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jlf1961 -> RE: How hard is hard science fiction? (8/31/2016 5:58:56 PM)
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FTL travel aside, Niven actually followed Freeman Dyson's theories when it came to ring world, but avoided the sphere construction completely.
Now, as far as FTL travel goes, there have been many theories used by sci fi authors over the years, ranging from actually exceeding the speed of light by sheer brute energy, which if the theories concerning both dark energy and or zero point energy hold up, might actually be possible, sort of.
Then there was the warp drives, which put the ship in a bubble of real space while warping the space/time continuim directly in front of the craft by contracting it, while at the same time expanding space time behind the vessel. Miguel Alcubierre actually did the math that shows this to be possible, vindicating the authors that used it.
So, what was soft is now actually theoretically possible.
Now, lets look at some of the other ideas.
Of course this is exactly what Herbert was talking about when discussing Guild Navigators 'folding' space.
Wormholes, possible, but there are some problems.
1) A singularity massive enough to create one would probably destroy the ship by the gravitational tides. Solve that problem and you are only half way there, since the other problem is that you have no control over where you are going.
Now, a few authors addressed this by having some group of explorers (the pilgrims from wing commander for example) having gone ahead and mapped these jump points.
2) Ships with the so called jump drives which somehow creates the singularity artificially and enters the point and goes where ever.
A physicist decided to play the devil's advocate and do the calculations needed to create a worm hole that will take you to a specific point in space time.
He finally concluded that the ship would have to have a computer the size of the moon (in 1990 tech) just to do the calculations. Basically a few hundred trillion calculations per second for the duration of the wormhole jump.
Then we have those people who have approached star travel as some sort of bastard cross of alchemy, sorcery and physics.
Of course, there is the odd duck that figures that if we could accelerate a ship to 99.9999% of lightspeed, the relativistic mass would generate the wormhole and the end point is determined by the direction and time you had the ship accelerating.
Now the only problem with the last idea is that the mass would only be apparent to an outside observer, for those on the ship, everything would be normal, thus creating the debate is the change in mass real, or just an artificial illusion created by the relativistic effects of the ship's motion itself.
The reason for that question is found in an example using a bullet fired from a gun. The real mass of the projectile never actually changes, but the mass due to velocity does. Thus the impact force is greater than the mass of the bullet (not that it makes much difference to the target.)
So, in answer to your question, soft science fiction is basically soft only because the math has not been down to prove or disprove the science.
I would continue in greater depth, but to be honest, last night I was waking up about every 30 minutes to double check to see if I had been dreaming and my great nephew was indeed home.
He was, is and is presently playing candyland with his grandmother.
I on the other hand have once more learned that at 55, I cannot go without sleep as long as I could when I was 25.
In other words, the brick wall has been hit and it fell on me, then stood back up and repeated the process twice more.
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