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This week: Solar Eclipse Edited by: Waltz Invictus  
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There is no science in this world like physics. Nothing comes close to the precision with which physics enables you to understand the world around you. It's the laws of physics that allow us to say exactly what time the sun is going to rise. What time the eclipse is going to begin. What time the eclipse is going to end.
-Neil deGrasse Tyson
The reports of the eclipse parties not only described the scientific observations in great detail, but also the travels and experiences, and were sometimes marked by a piquancy not common in official documents.
-Simon Newcomb
It's best not to stare at the sun during an eclipse.
-Jeff Goldblum |
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As I'm sure you know by now, there will be a total eclipse of the sun visible in a path across the US next month. If not, well, now you do. I've never seen one in person, so I, like probably half the country, will be traveling to view it.
An eclipse hits us on a deep, primal level. If there's one constant in life, it's the sun; while it is eclipsed by the rest of the Earth every night, and sometimes obscured by clouds, we know it's there. I've heard that pre-literate societies had superstitions about eclipses, and even today some see them as omens, even though their occurrence, paths, and durations are entirely determined through scientific observations. So an eclipse is certainly a worthy event to feature in fantasy, and of course the science behind them can be examined in science fiction.
There are a few scientific inaccuracies that it pains me to see in fiction, and one of them is getting eclipses wrong. And most of the time, the writers indeed get them wrong. So I'm going to go into a brief description of how to get it right.
First and foremost, a solar eclipse can only take place during a new moon (please refrain from Twilight jokes). Once, I saw a movie set in a prescientific culture that featured an eclipse as a plot point. The sky darkened, the moon covered the sun, and chaos ensued. Then in the next scene, the plot skipped to that night - and to establish that it was night, they used a shot of the full moon. But I know two weeks hadn't passed, so I wanted to throw something at the screen.
Second, unlike lightning, total eclipses rarely affect the same place twice - at least twice in a human lifetime. The moon's orbit isn't precisely in a plane with the Earth's, so there's not an eclipse at every new moon - only rarely. And even when there is an eclipse, it's going to affect different places on Earth every time, except in extremely rare circumstances. Even more rare than a blue moon, and don't get me started on that erroneous definition, because we'll be here all day.
Third, no matter where on Earth one can view the eclipse, it's an extremely short phenomenon. No more than a few minutes of totality. This is because the moon doesn't just conveniently stop when it happens to cover the sun wherever you happen to be, and then start up again hours later. I've seen TV shows that get this horribly wrong for the sake of some convenient plot device, and it bugs me - but not as much as the full-moon thing does.
Fourth, not every eclipse completely blots out the sun. The reason for that is that orbits are elliptical - sometimes if the earth is near perihelion and the moon is around apogee, the apparent size of the moon is smaller than that of the sun, and so you get what's called an annular eclipse - a ring of fire around the moon, if you're in the right spot on Earth to view it. That would be cool. But next month, it will achieve totality.
And finally (well, there's a lot more but I'm trying to keep this readable), eclipses are completely predictable: their paths, the amount of totality, and their times down to less than a second. Even some ancient people were able to predict eclipses with remarkable accuracy. So I don't want to see the whole "oh no, it's a sudden and unexpected eclipse" thing in fiction, unless you're using a truly primitive society.
You don't have to make stuff up about eclipses to use them in fiction. There's no need to, because they're pretty damn awesome on their own. The truly amazing thing is that the moon and the sun, as we view them, are about the same apparent size, so eclipses can happen. That's not the case for other planets and their moons - Mars, for instance, has moons so small they'd never block the entire disk of the sun, even though the sun would appear smaller there. And you can't say that for a time in the distant past or far future, as the moon continues to recede from the earth by a tiny but measurable amount.
That we can see total eclipses as we do, with the moon only just covering the sun, is a cosmic coincidence so vast as to be unbelievable if we didn't live with it every day, or have it brought to our full attention during an eclipse. It would be in the realm of fantasy or science fiction for a hypothetical alien culture on another planet.
It's a truly amazing thing. So get the science right, even if you're writing fantasy. |
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Last time, in "Driverless" , I talked about self-driving cars.
blimprider: Hi, Robert. Very thought-provoking subject, but don't hold your breath on the driverless car. Every time a cop writes a ticket, the municipality he works for collects a wad of cash that is a supplement to the budgeted tax revenue. You can't cite a driverless car, and no politician on earth is going to give up that revenue stream.
Yeah, I did give that a nod in the editorial. I think there's going to be pushback, sure, just like there is whenever anything changes. But if there's anything politicians excel at, it's finding new ways to bone us out of money.
Quick-Quill  : I love that reality can mimic SF or vice versa. Remember when flip phones came to be? they were designed after the Star trek communicators. many of the mobile phones continued to copy the Star Trek phones.
Ever see the TV series Boston Legal? It featured William Shatner and regularly dropped Easter eggs. At one point, Shatner's character flipped open a phone and it gave the distinctive communicator chirp from Star Trek. I had to pause it for laughing so hard. Yeah. Life imitates art; art imitates life. I don't even remember which of those came first.
And that's it for me for now - see you next time! Until then,
DREAM ON!!! |
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Fantasy: July 05, 2017 Issue [#8371]
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