quote:The rebel ships jump to hyperspace. The passage refers to the starline effect visible from within the ships, and to the transition to hyperspace being marked by a muon flash. Whether this is just poetic language or whether muons are genuinely created by the jump process is not clear.
A wise reader questioned whether starline effects and muon flashes can be seen by characters inside a space ship as they enter/exit hyperspace or only by characters elsewhere in space observing the ship entering/exiting hyperspace. I would think, as in the quote above from technical comments about Star Wars, that no one actually knows since hyperspace isn't a reality. Any thoughts?
posted
I found the passage on the link you provided and read it. My guess is that the author wants his novel to feel like a movie. This is a big problem, I think, and a prime example of why a novelist should read as much as possible. Instead of focusing on the characters in the rebel fleet, this author is banking on the fact that 99.9% of his readers will have seen at least one STAR WARS movie and so he's doing a hack job to describe a scene from the movie rather than writing a solid, stand-alone piece of fiction. Put this one away as bad writing.
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I'm not sure I'd call it bad writing, Balthasar. Suppose someone invented hyperspace travel tomorrow, and it didn't look like it does in the Star Wars movies. Readers of Star Wars books would still expect to find hyperspace scenes described to match what they've seen in the movies. The "Muon flashes" are just the sort of technical detail you expect in a novel.
Posts: 976 | Registered: May 2001
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quote:Main Entry: mu·on Pronunciation: 'myü-"än Function: noun Etymology: contraction of earlier mu-meson, from mu Date: 1952 :an unstable lepton that is common in the cosmic radiation near the earth's surface, has a mass about 207 times the mass of the electron, and exists in negative and positive forms
That's the Merriam-Webster definition of a muon. I don't know if a muon would flash when jumping into hyperspace. I know it's nitpicking, but I'm a partial hard SF fan. At least try to use words that mean what you want them to.
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There’s the conundrum (no, not the maguffin ). No one really knows if there are starline effects and muon flashes, so no amount of reading is going to be definitive. Since there may be such things, it could be realism to include them in a story. Since there may not be such things, it could be simply “bad writing” to include them -- or simply soft SF, which is a legitimate subgenre.
Of course there’s the sort of argument OSC presents about warp speed -- don't use it if you want to be read seriously -- yet hyperspace, which is also a figment of someone's imagination, is fair game even if it's presented "...as safe and fast as the Concorde..." and people whip around the universe as they do on Earth.
What tips the scale for me toward legitimizing muon flashes and starline effects is a picture a Navy photographer took of a jet breaking the sound barrier.
Granted, it happened in a microsecond, but what sort of cloud/flash/whatever can be imagined with a hyperspace entry/exit? Starline effects and muon flashes become more than poetic imaginings.
posted
Because muons tend to decay fairly rapidly into other particles and energy, a burst of muons would almost certainly produce light, along with a good deal of hard radiation. I don't know how much it would take to cause a "flash", or whether "glow" would be a better word, but a burst of muons would produce some visible light.
Posts: 8322 | Registered: Aug 1999
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posted
Actually, Kolona, right now warp drive is more technically fashionable than hyperdrive. Read Dr. Lawrence Krauss's book The Physics of Star Trek in which he describes how it would work, and explains how it really could allow a ship to move faster than light.
In a nutshell: relativity doesn't say you can't move faster than light, it just says you can't accelerate to a speed faster than light. If you could warp space, you could change your location without accelerating. We know it is possible to warp space, since gravity does it a little bit.
There are a number of technological obstacles to overcome, but the biggest obstacle to a practical warp drive is energy. To move a ship the size of the Enterprise a few lightyears would require a chunk of antimatter bigger than the whole Milky Way!
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Doc, that's just what I mean. It seems that SF people, above all others, should ever keep the window open. You just never know when someone will pull energy out of thin air -- as with electricity -- or perfect space travel by bending, folding or otherwise mutilating the fabric of space.
Posts: 1810 | Registered: Jun 2002
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posted
Actually, Muons, which was stated above around just a heavier type of lepton (heavier than an electron, for example). However, they are so small (so small that they pass through your body all the time) that they do not produce any visible light unless they pass through some sort of scintillation material.
For example, I am currently doing Cosmic ray muon detection using scintillators and photomultiplier tubes, and the only way that the equipment can detect these charged particles is because they pass through the detector medium, charge some of the material, cause a "flash", and then those photons enter into the PMT.
So basically, what I'm trying to say, is that muons wouldn't naturally emit light. They only emit light if they strike something, ionize it, and then emit a photon of some sort of 'visible' length.
posted
. . . and "force" equals mass times acceleration. Unless of course you lived a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.
Star Wars writers aren't constrained to give their words that same technical meanings we might associate with them. They are free to choose words that sound cool and employ them for any purpose.
