Willing Suspension of Disbelief
 Image courtesy Amazon "The Core" bombed at movie theaters in part because it broke the laws of science fiction. |
There is a principle in movie making called "the willing suspension of disbelief," in which moviegoers can accept a certain level of implausibility in favor of the story. For example, fantasy stories rely on magic and readers and viewers accept this. This also happens with some science fiction stories. For example, the work may be dated. Jules Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth" was written before geologists knew anything about the internal structure of the Earth or plate tectonics, so you can suspend belief and enjoy the story. Finding the line at which viewers are unwilling to suspend their belief can be tricky.
So, science is important to make a work of science fiction and authors and film makers should strive to make the science in their works as real as possible. If the science is not real, the responses can vary. Some viewers may be willing to suspend their disbelief. "Star Wars" fans are certainly willing to suspend disbelief. However, if the science is too "out there," Viewers can be turned off. "The Core" was so unbelievable that it bombed at the box office. How filmmakers choose to tackle the believability factor could mean the difference between a success and a bomb.
- Science fiction stories are those in which some aspect of future science or technology is so integral to the story that, if you take away the science or technology, the story collapses.
Image courtesy Amazon - Science fiction writers are free to extrapolate from today's knowledge or to invent anything they can imagine ?so long as no one can prove that what they have "imagined" is wrong.
Bova and Lewis's second law gives science fiction authors great license. Let's examine how this law works with a common science fiction film problem. The distances between stars in the galaxy are vast (light years and parsecs). So, for characters to travel among the stars in a reasonable time, they must travel faster than light. But Einstein's theory of special relativity places the speed of light (300,000 km/s) as the cosmic speed limit. Nothing that has mass can travel as fast as light because it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate it to the speed of light, and the mass would increase infinitely. Science-fiction authors have invented ways around this problem, such as "warp drives" that distort space on "Star Trek." These methods enable the characters to traverse the great distances without incurring the penalties of relativity (increases in mass, shortened lengths, time dilation). In fact, these inventions have stimulated theoretical physicists to explore them. So far, none of these ideas can be disproved and have become staples of science fiction.
