational waves and the light signature from an event arrived at Earth at the same time.
@@johannageisel5390 That's because 'the speed of light in a vacuum' is more accurately 'the speed of information' or 'the speed of the reality calculation,' if you're a fan of the simulation hypothesis.
Limiting yourself to what's known is not SF. That's why I quit reading most of the modern stuff. Give me somebody like Burroughs who can tell a story without one page of it being believable and I'm happy.
@@neilreynolds3858 No, SF is not limited to what is known, but it _is_ limited by what is known *_not_* to be true. If the author goes against established science we are in science fantasy territory, not science fiction. The distinction matters today, because our current society is deeply unsustainable and believing fairy tales about leaving Earth in this situation is actively harmful. There is no planet B. We have to clean up our mess yesterday. And there is a lot of good science fiction to be written about solutions to our predicament. I will continue to read fantasy novels about "our galactic future" (🤣), but it is important to know reality from fiction.
@@CraigPMiller Well, maybe not bliss, but it's definitely way easier (and faster) to write if you're not worried about being consistent with a high-order tensor equation!
Well, if you count Star Trek and Star Wars as SF, there’s all sorts of freedom granted for the sake of the stories: warp drives, inter breeding among widely differing species, everyone speaks English.
About everyone speaking English: Star Trek posits a universal translator. There's a funny bit in the _DS9_ episode "Little Green Men" in which Quark, Rom and Nog are trapped on 1947 Earth and find after they're captured by the military in you-know-where that their translators aren't working: the English spoken by the military personnel is rendered as gibberish to them, while their own speech is likewise incomprehensible to their captors. As for interbreeding, ST has revealed that Spock is the product of sophisticated genetic engineering. There's an episode of _Star Trek: Enterprise_ in which an earlier attempt results in a hybrid child of Trip and T'Pol but the child dies due to genetic incompatibility.
I really tried to read some EE doc smith in the 90s and I was fine with the strange science, but I really could not cope with the female characters and attitudes towards them. still got the box set on my shelves, they might even be valuable lol
They are of their time. A man earnt the money and the wife kept house. Spoiler Alert! the anti - civ civ called "Boskone" became more one sided as one higher in the hierarchy of evilness. The Eich were a very male dominated society and below them was a female dominated society that kept males for breeding purposes only and necessitated the "Red Lensman" .
I agree that his attitude towards female characters is the kind of thing that would get him a lot of flak today. To be fair, he doesn't seem to particularly denigrate them in any way, just kind of relegates them to a very minuscule role, if any.
The attitude to women I can live with, or you just have to skip basically all older litterature. What did bother me was the genocidal racism in Skylark Three. Not satisfied with destroying an enemy's military capacity it turns into a genocide where they even hunt down and destroy the last surviving colony ship attempting to escape. Add a bit of eugenics too and it's reads like nazi propaganda.
I say, people should just reject hard sci-fi and fully embrace soft sci-fi, since a science-fiction story that adheres 100% to real science is theoretically impossible. Only pedants and boors place hard sci-fi on any sort of pedestal over soft.
Even given your argument, which is very questionable, there is a simple problem of fuel. The fuel in a modern rocket runs out very quickly. How would you carry that much fuel? These books don't work because of poor science, which as others have said just isn't true. It was fun to write about these battles and do-gooders winning against all odds in space, it didn't need to be scientifically correct.
Our best understanding of space travel today is that it is practically impossible 🫤 Apart from the hint from the Fermi Paradox the problems is nicely summed up in Charles Stross' essay "High frontier redux". He abandonned writing space operas shortly there after. I will add the fact that we are pushing up against Earth's ecological boundaries without being close to practical space travel, and that the warming atmosphere is putting _hard_ limits on future growth. Waste heat will warm the atmosphere as effectively as greenhouse gasses. And as that includes potential energy from materials mined from asteroid we can't look to the solar system for resources on a meaningful scale ☹️ We aren't going anywhere anytime soon and if we don't get our act together the human race will be run shortly.
Well, I now think much less of Stross. He's apparently a barbarian who can't fathom the idea that if it doesn't affect him, personally, it can still matter. I, too, expect that if doom comes to Earth I'll die... but I'm not so selfish that a world where all of humanity shared in that doom is as good as one where they don't. Also, those hard limits aren't that hard. Besides the possibility of moving industry to space (probably not terribly viable with just rockets, but there are lots of options that are easier than an orbital elevator,) you can also build radiators for the planet.
it was also no PC around to care about people feelings. gender was not a fixed category in many novels but there was no trans ideology, it was just an interesting concept.
Pretty strange choice to put up that equation in a banner right across your face and leave it there for a long time. That whole section of your presentation was super boring and I fast-forwarded through it - seemed like a massive detour from your thesis.
I did hate the Lensman series. I think E.E Doc Smith knew less. There was a whack of speculation that went on in early on in science fiction that was either not scientifically based or was based on science as we knew it at the time that was incorrect or only partially understood. The speed of light was first calculated in 1676. Einstein proved nothing in the universe went faster than light in 1905. E.E.Doc Smith created a series of characters the Lensmen who were great at everything which made for pretty bad super man-esque stories.