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Rahl, what quantities of muons are you working with? I think that Cosmic ray muons would be...well, quite scarce. They do naturally decay with a very short half life (I'm very sure about that part) and produce some type of radiation. If something were to produce a "burst" of muons, I would expect that nearly all of them would decay and emmit a fair amount of radiation right away. Particularly since...well, it doesn't matter.
Posts: 8322 | Registered: Aug 1999
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posted
I usually get the counts in the thousands for a few minutes. But that doesn't necessarily matter for a "burst" of muons, I suppose. That implies there are a lot of them.
The thing is, I believe the products of muon decay are only electrons (or positrons), and neutrinos (or antineutrinos). Granted, this part of the reaction I haven't studied much, but I don't believe that they have any reason to emit radiation (unless, perhaps, the electrons are accelerated in some way).
But, if these muon bursts happened in the vacinity of some sort of scintillation material (which, in the emptiness of space is probably not likely) then they may be able to radiate light. But I'm just doubtful.
But I'm not a high-energy physicist. This is just what I recall from my subatomic class.
posted
Warp drive...hyperdrive...there would still be a transition into it and the potential for some spatial pyrotechnics. Starline effects and muon flashes could still be in vogue once a ship gets up to speed -- hyperspeed, that is . Maybe the angle of entry of a ship into a warped bit of space causes an effect all its own. Maybe there's a startling absence of effects and stars and only the deepest unsettling blackness. No matter how you cut it, a writer can have fun with it.
Posts: 1810 | Registered: Jun 2002
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It's all simply speculative. The speculative side of science fiction. There's absolutely no basis for making the statement except in a speculative sense.
Actually, it's quite a relief that at least they're not discussing Tachyons, as most the fashion would dictate - unless the Muons are a decay product.
If they'd have wanted to play safer they could have just referred to the "M Flash" of "flash of light". Which would be observable only outside of the ship if using the visible wavelengths.
Obviously, it is a flash of light being observed - but I don't believe humanity in general ever makes an issue of the causation of a light source with reference to high-energy physics, unless being studied. Thus a light bulb is "light bulb", not a "Tungsten Electron Compression Matrix". Sometimes spec fic gets lost in itself.
As for Star Wars - well, really, jet-turbines in space kills the speculative side of the movies. Actually, everything technical does. The illusion of the film is in the visual details, not the technical scope, which is little evolved from 1950's sf.
posted
I didn't say the sound barrier break picture was a flash of light, only that if breaking that barrier resulted in a visible cloud,
quote:what sort of cloud/flash/whatever can be imagined with a hyperspace entry/exit?
. However, your point about seeing the flash only outside the ship was the question my reader brought up. Of course, you said "if using the visible wavelengths," so of course my mind jumps to "If not." If hyperspace is purely speculative, what if there's a band wholly unique to it and unknown to us presently? Who knows what you'd see when and from where?
Actually, I feel sorry for hard SF people. I can't believe they have any fun.
[This message has been edited by Kolona (edited May 21, 2003).]
posted
Don't be silly, my dear. The advance of science has always increased the scope of the human imagination, and "hard" SF writers are on the leading edge of real science that is opening up the possibilities that former generations lacked even the conceptual tools to imagine, let alone explore in convincing fiction.
Yes, I was thinking that you couldn't be seeing many muons if you were looking at naturally occuring particles. I think that you're right about their decay producing both electrons and positrons, which would annihilate each other and produce a lot of radiation should there be a large quantity of muons being produced for some reason.
Of course, this still doesn't explain why a hyperdrive should produce a burst of muons....
quote:If hyperspace is purely speculative, what if there's a band wholly unique to it and unknown to us presently? Who knows what you'd see when and from where?
The problem there is that the electro-magnetic spectrum is very well understood.
Of course, perhaps the laws of physics are completely messed up by hyperspace - they must be if the Star Wars writer is claiming that visible light shines through brick walls.
quote:the Star Wars writer is claiming that visible light shines through brick walls.
How so? They were viewing the effects from inside the cockpit, and I don't think I'm treading on dangerous ground to assume a window/porthole/viewscreeen.
Just had a thought. The windows themselves could have certain properties to allow those in the ship to see the jump effects. If sunglasses can keep out UV rays and prisms can "break" light, why not? It could be an inadvertent result of properties the glass/whatever needed for other spatial applications.
quote:The problem there is that the electro-magnetic spectrum is very well understood.
One of my pet guiding principles is "The expert is not always right or the best person for the job." After I lost some money, time and aggravation because of a piano "expert," and especially after I almost lost my son's life or at least his mental capacity because of an "expert," I embraced this principle wholeheartedly.
