… you have no idea how and maths scared you since third grade.
Some days ago I was chatting with a friend of mine. He told me he was writing a SF short story, and, after reading the summary, I volunteered as beta-reader. He politely refused.
“Thanks, mate, but no. You’d shred it into pieces before page 3.”
“Am I such an asshole?”
“No, but you’re of that kind of SF geeks that would never pass FTL without 30 equations and a couple of Nobel prizes duly quoted to show the author knew the rules before breaking it.”
Ugh. I decided to give his statements some justice and thinking about it in a more systematic way. It’s true that FTL(= Faster than Light) is one pet peeves of mine when SF is concerned. But there’s a simple reason for it, and my friend – who, incidentally, does his homework very well when science is concerned – nailed it down. Science fiction has, for better or for worse, the science part in its genetic code, and there’s no way around it. Also because SF readership is generally fastidious on this point. While the majority gets happily along with the Clarke’s three laws of SF for what concerns what is possible and what is not, outright and unjustified violations of law of physics, quantum or not, are frowned upon.
“Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
So, back to my friend, I would say he has three good options:
1- He can keep doing what he already does – i.e., researching in detail what he’s going to write about. You don’t need a PhD in astrophysics, even though you won’t be surprised to discover that many good SF writers have scientific background. With internet and now the MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses) it is incredibly simple – no, not easy – to gain a good grasp of subjects looking otherwise esoteric. In case this whets your appetite, I would recommend Coursera, and some very, very good modules you can take for free. Some of them are doable with normal high school maths – such as the very interesting Astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life (University of Edinburgh) or Confronting The Big Questions: Highlights of Modern Astronomy (University of Rochester). Others, for instance Galaxies and Cosmology (Caltech) and Analyzing the Universe (Rutgers University), require some understanding of physics and good numeracy. (But still doable: I have completed all nine I have found so far, and I am a statistician, not a physicist.)
2- Again, sticking to SF, he can cheat a little bit, meaning he can avoid providing too many technical details and leave the reader filling the gap. The more knowledgeable the reader, the better. This might be an excellent idea tout-court, now that I think about it. I should remember it, if the fancy of writing a quantum gravity novel ever takes me. Of course, this implies that the scant details you put in are damn right, to sustain the illusion.
3- As last resort, he can avoid SF and stick to Fantasy – ie, like Star Wars, for example, that is fantasy in space. You don’t believe that just because there are starships and planets it is SF, do you? Good.
Finally, and not just to comfort him, FTL (and its dismissal) is actually less simple than it might appear. There are now a lot of discussions about the fact that the early universe – just after the Big Bang was actually expanding faster than light. There are the tachyons, theoretical (so far) subatomic particles that are allegedly faster than light. And FTL in space travel can be intended as a result, not as a technique.
(CREDIT: Wikicommon)
With wormholes, or any kind of warp drive, you actually maintain your velocity subluminal at all times, but since the fabric of space shrinks, the result will allow you to travel in FTL…
My friend can sleep safe and sound.
PS. In case you have any query about MOOCs and what it’s available online on these subjects, feel free to ask. I am a university geek, remember – it comes with the turf. 🙂