Give me any science fiction between the 1950s and today that does not include in its plot too much romance or soap opera and Ill except it. Arthur C Clarkes early stuff when he wrote by himself was phenomenal but then when he brought in coauthors like in the Rendezvous with Rama series that changed the writing style to a soap opera, I totally hated it and got bored with it entirely. How do you go from a fantastic book 1 in a series followed by 3 or 4 duds. Simple, you go away from the science fiction and physics and chemistry and mystery and suspense to “ These are the Day of Our Lives” total crap. My aim is to read a lot more of the shorter older novels for just fun. I liked the weirdness and uniqueness of “ The Three Body Problem” but it is so confusing and plots within plots of super alien tech like the spooky sentinels that the aliens coming to invade sent ahead like 1000 times the speed of light but the invasion force is going to take 400 years to arrive. These are all very cool concepts. What I would like to see is a top 100 list of all the pure science fiction of the 50s and 60s short novels, like less than 300 pages. Anybody out there know of any such list?
General Relativity was known when Smith wrote the Lensman series. He just ignored science for the sake of telling a good story. From a story perspective his way of faster than light travel is genius, the best in any story that has FTL-travel I've come across, and he uses it in some creative ways throughout the series. That's all that matters.
Yes, GR was known, but the more relevant question is how well was it known to the general public or even to educated non-specialists. Even today, if you show a person a document with a d'Alembertian in it, they'll probably be more likely to think they're missing a font than know what mathematical operation it represents.
I think it's entirely possible that Smith's understanding of GR was pretty limited, probably not anything past what he might have read in magazines like PopSci at the time. He was, after all, educated much earlier than he wrote the books. Concepts like relativistic viscosity, time dilation, c as a universal maximum speed, the existence of a limited number of fundamental forces--all of these had very little, if any, physical evidence supporting them in 1950 and were likely not well-known by anyone outside of physicists working specifically in those fields.
Even what ideas got out to the public, how many of them ended up oversimplified or just plain wrong in the public eye? Look at the double-slit experiment and how some reasonably intelligent but untrained people view it today.
Even in modern times, I did only one semester of GR in undergrad, and it was optional in grad school. I find the topic interesting but my Ph. D. was for studying ultracold atomic physics.
What was interesting to me was how his FTL idea "works" if you ignore GR and put in some reasonable numbers. I wonder if Smith did some kind of basic calculations like that, but I suspect he probably was content with his explanation and left the rest to hand-waving and the assumption of gradual improvements in basic technology, such as rockets.
There is what is known scientific fact and then there is "how sophisticated is the audience". Nowadays the audience is familiar with more of the facts that might constrain science fiction. No more sailing to the moon on a wooden ship with no helmets. Alas.
@@wanderlking8634 I was quite aware of how Smith´s science didn't add up when I read Lensman and it didn't bother me one bit. It's fiction. You are allowed to make up rules of your own as long as you implement them coherently within the story. (I do hate it when authors get their science wrong for no reason. Like how in the Three Body Problem the author misunderstands tidal forces) Using wooden ships to the moon might be going a bit too far, turning it into fantasy, but it could still work as a story. A good author can convince you that in his world it makes sense.
Pity he didn't know about the Higgs. But the best FTL drive is the one in the HHGTTG.
@@RudolphKohn I can't speak for the Lensman series, but I know that in Smith's Skylark of Space, two scientists invent a spaceship and are surprised to find its velocity increasing to many times the speed of light. One scientist says that going faster than light is impossible according to the theory of relativity, while the other says the theory of relativity is still just a theory, while their spaceship's speed is hard fact.
And we lost desert Mars with ancient civilizations and jungle Venus. It's very sad.
I'm currently making up some people who have survived on Venus, even though there are no jungles.
You could have a Mars and Venus of an alternative history. This is how I read Leigh Brackett and Edgar Rice Burroughs.
I wouldn't consider Doc Smith's work to be hard SF myself, but that's not to say that he was scientifically illiterate or mathematically inept; he was a PhD chemical engineer (and one of my favorite writers when I was in high school in the 1970s) and could do the work from known science, but that doesn't mean he always stuck to it. His book series before the Lensman novels, "The Skylark of Space" and its sequels, got into superluminal velocity travel with the simple mechanism of, "Einstein's theory is still a theory, and our speed is an observed fact."
But on the whole, you're correct, a writer in the first half of the twentieth century had fewer known rules to worry about when trying to create SF that held consistently with the scientific knowledge of that era, compared with one today. I recall Isaac Asimov mentioning in his autobiography, a story he wrote that was legitimate SF at the time of writing but obsolete by the time it was published!
@tometraveler I think the "hard" SF that Rudolph refers to is that it dealt with hardware ( spaceships, blasters, etc) rather than soft issues. Star Wars is "hard" (first nine) UFO is "hard" whereas Dr Who is decidedly "soft" nowadays
Oh, I agree he wasn't trying to write "hard" sci-fi. He's way too floppy and hand-waves a lot of details away. Which is fine!
In my review of "Triplanetary," I joked about how the ships seem to basically just be big orbs bristling with guns and rockets, only to laugh out loud when he described the standard ship to be literally "spherical" in "First Lensman."