In fact, there was -- if not a study, then certainly an article -- about how many, many (redundancy intended) inventions were the work of people not in the particular field. People who not only thought, but lived and worked outside the box, who because of that distance, were able to see with new eyes in a way the experts in the field could not.
Where an expert would say something couldn't be done because of such and so, the outsider wouldn't have such a mental block and proceed blissfully on, sometimes to great success. Of course not all the time, but I had a list at one point of inventions with just such a history.
All that to say, I don't care how well understood something is. I like to entertain the "What if" principle in all its impossibility. No slam to you, Brian, or anyone else who sees the world in strict scientific parameters. We need you, too. But you guys also need us.
posted
And then I just read in a People magazine at my doctor's office about a guy who's teaching physics using comic books. At some point, for instance, Spiderman apparently used his web to rescue someone falling, and although the person never hit bottom she died anyway because the sudden jolt broke her neck. (Makes me wonder what the hard SF people will think about a certain part of my story, even with all the safeguards I put in. ) Anyway, I thought this was neat, so I'm not a full Taoist by any means, Nocturne. Posts: 1810 | Registered: Jun 2002
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posted
It is my opinion that "hyperspace" is nothing more than a convenient excuse to support a fiction story set in a futuristic environment. This is a way of allowing characters to interact through space. I don't think there is enough knowledge of physics to validate whether any of that sort of travel is possible.
My opinion is that it is not feasible, and will never happen. But I am no more qualified to make that statement than anyone else.
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Not that I am a Spiderman fan (I'm not--I think he whines too much. That said, I did enjoy Tobey Maguire's portrayal of him), but isn't his web stretchy?
What I'm saying is that the whole point of bungy jumping is that the stretchy-ness of the bungy cord slows down the impact and lessens the force.
If Spiderman's web isn't stretchy, then, yes, the victim would die from the sudden stop. (Consider two such stupid saves in one year when Spock caught Kirk in his fall from El Capitan and Batman and what'shername were saved from a fall from Gotham Cathedral by Batman's batrope--which isn't stretchy. Both were sudden stops and in both cases people should have died.)
It's a force x time equals mass x velocity thing, and having taught physics myself, I approve--but I still would want to be sure to use the right example.
No problem - I think it was just a communication issue - namely that I would need to have read exactly what you had to understand your query better. In fac...what were you even asking again?
And the Spiderman thinkg - yes, that was Mary Jane who died in the comic. I remember that because I never understood how she could have just died from the fall. Shame they didn't do the same in the film.
posted
When rock climbing, I've heard rules of thumb between 11 and 15 feet. Fall that far before your rope goes taught and your spine will snap.
The physics would be pretty easy to calculate, if you knew the modulus of elasticity of the rope. Barring that, you could make a quick estimate. Suppose you free fall at one G for ten feet then begin uniform deceleration for the next ten feet then stop (i.e. you don't spring back up). During the deceleration you'll experience two Gs, the deceleration plus regular Earth gravity.
Even the springiest nylon rope won't stretch that much. From a 10 foot rope you'd be lucky to get more than a couple of inches of elastic action. Thus the deceleration would be many, many times greater than 2 Gs. If it's tied around your waste you could be cut in half!
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Of course hyperspace is contrived, Alias, just like Middle Earth and rabbit holes and countless other devices fiction writers employ. Those are outlets for the dreamers in us all.
Kathleen, I recently came across an article in an old U.S. News & World Report (Jan.28-Feb.4/02) about scientists working on a man-made version of spider silk for bulletproof clothing and replacement knee parts precisely because of the strength and elasticity of webs. Says "they took silk-making genes from spiders, inserted them into mammal cells, then spun the cell-made products into silk that closely resembles the spider's own." Crazy, huh? Maybe a future Spiderman will shoot webs without computer graphics.
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Goats, to be precise. In fact, they inserted the spider silk gene into their mammary gland somehow or other, so the goats gave (goat) milk with tiny strands of spider silk in it.
So, I don't think that SpiderMan will shoot webbing without the aid of computer graphics, no...
See, Kolona? Those of us that follow the science have a lot of fun, even it it isn't always good, clean fun
posted
Actually, Survivor, I think they started with baby hamsters, and cows worked, too, but goats seem to be the mammal of choice. Maybe Spiderman will morph into Goatman.
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). No one really knows if there are starline effects and muon flashes, so no amount of reading is going to be definitive. Since there may be such things, it could be realism to include them in a story. Since there may not be such things, it could be simply “bad writing” to include them -- or simply soft SF, which is a legitimate subgenre.
. Maybe the angle of entry of a ship into a warped bit of space causes an effect all its own. Maybe there's a startling absence of effects and stars and only the deepest unsettling blackness. No matter how you cut it, a writer can have fun with it.
