Questions tagged [physics]
For questions about the physics of a fictional universe. Questions purely concerning real-world physics are off-topic. Always use in conjunction with the specific work tag in question.
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House of Suns: How do stardams contain unstable stars?
In Alistair Reynold's House of Suns, there is the concept of creating a 'stardam' to prevent unstable stars from destroying nearby systems when they blow up. It says:
A billion or so years later, we ...
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How Did the Space Junk Stay in Orbit in Wall-E? [closed]
In the Disney/Pixar film Wall-E, we see space junk practically covering Earth's atmosphere in orbit... how? If it had been years, generations even, since man had been to Earth, shouldn't all of that ...
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Sci-fi story with the premise that spacetime geometry is Riemannian
I'm trying to find a hard sci-fi story where one of the major premises was that the world has a Riemannian geometry (x^2+y^2+z^2 + t^2) instead of the real world's Minkowski geometry (x^2+y^2+z^2 - t^...
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In the novel The Three-Body Problem, does the Sun's amplification of radio transmissions have a scientific basis?
Per Wikipedia
[...] However, she is rescued at the last minute by Yang Weining and Lei Zhicheng, two military physicists working under Red Coast (a Chinese initiative for alien communication ...
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Is the audience laughing at Dr Alexander Murry's presentation?
In the 2018 film adaptation by Jennifer Lee of A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle, there is a scene where Dr Alexander Murry (henceforth Dr Murry even if his wife is also Dr Murry), played by ...
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How closely did When Worlds Collide authors pursue the physics of the catastrophic damage and planet trajectories?
After writing this comment I thought of the 1933 novel When Worlds Collide co-written by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer.
South African astronomer Sven Bronson discovers that a pair of rogue planets,...
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Television episode about scientists discovering the Grand Unification Theory, as each one discovers it they begin to vanish
I'm still trying to find another sci-fi show/series/episode - it has similarities to the one Twilight Zone with the experimental aircraft (And When the Sky was Opened). But in this one, a bunch of ...
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How did the elevator get to a planet?
Note: while I tried to keep the title more or less spoiler-free, this is about the most recent episodes of a show, so this question will definitely contain spoilers.
At the end of the third season of ...
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How does Spider-Man manage to hold on to his webs?
When Spider-Man web slings across town, the general procedure is shoot web, hold it, swing, airtime, repeat. For good grip, the end of the web line he's holding should be well below the center of his ...
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In Downsizing where did the lost mass from the shrinking process go?
In the movie Downsizing humans can be irreversibly shrunk to about 5" tall. There is a scene with full size people lying on medical beds and soon after a scene where people are in their shrunken state....
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When a speedster runs does everything become colder? [closed]
So I was watching X-Men: Days of Future Past. In the prison break scene when Quicksilver deviates all the bullets, he first tastes whatever they were cooking in the kitchen. So it got me thinking, if ...
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Did Holden just discover faster-than-light communications by the protomolecule?
In the TV series The Expanse, the protomolecule is clearly capable of feats unexplainable by the science and technology that the humans on the show possess:
It can make a whole asteroid vanish from ...
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Peter F. Hamilton Night's Dawn: Zero-Tau technology
I am in the process of reading the Night's Dawn trilogy by Hamilton. I think we can consider it hard sci-fi, since the explanations provided are quite plausible for all the technical and scientific ...
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Do multiple warp fields stack?
Warp cores use a huge amount of energy to create a warp field, and then a comparatively lesser amount of energy to maintain it. At warp 1, this is 20 gigajoules and 200 megajoules, respectively. Is it ...
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What were the power sources of the rings from Captain Planet?
Captain Planet's 'Planeteers' each have a powerful ring.
What is the source of their power and does the use of this power itself cause pollution (e.g. is their use a ...
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