I just thought it was interesting how his simplification (basically, ignoring GR effects and working in an entirely classical fluid dynamic regime) actually works out if you plug in reasonable numbers.
I also think it's possible he was fairly ignorant of many of the more subtle effects of GR as well as the details of the Standard Model. After all, he was a specialist in a very different field, and he was educated much earlier than the 1940s. His knowledge of GR probably came mostly from magazines like Popular Science around that time. It's highly unlikely that he was up-to-date on tensor operations and GR metrics.
Plus, at that time, most of the conclusions of GR and Standard Model physics had very little, if any, physical evidence behind them. Members of the public, even educated non-specialists like Smith, could have been very skeptical that all of the goofy math actually translated into reality (per your quote of "our speed is an observed fact"). At that point, there were no particle accelerator experiments (to flesh out the Standard Model and show there aren't any "unknown" forces with alternate speed limits, such as Smith uses for his Spy Rays etc.) and pretty much the only physical evidence for GR was a prediction of a star's light's deviation around the sun during an eclipse.
On a related note, I just recently re-read Stephen Baxter's "Massacre of Mankind," which is an official sequel to H.G. Wells's "War of the Worlds," and there's a similar phenomenon going on there as well, only with different concepts, such as the structure of the Solar system and various biological concepts. The public-facing "scientific" literature during the early 1900s had a bunch of really bizarre conclusions about various planets, because (for instance) spectroscopic examinations of Venus were not yet possible, so we knew it was hot there, but not how hellishly hot!
I was perhaps a little too vague, but I wasn't trying to call the Lensman series "hard" sci-fi at all.
I think it's likely that Smith didn't know much about General Relativity beyond the general public of the time, so I wanted to evaluate his classical fluid dynamic model as if it were a serious idea, just for the fun of it.
Imagine my surprise when it kinda-sorta works! Yes, it completely ignores GR effects, but even educated non-specialists of the time probably had as many incorrect ideas about relativity as people do now about quantum mechanics! It was "easier" to write "hard" sci-fi when we knew so little!
@@RudolphKohn
I read somewhere, meaning I don't remember the source, that Smith knew full well that he was writing space fantasy and not science fiction.
Old pulp SF is my joy.
Librivox / Gutenberg are a great resource for the oldest out of copyright titles. Titles such as "Voyage to Arcturus" and the Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars series float my boat. I have the Lensman series on my TBR list.
@@Tony_Lewis Librivox and Gutenberg are great! I like the physical scans over at the Internet Archive, too.
Mountains of great old books to read!
As others have said, Smith definitely knew enough of relativity to know he was ignoring it, even if he wasn't so cavalier in the Lens books as in the Skylark books. He wasn't pushing for scientific accuracy so much as verisimilitude.
The parts where I think he can make any claim to hardness in his science fiction is where we do see things like the drag equation as described here coming in and affecting the books. Early spaceships are spherical, but when they need increased speed, they switch to teardrops. When they're preparing for an intergalactic journey, they calculate expected travel time based on estimates of the intergalactic medium (and then discover that those estimates were way too high, allowing them to travel much faster than expected).
I think his justification for ignoring relativity is actually pretty clever. Remove "rest mass" (somehow) and things snap back to classical physics. Everyone loves a simplified problem.
I don't think Smith was aiming for scientific accuracy, but part of making an immersive world is to know how and where to play with the rules to make the result serve the desired purpose and seem clever... while still maintaining some amount of self-consistency, and avoiding the potential for the reader to see Dei Ex Machinis around every corner.
The thing that really got me was how "realistic" numbers in those classical drag equations actually could get you superluminal. I suspect Smith didn't bother to play around with relativistic equations, but he knew those fluid dynamic equations really well, and probably could find estimates of interstellar medium density and existing rocket thrust numbers. It worked out well enough that I wonder if he tried playing around with those numbers and came to a similar conclusion as I did.
To give an example, in my recent writing, I needed a minimum allowable orbit time for a ship around a gas giant. What I did was look at known statistics of mass and radius for existing gas giants, make a scatter plot, pick a point within the "cloud" of real data for my fictional planet, and calculate orbital times for orbits marginally larger than the atmospheric radius. If I had gotten a number like... 72 hours, I might have tried something else. Instead, I got 5 hours, which worked well with the events in the story.
Lensmen series and Skylark series were and are space operas , not hard science novels. As a reader of these books in the late 60s to mid 70s, they were a fantastical and rollicking good read, but I never confused them with hard facts. Sometimes we need to chill out and just go along for the ride.
So I'm guessing you're not a fan of the Doc Savage series, huh? Because that's all the science I need. Ray gun? Daring hero? Evil villain? Check! Check! Check!!! Let the adventure begin! (just my preference, obviously)
I actually really like the one Doc Savage book I've read, the one where he took on the Shadow. There were actually some cool instrumentation details in that book that made me smile (as someone who has used a mass spectrometer before).
My purpose here wasn't to say only hard sci-fi is good sci-fi, but rather that 1) having a more complete (and therefore restrictive) understanding of science can tie down writers who want to maintain some hardness in their stories, and 2) that coming up with plausible explanations for things, even when breaking the rules, is a virtue and helps make stories more believable when examined in detail.
@@RudolphKohn We like what we like, and folks should be happy just to know other folks are reading, right?
