Those who recall the first Superman film starring Christopher Reeve will I am sure remember the scene where he is heartbroken that he could not arrive in time to save Lois Lane from death when she falls into a crevasse, if I recall correctly. So what does he do? He flies around the world at high speed in a direction opposite to the Earth’s rotation and by doing so he reverses the flow of time so that events go backwards and Lois emerges from the depths and he can rescue her. This was laugh-out-loud funny bad science.
One of the nice things about the Star Wars franchise is that it makes no effort at all to pretend that anything in it has any actual basis in science. Everything is so preposterous that one has to believe that it is straight-up magic like what exists in Hogwarts, where the normal rules of science do not apply, except now it has even less consistency. At least in Hogwarts the same spells tend to produce the same results. In Star Wars, the Force is a deus ex machina that changes all the time depending the need of the filmmaker to get out of a plot predicament. To my mind, this makes efforts to look at the physics behind it pointless.
But there is one interesting question that remains in my mind. The films begin with the viewer being told that the events take place a long time ago in a galaxy far away. If so, who are the people that we see? If the narration is from the current time, they cannot be humans because we have not as yet gone to other galaxies and the time taken to get there would mean that these events took place long before modern humans evolved on Earth. Given what we know about how evolution works, it is highly unlikely that an independent evolutionary process in another galaxy would have resulted in organisms so similar to us.
One way out is to assume that the films were made far into our own future so that ‘a long time ago’ would still be in the distant future to us where we had gone to other galaxies.
Just for fun, here is a deliberately cheesy short parody Hardware Wars that came out in 1978, about a year after the release of the first Star Wars film. I recall seeing it in theaters as part of the pre-film shorts for another film. It is actually a pretty good summary of the plot of the entire first film.
That’s what fanfiction is for. Maybe Star Wars is in the same universe as Stargate, or any other story in which humans evolved millions or billions of years ago on a distant planet and manufactured new human populations throughout the cosmos. Or maybe the humans of Coruscant are the ancient humans, and we are their creations. Or perhaps the Force just likes the humanoid form and makes humanish beings evolve all over the universe.
Mano, I think the science of Superman is slightly less bad. He is supposed to have flown ‘faster than speed of light’ thus reversing time. However, the filming was absolutely terrible where it does look as if he wound the clock back by changing the direction of rotation of earth (I certainly thought the latter was the idea when I watched it in theater on first release during my high school years)
It’s a storytelling convention, just like how stories set in Ancient Greece are filled with people speaking modern English. The World is Round, a SF novel by Tony Rothman which is set an indefinite number of mega years in the future, has an Author’s Note to the effect of I have no idea what species these characters actually are, but since they think and behave like humans, we may as well assume they look like humans, too.
mastmaker,
Thanks for that clarification. It is true that that is less bad but even going faster than the speed of light will not reverse the course of all events.
Knowing science would severely impede writing science fiction as entertainment.
A Superman comic brought that home to me many years ago. Once our hero found out the bad guys had made their plans a week before in a certain hideout, he simply flew FTL a light-week into space, focused his telescopic sight onto the lair, used his x-ray vision to see through the walls, and read their lips.
Though lacking any degrees or training, even I know too much to have imagined that one.
I don’t mind physics-breaking stuff, as long as it’s internally consistent. But it really bugs me if you set up rules and then break them, as the latest Star Wars did (“Traveling through hyperspace ain’t like dusting crops, boy! Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova and that’d end your trip real quick, wouldn’t it?”)
I also hate it when people in these universes do something that ought to be obvious given the universe, but it’s treated as a brilliant innovation — and then never used again. For instance (Spoiler for Last Jedi) in Episode 8, a ship blows up another ship by pointing at it and going into hyperspace. But if that worked, then it ought to be THE go-to tactic in all space battles. After all, we now know that a warp drive is small and cheap enough to fit in both an X-wing and TIE fighter. So just equip them with a drone pilot, point them at a big capitol ship, and have them all go into hyperspace.
It’s as if, some day in 2020, for the first time someone had the idea that drones could be used on the battlefield — rather than the military looking at their potential from day 1.
Threepio explicitly refers to Luke in “Star Wars” thus: “He’s quite clever, you know… for a human being.” I always figured it s just one of those things you’re not supposed to think to hard about.
I forget where I read it, but one science fiction author once gave the following reason for why human(oid) forms consistently evolve on various planets in the galaxy:
“Interstellar clouds are made mostly of alcohol, and somebody has to drink all that stuff!”
One way out is to assume that the films were made far into our own future so that ‘a long time ago’
They are ignorable drivel. It’s not worth trying to understand them at all.
The Star Wars mystery for me is, if one laser pellet can kill a storm trooper, what good is all that armor? Why don’t they take it off and be more agile? And Good Grief! don’t they get any training at all? Not one of them can hit the side of a barn from inside the barn. One dude with a pea shooter can take out a whole battalion.
Mano @4:
I know you are a physics professor, but how do you know that? ;-p
I agree with cubist (#3). It’s a storytelling convention.
George Lucas was a huge fan of mythologist Joseph Campbell. Many myths / legends / stories begin with something along the lines of “Long ago, and far away …”
Lucas simply put his own spin on this convention.
Kenbakermn @10
“And Good Grief! don’t they get any training at all? Not one of them can hit the side of a barn from inside the barn.”
I love that the last episode of The Mandalorian had some fun with this as a couple of Troopers (played by fairly well known comedic actors Adam Pally and Jason Sudeikis) passed some time trying to shoot at some debris and they kept missing.
There was a cancelled Star Wars novel that would have depicted a colony ship departing Earth in the future, being driven off course, across the universe and through time by some kind of anomaly, and wound up in the Star Wars galaxy’s very distant past were they were enslaved and distributed across the worlds by Hutts and Duros.
Ken @10: My hypothesis is it’s the armor itself. I mean the field of view in those helmets must be awful. Evidence is Finn us a former stormtrooper with presumably the same training and he mows down troopers like a turkey shoot.
My guess is the Empire likes the snazzy uniforms and didn’t really care about how effective they were.
Re: Obi-Wan’s comments about how only stormtroopers shoot with such precision .. my guess is he was being sarcastic…
eternalstudent @15
Mandalorians also have helmets without much range of vision and shoot just fine.I assume the troopers, like the Mandarlorians, have all sorts of tech in those helmets that offset that.
@Marcus #9
You nailed it.
robert79@8,
It was Iain M. Banks, in one of his Culture novels, although I don’t recall which. And it’s odd, because other aspects of the Culture universe provide an obvious explanation. The galaxy is full of technologically advanced species, with the more advanced often “mentoring” the less, and FTL travel is routine. So it’s hardly a stretch that one such species could have decided to experiment by planting humans on a variety of planets to see how they get on.