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New The science of B-grade SciFi movies from the 1950s

In The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), the hero is exposed to radioactive toxic waste and finds himself growing smaller and smaller. He is lost to family and friends while fending off the household cat and must make his own way in a world grown monstrously large. He forages food from crumbs and drinks from puddles of condensation. In one famous scene, he defends himself against a house spider by using an abandoned sewing needle, which he has to struggle to lift.

Stop the projector! Time for a little analysis.

When the Incredible Shrinking Man stops shrinking, he is about an inch tall, down by a factor of about 70 in linear dimensions. Thus, the surface area of his body, through which he loses heat, has decreased by a factor of 70 x 70 or about 5,000 times, but the mass of his body, which generates the heat, has decreased by 70 x 70 x 70 or 350,000 times. He's clearly going to have a hard time maintaining his body temperature (even though his clothes are now conveniently shrinking with him) unless his metabolic rate increases drastically.

Luckily, his lung area has only decreased by 5,000-fold, so he can get the relatively larger supply of oxygen he needs, but he's going to have to supply his body with much more fuel; like a shrew, he'll probably have to eat his own weight daily just to stay alive. He'll also have to give up sleeping and eat 24 hours a day or risk starving before he wakes up in the morning (unless he can learn the trick used by hummingbirds of lowering their body temperatures while they sleep).

[link|http://fathom.lib.uchicago.edu/2/21701757/|http://fathom.lib.uchicago.edu/2/21701757/]
lincoln

"Chicago to my mind was the only place to be. ... I above all liked the city because it was filled with people all a-bustle, and the clatter of hooves and carriages, and with delivery wagons and drays and peddlers and the boom and clank of freight trains. And when those black clouds came sailing in from the west, pouring thunderstorms upon us so that you couldn't hear the cries or curses of humankind, I liked that best of all. Chicago could stand up to the worst God had to offer. I understood why it was built--a place for trade, of course, with railroads and ships and so on, but mostly to give all of us a magnitude of defiance that is not provided by one house on the plains. And the plains is where those storms come from." -- E.L. Doctorow


Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem.


I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the United States.


[link|mailto:bconnors@ev1.net|contact me]
New Oh brother.
Someone has forgotten that the "fi" in SciFi is short for FICTION. Or, perhaps they've just forgotten what fiction means.
--
Steve
[link|http://www.ubuntulinux.org|Ubuntu]
New That's defective labeling - it isn't fiction, it's fantasy.
Fiction needs a reasonable grasp on reality which very little "SciFi" has. The science tends to be waaaaaay out in left field and human interactions tend to be in a male juvanile mode.

I saw a couple episodes of Star Trek on TV and was dragged out to see Wrath of Kahn when it came out (by a former live-in girlfriend) - all I can say about their science is "Gaaaaaaaaaaaaa . . . ".
[link|http://www.aaxnet.com|AAx]
New Star Trek was never really 'science fiction'.
Roddenberry is on record as saying he wanted to use a space setting for telling human dramas. Star Trek is 'science fantasy', it's just not anywhere near as up-front about it as Star Wars is. Even Babylon 5, which had a more coherent science than Star Trek ever had, was really 'science fantasy' in the end.

IME, hard science fiction is very very hard to do in television because a) the science needs to be as correct as possible and b) therefore the science is at least as important as the human characters. TV executives don't understand that. The recent Battlestar Galactica makes a damn good fist of being hard-ish science fiction, but there is still human drama. So the best hard science fiction is writing.

Wade.
"Insert crowbar. Apply force."
New Agreed - if we can't place the kind of dorks we know
(or are) within a compelling plot via the tools of the trade: conflict, wry twists, suspense - and via fathomable characters we quickly-enough want to care about - wtf's the use of the science also seeming to be 'correct'?

I always deemed ST to be a soap; clearly the focus was upon new? approaches to all those present dilemmas which consciousness + duality guarantee: just as in that other Monopoly game. I never cared 'how' a phaser might work - the Point was: it had a stun setting! unlike a .44 Magnum and other testosterone-crazed gadgets as still pander to beastly reptile-brain solutions for all temporary ego conflicts.

'Course the 'science' has to be plausible, however advanced, but that line can become blurred too, Ex:

In The Light of Other Days, Arthur C. Clarke as-mentor-to one Stephen Baxter:
cheap & dirty devices were created -- invoking worm holes within the techno for the viewing of people/events of the past and present (quantum quiddity?). The actual "extrapolated problem of today" (basis for most-all sci-fi plotting) was that of privacy and its future - surely a real Question, if somone imagines any plausible Answer.

Implicit secondary thesis: whatever becomes technically Possible, homo-saps Will generally and immediately entrepreneur blindly.. wherever a large personal profit appears to ensue. ==>
Can't get rich? why bother to investigate. (Nobody's giving away the formula for \ufffdAspirin anymore.)

(Somehow too, the Atlas Shrugged shtik of the rogue Lone Hero Capitalist has become a depressingly familiar model; as if techno could not survive via the immanent curiosity about a one's environment -- unless each investigator dreams of possessing All the Power\ufffd cha cha.)

What a perfect MO for achieving yan boring dystopia just. like. This. one.
Is "Sci-fi" in a mindless rut, just like political, religio thought '06?
(Well.. not Terry Pratchett's. At least. And it's all still about Us.)



\ufffd Recently, the govt. of India has been compiling an official list of ingredients of naturopathic (incl. Ayurvedic) remedies extant -- to abort the trend of corporations (mainly US, Euro referenced) seeking to patent anything not-yet appropriated. Billy's meta-greed has now become the norm for all those me-toos, each seeking personal Trillionaire status this millennium (or Bust.) Capitalism/mammon as religion -- just as pathetic a plot as it is Live on Trump-TeeVee.


UK should pass a law keeping Terry P. out of any VW beetles, Pintos or other notorious mobile deathtraps, I wot. We have no back-up for this mind.
New Another case of somebody with too much time on their hands
Smile,
Amy

[link|http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?Amy%20Rathman|Pics of the Family]
New They mentioned this, along with a lot of other movie science
here:

[link|http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/|http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/]

They go over 'flashing bullets', breaking glass, and lots of other visual effects.
     The science of B-grade SciFi movies from the 1950s - (lincoln) - (6)
         Oh brother. - (Steve Lowe) - (3)
             That's defective labeling - it isn't fiction, it's fantasy. - (Andrew Grygus) - (2)
                 Star Trek was never really 'science fiction'. - (static) - (1)
                     Agreed - if we can't place the kind of dorks we know - (Ashton)
         Another case of somebody with too much time on their hands -NT - (imqwerky)
         They mentioned this, along with a lot of other movie science - (dmcarls)

Be still, my beating heart.
39 ms