I enjoyed your takes in this video, so thanks.
I am aware that I have "lowbrow" tastes - Conan and Doc Savage amongst many other pulp auteurs, but Jack Vance was wildly talented, and will always be my very favorite author.
Anyway, thanks, and keep those great productions coming!
I think I understand what you mean. The original 'War of the worlds had Martian canons shooting rockets, because the rocket engine wasn't invented yet . Asimov uses nuclear energy for everything in Foundation , because that was considered the solution for everything in that era.
But I really doubt modern readers know about 'rest mass' . Most modern Sci-fi (or even older SF ) just skips the 'how' of physics . They just go into 'hyper space 'or something similar.
When the Lensman stories were written, it was perfectly well understood by scientists that the speed of light was a fundamental limit and that removing mass from an object would simply cause that object to move at that speed. E. E. Smith and others, however, either didn't understand that or simply chose to ignore it.
Great video and love the science description along it 👍
So glad to see anyone talking about the man who, in my opinion; single handedly Created Modern SF for television and cinema. (I’m looking at you, Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Babylon 5, Stargate …) Smith has all of this and more.
- below are some fans & doubters.
Calling Smith ignorant is to misunderstand the history of science and fiction … just because current science was successful, doesn’t mean that they are correct, even now Big G is running into brick walls of their own design.
Smith’s Free-Drive is a Blister-Field system that gave rise to the bizarre functions of The Warp in Star Trek. It ‘separates’ the ship from Space, or more precisely; Moves space/time around it. Inside the ship everything is normal gravity along the axis of force. Like light through a Lens 😉
- Older SF offers the imagination to speculate into the how and why of its Sciences, like one does when reading a magic system in fantasy.
- also, Smith’s lack of computers may be more historical, but actually is becoming more clear to us as AI blurs Facts and Reality. Never forget that The Lensmen series is about Truth and Justice through FACTS! So, all maps are physical, and so are their calculation devices. (My head canon includes impossible slide rules made of steal tape sliding in a separate Free-Drive Field) 🥰
Let Fiction drive Imagination.
Thanks for the comment! I totally agree that the Lensman series isn't trying to be hard sci-fi, I just thought it would be fun to look at it through that lens (no pun intended) for a bit.
I wasn't trying to use "ignorant" as an insult; far from it. As a physicist, I've studied enough of the weird and counterintuitive results of modern understandings of relativity and quantum mechanics that I've learned that a certain amount of ignorance about the subtle details of these fields is normal, and probably healthy. Because the alternatives are: 1) spend a huge amount of time going through all of the derivations to convince yourself or 2) blindly believe that what the scientists say is the last word. Neither choice is great for the average person, for a variety of reasons.
Plus, I firmly believe we are way too used to the rapid information flows of these times. Nowadays, there's always some person to say "Actually, relativity says..." Smith finished his degree in 1914, before any significant tests of relativity were done. It wasn't his field, either! So it's highly likely that what he knew about the mathematics and measurements around relativity were probably from magazines like Scientific American.
Even if he had wanted to make hard sci-fi (which I don't believe he did), he would have had a hard time incorporating the mathematical conclusions, since many of the paradoxes were still the subjects of massive scientific debate. Even more important, there were practically no experimental tests of relativity when he was writing the Lensman series, so it's perfectly reasonable (even from a hard sci-fi perspective) to imagine possible loopholes or flaws in it.
Smith was extremely creative
Doc Smith did know relativity quite well. He just ignored it. Early on in the Skylark series, one of the characters mentions the speed of light limit and they just observe that their spaceship using the 4th order drive goes faster than the speed of light. Oh well I guess Einstein was wrong then :)
Being aware of a few aspects of General Relativity doesn't necessarily mean a full understanding of all the little implications. Someone else mentioned that crack at Einstein in one of the later books, but I think it's likely Smith's understanding of GR was at the level of an educated non-specialist, and not someone working specifically in that field. Basically, someone who learned about GR from publications aimed at educated laymen, and not the specialized scientific journals, and "educated layman" publications get things incomplete, or wrong, or assume too much often.
For instance, the proof that gravitational waves travel at the speed of light comes from some intermediate-level mathematics looking at vacuum space-time metrics. I had to go look it up, since GR isn't my field. It's not super difficult, but I had to remember some mathematical stuff that I haven't used in years.
Smith was also writing at a time when efforts to unify the different forces was much less advanced, and had practically zero experimental backing. The possibility of an unknown force that might propagate at greater speeds than light was not too far out there.
Smith's notion of eliminating the rest mass of matter, ignoring GR, and simply equalizing classical drag-thrust equations was, I thought, pretty neat, especially since plugging in reasonable numbers can get you to superluminal speeds. That's why I highlighted that method here. It's got just enough plausibility to fly in a sci-fi setting. Eliminate rest mass (somehow), and classical drag equations work again! It's a cool idea!
People, including intelligent people, are quite prone (for good reasons), to be skeptical of purely mathematical descriptions of how the universe works... consider the early years of LIGO, when it was still fairly common for people to express skepticism about gravitational waves. Considering how much slower information propagated in the 1940s, it's likely Smith's understanding of GR and its implications was fairly surface level, and the same goes for his understanding of the Standard Model and its four forces.
