TOTALLY my last posting on that wretched movie.
Reader: “My favorite moment: Prof.: ‘When tau is equal to zero, who can
tell me the eigenvalues?’ Parker: ‘Point-two-three electron-volts.’ Being
a physicist, and watching it with physicists, all I have is one word:
guf-FAW.”
Me: If the screenwriter had read PRIME OBSESSION
http, he’d know what an eigenvalue
is.
Reader: “Dear Mr Derbyshire—You say: ‘The central, fairly preposterous,
premise that time travel is possible….’ Of course time travel is
possible; I have been able to achieve it for a number of years, travelling
forward at the rate of one hour per hour. I believe Einstein showed this
rate could be varied simply be changing one’s velocity. As for travelling
backward, I understand (actually, I don’t) that certain adherents of quantum
mechanics profess no theoretical impediment, although Einstein, of course,
would not agree.”
Me: According to Big Al (Einstein, not Sharpton), you, and me, and
everything else in the cosmos, are all traveling through space-time at the
same speed — the speed of light — for ever. It’s only that the
space-component of our motions and the time-component are all different. To
get around THAT is some trick. Relativity allows travel into the future at
a speed higher than one hour per hour (as, if we ever master it, would
suspended animation), but it doesn’t allow you to travel backwards. The
most recent physics I have read about seems to permit travel backwards in
time, but only back to the point at which time machines are invented…
Reader: “I know exactly how you feel about Spiderman’s science (although I
liked the rest of the movie.) The problem isn’t that comic book movies only
get to have one preposterous, unscientific event. The problem is that in
Superman or Batman, the main character isn’t a scientist. Peter Parker is a
brilliant science student, Dr. Otto Octavius is some brilliant physicist
who’s managed to create controlled (sort of) fusion. In the first Spiderman
movie, where the science was weird and outlandish, they glossed over it and
didn’t try to explain it (no one explained what powered the glider, what
chemical strengthened the Green Goblin, how that bizarre bomb worked, etc.)
In this one, on the other hand, they felt a need to provide stupid
pseudo-scientific explanations for the fusion reactions, etc. (stablizing
harmonics? Intelligent tentacles?,) even when they weren’t relevant to the
plot. There was no need to explain the weird reaction that had the power to
destroy New York, or even to claim it was fusion. If they had just made
things up completely, it would have made more sense.”
Me: I agree that preposterous science is best left un-”explained.” It
should just be what Hitchcock called a McGuffin — take it or leave it. And
I repeat my point that in a good sci-fi story there should be only *one*
McGuffin. If the time traveler encounters a race of telepaths in the far
future, the discerning sci-fi reader feels instinctively that something is
wrong. (Is this a time travel story, or a telepathy story?)
Pursuant to which: Has there ever been a good telepathy movie? I always
thought Eric Frank Russell’s THREE TO CONQUER would make a good one, or A.E.
Van Vogt’s SLAN, or Theodore Sturgeon’s MORE THAN HUMAN… I’d go with
Russell, for the car chase scene.