MadSci Network: Science History
Query:

Re: How influential has science fiction been on science?

Date: Tue May 29 12:45:21 2001
Posted By: Dan Berger, Faculty Chemistry/Science, Bluffton College
Area of science: Science History
ID: 990211630.Sh
Message:

How influential has science fiction been on science?

Is it true that science fiction often give ideas to new science projects, for example "the time machine" and so on...?


Generally it's the other way 'round. Science fiction tends to borrow from, and extrapolate from, current scientific knowledge, and unless both the current science and the particular science fiction writer know their stuff, the results can sometimes be embarassing. Examples include the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs: the "R-ray" pistol wielded by his hero Carson of Venus, or the "eighth Barsoomian ray" used to make Martian airships float in the air, is almost indistinguishable from the frankly supernatural magic used in stories by Burroughs' contemporary, Robert E. Howard.

Some science fiction writers, notably H.G. Wells, are open about their amateur status in science. Wells carefully stayed within the bounds of popular science and, when he went beyond it, was frankly fantastic (in the literary sense of "fantasy"): the central technologies The Time Machine, The Invisible Man and The First Men in the Moon have only the slimmest of connections with science per se and don't pretend to more: time machines, invisibility treatments and metals that insulate against gravity are purely fantastic and were known to be so in Wells' time. Such modern science fiction writers as Harlan Ellison (Ellison prefers "speculative fiction") follow in Wells' footsteps.

But of course, that wasn't the point: for more, see my answer about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. In science fiction and fantastic fiction, like any other fiction, the science or fantasy is used to set the scene on which characters can interact.

cover of Astounding Science Fiction from the 1940s Nevertheless, some science fiction writers--the genre is called "hard" science fiction--work carefully within the bounds of known science, with some extrapolations. Many (though by no means all) such writers have advanced scientific or engineering training. Often they draw upon friends who are working scientists for background; an example is Jerry Pournelle's "Alderson drive," named for and with theoretical underpinnings by physicist Dan Alderson. (For more information, see Larry Niven's essay about how The Mote in God's Eye was written; it can be found in his collection N-Space.)

The granddaddy of hard science fiction was H.G. Wells' rival, Jules Verne. But Jules Verne was not a trained scientist, and he pulled some real boners. The most egregious example is the cannon used to send astronauts to the Moon in From the Earth to the Moon. An acceleration, delivered instantaneously, that would be enough to send a good-sized object to the Moon would reduce the crew to about a millimeter of red Jell-O. Verne didn't have a very good understanding of free fall, either. To be fair, Verne was the child of his time, and many credentialed scientists of his day did very little better.

The tradition of not bothering to get the science right continued, at least in the lowest level of science fiction, until John W. Campbell took over Astounding Science Fiction and began developing a stable of hard science fiction writers like Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. Nowadays, science fiction writers almost always get the science right; it's mainstream fiction which carries on the earlier tradition.

But back to your question...

Many scientists, especially astronomers, are frank about their debt to science fiction, though some will go on in the same breath to disparage it. I'm thinking of Carl Sagan's statement (I believe in Broca's Brain) that science fiction gave him his sense of wonder, but having become a man he put away childish things...

I strongly doubt that anyone can point to anything in current science and say, "that came from science fiction." The one exception is likely to be the current theoretical speculations about time travel--but time travel is an idea far older than science fiction. The space program was fathered by men who may or may not have read science fiction, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) and Robert Goddard (1882-1945), but who thoroughly developed the principles needed for space travel--and whose work was and is gratefully used by generations of science fiction writers.

The most famous and misinterpreted incident involves a story (I don't know the name) published in about 1945 in Astounding. The story used uranium fission to power a bomb, getting so many details right that the magazine and the author were investigated by the FBI. Not only was the author unaware of the Manhattan Project, he was easily able to show the open-source information from which he had extrapolated his story. The fact was that, far from being inspired by each other, in this case fiction and reality were completely independent, though based on the same published results. By and large this remains true today: if a science fiction writer can imagine it, so can a scientist--but only one of them has the resources and training to make it happen.

Dan Berger
Bluffton College
http://www.bluffton.edu/~bergerd



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