Followed your argument up until you said 'this gave them more leeway' Well not really - the 'constraints they were aware of then' and the constraints we are aware of now are different yes - but the amount of 'leeway' (from those constrains) that we allow ourselves is a choice. And that choice could be as broad or narrow then as it is now with modern day writers. But having said all that I suppose the difference then - which is when I started reading SF (I'm in my 70's now) was if the author could 'ground his novel in 'scientific' jargon - then it would past as 'hard sf' I suppose a good science based story also had the benefit of making science fiction 'legitimate fiction' - more worthy somehow. Thanks for the video!
You can just make up alternate laws of physics and follow them consistently to get hard sf that is very strange, see "Dichronauts" by Greg Egan for an example.
My first thought was the FTL Alderson Drive (and related shield technology) from Jerry Pournelle's _CoDominium_ stories.
I read, and have read, a huge amount of Golden Age SF, and there was definitely an advantage to the writer in a more-limited understanding of the universe. Skating on the frozen canals of Mars (Red Planet, Heinlein) was a great image that has been overtaken by better knowledge. Which is to say that I agree with your basic premise.
But I have some comments about the Lensman series. 8-)
I was a huge fan of the Lensman series when I was young. (They're kind of unreadable for me now, but I read them at the right time.) There's a pretty good chance that it was Doc Smith and RA Heinlein that led directly to my going into Physics in college. (Not that I stayed in Physics; I'm a tech writer these many years later.)
The drives in the Lensman series removed inertia, not rest mass. Postulating the result of dropping rest mass to zero isn't really on point, since the principle is a decoupling of mass and inertia. And if you don't care how much the mass changes, since that's not what you're acting on, you get to break the universal speed limit.
That said, making things inertialess had way more problems: How do you get thrust when the particles in the thrust stream are inertialess? How do people breathe when the air is inertialess? For that matter, why don't all the gas particles form a thin film on the floor as soon as you get acceleration? Why don't the characters get thrust away spinning at a ridiculous speed (momentarily, anyway) every time they fire their Delameters? For the sake of the story, these were just handwaved away, of course. (Doc Smith was _not_ a physicist, FWIW.)
The conceit was just a zeroth-level attempt at creating plausibility, not a serious attempt at physics. But it was absolutely brilliant for 14-year-old me.
That was my immediate thought also. No inertia (or rest mass), no thrust, thus no going anywhere. I think I read one one of the Lensman books decades ago, but was a bit turned off by the slightly wooden characters.
Alastair Reynolds (astrophysicist) postulated an inertia-reduction drive in at least one of his Revelation Space books, but had the characters get sick if they got too close to one.
Golden Age is awesome! Edmond Hamilton, E.E. Smith, Leigh Brackett, Henry Kuttner!
E.E.Doc Smith has been one of my favourites since the 1960s.
Vortex Blaster was my favorite of his books.
BTW, I want a DeLameter.
I still dream about the Skylark series- and just re-read all four last spring/summer. Also re-reading Farmers World of Tiers as well as brand new stuff. But still love me some Skylark, or Red Planet ( first read in ‘59: forthright grade)
I really enjoyed your video. The algorithm worked for me today. Is this your only channel? I am a concept artist and musician trying to make my first sci-fi work (quite a daring temporal theme, tough to work out in a viable way) . I hope you make lots more content. Subscribed!!
Special Relativity was published in 1905 and General Relativity in 1915, so relativity should have been well know when the Lensman series was written.
Enjoyed this, interesting ideas. Thank you!
While yes the rest mass could be zero, but friction of the ship travelling through space, which is not empty. However the drive in both Seaton and Lensmen series was able to vastly exceed the speed of light. Initially Seaton was limited by the level of acceleration the crew could accommodate. It was only after he was able to secure inertia less drive from the Fenecrom and moved to a torpedo shaped ship was he able to achieve far higher speeds. EEDS knew all about the real science, but it just did not work for his stories.
The material X enabled full liberation of copper and then uranium into energy that could be used for power or thrust.
Lensman stuff was fun. To me the most interesting thing about it is that as far as I know, to this day it is the only thing ever to solve the fundamental right wing political problem. The right wing is all about the idea that if superior people are in charge, they will solve everything. The problem is getting the right people. Aristocracy, people "better" by birth, didn't work. Capitalist "meritocracy" sometimes puts able people in charge, but they are generally selfish bastards who are capable mainly at stealing everyone else's stuff, so that doesn't work so good. Religious leaders claim they're the right people because God said so, but God probably did not, in fact, say so. And so on.
The Lensman series grapples with this directly, and the main characters are seriously worried that there's no way to solve it. But then they get Mentor of Arisia . . . all-wise, all-benevolent, telepathic, pretty much God manifest. Mentor can evaluate people you send to him, pick only the ones who are both hypercompetent, benevolent, and incorruptible, and give them Lenses, which both directly give them power and serve as unfakeable credentials of fitness to lead. It's a foolproof method of putting the definitively right people in charge. Unfortunately for that kind of politics it sort of underlines that this is not possible in real life.
