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.
124
questions
5
votes
2
answers
381
views
What happens if a very heavy impact hits a person's Holtzmann shield?
The basic purpose of a personal shield is that it's bulletproof, transferring so little impact to the wearer that unlike modern body armour, the wearer isn't even knocked back or winded.
But ...
- 199
5
votes
1
answer
254
views
Do Babylon 5 Starfuries shoot out radially?
I was rewatching some good old Babylon 5 episodes at the weekend and realised something I never thought about before.
It looks like the Starfuries shoot out radially from Cobra Bays at launch, like ...
- 171
5
votes
3
answers
369
views
The Lost Fleet's descriptions of trajectories as 'curves' at 20% of light speed
I find it strange when reading descriptions of trajectories/fleet movements in The Lost Fleet that they're commonly described as curves.
A few examples
From Relentless, chapter 2:
On the display, ...
- 159
4
votes
1
answer
252
views
How high is the Death Star above Endor?
This is part of the answer to How did the Death Star 2 stay in orbit above Endor when it did not have functional ion engines nor a functional hyperdrive system?. The answer is so large I decided to ...
- 13.7k
8
votes
6
answers
8k
views
The Expanse: Sustained Gs during space travel
In The Expanse series, characters experience sustained Gs during space travel, not just during acceleration, which doesn't make sense. For instance, here's several passages from Leviathan Wakes, the ...
- 247
2
votes
1
answer
224
views
How high over the floor/streets is the overhang of rock over Ilirea/Urû'baen?
What the title says.
Image of the city from The Official Eragon Colouring Book
Assuming that in the image the scales are a bit exaggerated, how high do the books say that the ceiling of Ilirea is ...
- 924
3
votes
1
answer
582
views
Physics of Kryptonite -- atomic number, half life, etc.?
How deeply have the comic books gone into what sort of radiation Kryptonite emits, whether it decays, and its useful properties besides injuring Superman. I saw that its atomic number is 126, so it is ...
- 16k
2
votes
1
answer
390
views
In Interstellar, how did Cooper and TARS provide momentum while detaching from the main ship?
Cooper refers to Newton's 3rd law while detaching. I didn't understand the physics behind this scene.
- 31
3
votes
1
answer
335
views
Is time dilation ever mentioned in Star Trek? [duplicate]
I am pretty sure that in the original series, not movies or novels both of which I am less familiar with, Special Relativity is simply not mentioned — Einstein himself makes appearances in later ...
- 16k
-1
votes
2
answers
366
views
Wouldn't a lightsaber melt/blind a wielder? [closed]
This question wasn't identified anywhere else on the site, so I thought I would ask it. Lightsabers are (seemingly) closely related to plasma, which would be the closest tangible thing to a lightsaber ...
- 125
4
votes
1
answer
665
views
How does Miller survive the acceleration in The Expanse?
In The Expanse, when Miller is
we can guess there's a fair bit of acceleration and plenty of G's
yet Miller is unaffected by this acceleration. Why? Is it
that's able to dampen inertia?
- 11.3k
2
votes
1
answer
216
views
Why are ships drifting toward Ilus/New Terra in James SA Corey's Cibola Burn?
In Cibola Burn the ships Edward Israel, Barbapiccola and Rocinante started drifting toward Ilus/New Terra once their reactors stopped working.
But if they had enough velocity, shouldn't they be able ...
- 23
5
votes
3
answers
563
views
Why does 4D navigation work like this?
At one point in Cixin Liu's novel "Death's End", humans enter a bubble of four-dimensional space.
The author explains that, as their equipment is only designed for three dimensions, they are ...
- 7,542
2
votes
3
answers
584
views
Has Star Trek ever addressed the issue of superluminal communication and time travel?
With our current understanding of space-time and SR (presumably, the understanding shared in the Star Trek universe), superluminal travel can lead to incidental time travel into the past. See this and ...
- 987
-2
votes
1
answer
359
views
How did Han Solo use the Maw Cluster to beat the Kessel Run? [closed]
We know that Solo made the Kessel Run in a shorter distance by skirting close to the Maw Cluster (with the help of his Class 0.5 modified hyperdrive and navicomputer), but how exactly does the physics ...
- 117
4
votes
1
answer
591
views
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 ...
- 827
2
votes
2
answers
2k
views
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 ...
- 3,602
19
votes
1
answer
582
views
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^...
19
votes
3
answers
23k
views
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 ...
- 8,658
5
votes
1
answer
425
views
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 ...
- 3,578
7
votes
2
answers
711
views
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,...
- 8,658
12
votes
0
answers
270
views
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 ...
- 219
3
votes
0
answers
64
views
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 ...
- 805
16
votes
1
answer
4k
views
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 ...
- 263
2
votes
1
answer
401
views
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....
- 738
1
vote
1
answer
190
views
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 ...
- 19
6
votes
2
answers
2k
views
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 ...
- 2,878
0
votes
1
answer
1k
views
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 ...
- 101
1
vote
1
answer
271
views
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 ...
- 682
1
vote
0
answers
252
views
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 ...
- 65