(The converse problem for egalitarian leftists is getting a system with strong democracy and weak or nonexistent leaders to function without everyone having to spend 300% of their time in commitee meetings)
The "folded paper" explaination has always bothered me. "Punching a hole through" aside, this drive folds the universe in half? It would have been easier to break the speed of light
@@oldsoul3539 It is an imperfect visual aid that somehow made its way into popular culture. It would be more accurate to paint a dot on the paper and fold it, observing that the dot "ends up" where the folds touched.
As for energy, my understanding is that the amount of energy needed to produce a large but finite curvature of space-time is also huge but finite, whereas (according to special relativity) the amount of energy needed to accelerate any mass to light speed is theoretically infinite.
In the end, it's one of many choices an author can make, and it has a sort of surface-level plausibility in light of the public perception of the limitations imposed by relativity.
Consider, how will people 80 or a 100 years today view our modern hard sci-fi when scientific knowledge progresses further and some of the assumptions we have at the moment prove false?
This will never happen, since in all important scientific disciplines we are RIGHT NOW at the verge of 'knowing it all', and especially in Physics, the 'theory of everything' is right around the corner...
Or at least most 'serious' scientists always behave like this is the case 😅
And only after something they postulated for decades with all their conviction and built their whole careers on it turns out to be wrong, they immediately pull the card of 'science being always just provisionary'.
But seriously... As an older guy who has always been especially interested in the history of science I came to the conclusion a long time ago already, that the way we practice science mainly suffers from the fact, that many MANY interesting questions are not even being asked in the first place - for reasons that are mostly as un-scientific as it gets...
@joechip4822 It does feel to a certain extent like we've plateaued. Technology has certainly continued to improve at a pretty rapid rate, but the only tangible impact it seems to have is making devices smaller and more powerful. It feels like all the real modern breakthroughs in science are so abstract and beyond layman's understanding (the Higgs Boson is probably the best example of this) that the notion of the future a 100 years from now being more or less the same seems reasonable. People 100 years ago, while often hilariously inaccurate, could envision a future that actually is decently similar to our own. Meanwhile our modern sci-fi either just predicts magic with stuff like FTL or presents Distopia as we cybernetics and AI makes us less human as a whole. The only really major thing I can think of that could really be attainable within the next century that would be a game changer is viable Fusion reactors (often more a handwaved in sci-fi for where energy is obtained than a serious examination of what such energy access would mean for society), but much like your comment, fusion has been right around the corner for about seventy years now. Who knows what the future holds really, maybe we are about to figure out all science and mathematics our, or at least all of it that will tangibly impact the average human, or perhaps everything we think we know will soon be overturned. Only time will tell. Hope I'm around to see it.
@@Jotari
For me, as a philosophical idealist, there is only one way I can look at any possible 'plateauing': the overdue realisation, that we threw the baby out with the bathwater when science mainly had the focus on distancing itself from everything that deemed in any way philosophical, mental, spiritual - not to speak of religious.
But don't get me wrong here... I am an atheist myself - but philosophical idealism and deeper insights into eastern philosophical thinking has told me, or at least opened me to the idea, that the next step in scientific evolution could be, or even needs to be accepting the mental being the basic and only fabric of reality. At least the 'reality' as we are at max able to comprehend it.
You're using binder paper. It already has holes in it. You didn't need to poke through it with a pen!😉
As soon as I saw the video title I knew this was what you'd be talking about and you're right, it is interesting. I miss the days of SF when the Solar system planets had Intelligent life. Ray Bradbury's Martians and Robert Heinlein's Venusians. I want Jules Verne's rifle that shoots pellets and deliver an electric charge on contact.
Isn't that just a Vernian taser?
The thing is superluminal speed is impossible for anything having mass. Doesn't matter if its normal positive mass or negative mass as long as the atoms have mass the energy required to reach 100% of light speed or faster becomes infinite! And it takes an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an infinite mass to light speed.
But going very close to c is no problem, like 99.99% is perfectly fine.
Oh, yes, I have noticed that too.
I tried very often to listen to old sci-fi, but similarly often I cannot suspend by disbelief long enough.
And apart from the totally wrong physics and astronomy, I also often dash against the social norms depicted in these stories. Mostly the fact, that women either don't exist at all, or only exist as love interests for the men.
On a long enough timeline all science fiction becomes fantasy.
5:00 The Interstellar Medium is more atomic hydrogen than molecular hydrogen, so H+, not H2.
Yeah, for this I wasn't so worried about a factor of two, so I just went to Wikipedia, which is written poorly or wrong (it says "primarily in molecular form" in the article). However, it does cite a Ferriere 2001 paper that I dug into a bit and it is still being cited today. Because of that, I assume its data are still good enough to be relevant, but I didn't do an extensive literature search.
Anyway, Table 1 says minimally ionized cool atomic hydrogen has the most mass by far (6e9 solar masses versus 1.6e9), but hot ionized atomic hydrogen takes up the most volume (0.6 versus about 0.4). The mass of molecular hydrogen is about on par with the mass of ionized hydrogen, but molecular hydrogen is concentrated in relatively dense molecular clouds that take up very little volume (compared to the volume of the Milky Way).
Just for fun, I wonder what was the best estimate for ISM density in the 1940s, but it's probably not worth the time to dig into the historical literature that much.
@@RudolphKohn It's an amazing job. I loved seeing an analysis of Doc Smith. In 1939, they came across the H+ / H2 dichotomy. This tends to be the difference between intergalactic deep space and diffuse nebulas that form the superstructure of star formation. So there is a sound case for using either figure in the sci-fi.
monoatomic,IOW.
Today's sf would have believe suspended hibernation is plausible. So the more we know the less magic there is.
That is the problem of emphasizing science over fiction.
If I want science, I'll read a science book.
Oh how I dislike the Event Horizon way of space travel. So many other pieces of fiction have stuck with it and always act like it's some big brain hard to understand method
Hard science fiction? Like what? “The Martian”, “Frankenstein”? I think “Nightfall” is the only one I know. “Black Mirror” has some great hard science-fiction. On the whole I enjoy the “fiction” in sci-fi, more than the science. Sometimes the speculation is more prescient than the “science”.
For instance the idea of telepathy is far more evocative of the possibility of instantaneous communication inherent in entanglement.
Available free at Project Gutenberg is an unauthorized sequel to War of the Worlds, Edison's Conquest of the Martians by Garrett Serviss.
2:07 You're already on the wrong foot.
We have, literally dozens, of theories thesis, concepts and ideas on how we can cheat relativity.
There's nothing wrong with writing a science fiction story that uses the same type of old-style classical hard SF concepts. It's a story. As long as it is consistent with itself and intellectually/emotionally stimulating, write it how you want.
The only thing keeping people from writing those kinds of stories are that people tell themselves we can't.
And sometimes, new science opens up *more* possibilities rather than shutting them down. When I was little, we didn't know about subsurface oceans. Or super-puff planets!
An interesting technological challenge of today that the first few Lensman books address is around identity and authority - how do you know if someone is who they say they are, how do you know if someone is to be trusted to do the right thing? The Lens, in addition to its less symbolic powers, was a mark recognized as meaning this person could be trusted.
In a sense it's an age-old challenge: how do I know, for example, that the author of the Donation of Constantine was actually Constantine? How do I know that this person will not lead a party of Persian soldiers via a goat path, thereby surrounding my fellow Greeks' forces? What the increasing complexity of technologies does, essentially, is widen the scope & complexity of the problem.... (I had to last-minute edit "scop" to "scope" tho I am amused by the thought of a wider, or thiccer, owl....)
that's all very nice, but SPECIAL relaitivity was already well understood by then, so no, such vehicles could not function.
also, you should consider the POWER source that drove the RAVENING beams and projectors. some sort of copper disintegration, off the top of my head.
every type of mass has inherent energy,it's just that elements like uranium,Pu,and Th are more easily fissionable. find a way to make copper fissionable and you would get energy,I suspect.
@@JayWye52 no, that's not what i'm talking about.
i did a quick check just now. the power source in the skylark series is a form of "unobtainium", and uses the complete DISINTEGRATION of copper - definitely NOT fission.
What's the Speed of Gravity? Probably near infinite! The Speed of Light isn't the universal speed limit, although it is a limit to our perception!
Authors are always going to be influenced by the writings of contemporaries. And nowadays we have AI increasingly coming into the picture.
Then again, Sci-fi is also coming under increasing political attack... YT is recommending I watch "Science Fiction and the Alt-Right!"
The speed of gravity is the same as the speed of light.
That was proven a few years ago when the gravitational waves and the light signature from an event arrived at Earth at the same time.
@@johannageisel5390 Gravitational "waves" are a FRAUD... gravity is an acceleration. It doesn't "wave"! Does your car "wave" as it accelerates?
@@johannageisel5390 That's because 'the speed of light in a vacuum' is more accurately 'the speed of information' or 'the speed of the reality calculation,' if you're a fan of the simulation hypothesis.
One problem, you are calling Lensmen hard Science Fiction. Lensmen was never hard science fiction, it was the first space opera.
Limiting yourself to what's known is not SF. That's why I quit reading most of the modern stuff. Give me somebody like Burroughs who can tell a story without one page of it being believable and I'm happy.
@@neilreynolds3858
No, SF is not limited to what is known, but it _is_ limited by what is known *_not_* to be true.
If the author goes against established science we are in science fantasy territory, not science fiction.
The distinction matters today, because our current society is deeply unsustainable and believing fairy tales about leaving Earth in this situation is actively harmful.
There is no planet B.
We have to clean up our mess yesterday.
And there is a lot of good science fiction to be written about solutions to our predicament.
I will continue to read fantasy novels about "our galactic future" (🤣), but it is important to know reality from fiction.
I enjoy Iain Banks' stories which just sidestep physics. They are still great yarns.
Ignorance is bliss 😬🙃😎
@@CraigPMiller Well, maybe not bliss, but it's definitely way easier (and faster) to write if you're not worried about being consistent with a high-order tensor equation!
@@RudolphKohn AC Clarke got it right - “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” 😁🙃😎
Well, if you count Star Trek and Star Wars as SF, there’s all sorts of freedom granted for the sake of the stories: warp drives, inter breeding among widely differing species, everyone speaks English.
About everyone speaking English: Star Trek posits a universal translator. There's a funny bit in the _DS9_ episode "Little Green Men" in which Quark, Rom and Nog are trapped on 1947 Earth and find after they're captured by the military in you-know-where that their translators aren't working: the English spoken by the military personnel is rendered as gibberish to them, while their own speech is likewise incomprehensible to their captors. As for interbreeding, ST has revealed that Spock is the product of sophisticated genetic engineering. There's an episode of _Star Trek: Enterprise_ in which an earlier attempt results in a hybrid child of Trip and T'Pol but the child dies due to genetic incompatibility.
I really tried to read some EE doc smith in the 90s and I was fine with the strange science, but I really could not cope with the female characters and attitudes towards them. still got the box set on my shelves, they might even be valuable lol
They are of their time. A man earnt the money and the wife kept house. Spoiler Alert! the anti - civ civ called "Boskone" became more one sided as one higher in the hierarchy of evilness. The Eich were a very male dominated society and below them was a female dominated society that kept males for breeding purposes only and necessitated the "Red Lensman" .
I agree that his attitude towards female characters is the kind of thing that would get him a lot of flak today. To be fair, he doesn't seem to particularly denigrate them in any way, just kind of relegates them to a very minuscule role, if any.
The attitude to women I can live with, or you just have to skip basically all older litterature. What did bother me was the genocidal racism in Skylark Three. Not satisfied with destroying an enemy's military capacity it turns into a genocide where they even hunt down and destroy the last surviving colony ship attempting to escape. Add a bit of eugenics too and it's reads like nazi propaganda.
@@RudolphKohn
He did change that to some degree with his later books. Children of the Lens treats women differently as does the last Skylark novel.
@@EthelredHardrede-nz8yv The two sets of twin Kinnison girls turn out to be the most powerful entities in the Lensman universe.
I say, people should just reject hard sci-fi and fully embrace soft sci-fi, since a science-fiction story that adheres 100% to real science is theoretically impossible. Only pedants and boors place hard sci-fi on any sort of pedestal over soft.
Even given your argument, which is very questionable, there is a simple problem of fuel. The fuel in a modern rocket runs out very quickly. How would you carry that much fuel? These books don't work because of poor science, which as others have said just isn't true. It was fun to write about these battles and do-gooders winning against all odds in space, it didn't need to be scientifically correct.
Our best understanding of space travel today is that it is practically impossible 🫤
Apart from the hint from the Fermi Paradox the problems is nicely summed up in Charles Stross' essay "High frontier redux".
He abandonned writing space operas shortly there after.
I will add the fact that we are pushing up against Earth's ecological boundaries without being close to practical space travel, and that the warming atmosphere is putting _hard_ limits on future growth.
Waste heat will warm the atmosphere as effectively as greenhouse gasses.
And as that includes potential energy from materials mined from asteroid we can't look to the solar system for resources on a meaningful scale ☹️
We aren't going anywhere anytime soon and if we don't get our act together the human race will be run shortly.
Well, I now think much less of Stross. He's apparently a barbarian who can't fathom the idea that if it doesn't affect him, personally, it can still matter. I, too, expect that if doom comes to Earth I'll die... but I'm not so selfish that a world where all of humanity shared in that doom is as good as one where they don't.
Also, those hard limits aren't that hard. Besides the possibility of moving industry to space (probably not terribly viable with just rockets, but there are lots of options that are easier than an orbital elevator,) you can also build radiators for the planet.
it was also no PC around to care about people feelings. gender was not a fixed category in many novels but there was no trans ideology, it was just an interesting concept.
Pretty strange choice to put up that equation in a banner right across your face and leave it there for a long time. That whole section of your presentation was super boring and I fast-forwarded through it - seemed like a massive detour from your thesis.
I did hate the Lensman series. I think E.E Doc Smith knew less. There was a whack of speculation that went on in early on in science fiction that was either not scientifically based or was based on science as we knew it at the time that was incorrect or only partially understood.
The speed of light was first calculated in 1676. Einstein proved nothing in the universe went faster than light in 1905.
E.E.Doc Smith created a series of characters the Lensmen who were great at everything which made for pretty bad super man-esque stories.
What do you do for fun?
Give me any science fiction between the 1950s and today that does not include in its plot too much romance or soap opera and Ill except it. Arthur C Clarkes early stuff when he wrote by himself was phenomenal but then when he brought in coauthors like in the Rendezvous with Rama series that changed the writing style to a soap opera, I totally hated it and got bored with it entirely. How do you go from a fantastic book 1 in a series followed by 3 or 4 duds. Simple, you go away from the science fiction and physics and chemistry and mystery and suspense to “ These are the Day of Our Lives” total crap. My aim is to read a lot more of the shorter older novels for just fun. I liked the weirdness and uniqueness of “ The Three Body Problem” but it is so confusing and plots within plots of super alien tech like the spooky sentinels that the aliens coming to invade sent ahead like 1000 times the speed of light but the invasion force is going to take 400 years to arrive. These are all very cool concepts. What I would like to see is a top 100 list of all the pure science fiction of the 50s and 60s short novels, like less than 300 pages. Anybody out there know of any such list?
Sorry, that is nonsense, an awesome sci fi novel could be written about relativistic space travel (I have yet to see an author get it right).