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Old 06-20-2022, 12:17 PM   #21
Anthony
 
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Default Re: 1822 superscience

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Originally Posted by whswhs View Post
A case might be made that unobtainium counts as superscience.
It does, but it's a somewhat different category, and unlike today, an awful lot of things would fall into the category of "doesn't exist as far as we know, but if someone claimed to have discovered it we wouldn't be too incredulous" -- for example, new elements were being discovered fairly regularly, and prior to the periodic table (1869) no real theory about what elements might be discoverable.
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Old 06-20-2022, 12:17 PM   #22
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Default Re: 1822 superscience

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A case might be made that unobtainium counts as superscience.

Consider, for example, undiscovered elements. Mendeleev made a big impression by pointing out gaps in his "periodic table," predicting that elements would be found to fill them, and estimating their properties, and having his predictions borne out. In popular fiction, this led to talk of "new elements" without any attempt to fit them into the periodic table, which of course is pure pseudoscience (kryptonite being the most famous example). But there were also stories about transuranic elements that postulated that they were more or less stable and had various useful properties. I don't think it was initially known that such elements had no stable forms. So were the postulated high-atomic-number elements pseudoscience (because we know now that they're impossible) or superscience (because finding stable forms would contradict now known science) or superscience in a broader sense (because at the time they simply hadn't been discovered)?
Unobtainium is definetely superscience. Warp Drives are Unobtainium, Marvel's Adamantium or Vibranium are Unobtanium.
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Old 06-20-2022, 12:23 PM   #23
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Default Re: 1822 superscience

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They had hot air balloons and gliders. They understood Newtonian motion (action/reaction). The missing piece is energy density, and is that not one of the key features of futuristic tech levels?
That's the thing, they believed such technology to be impossible. Not surprised, considering that their idea of energy source was what could be produced by steam.
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Old 06-20-2022, 12:23 PM   #24
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Default Re: 1822 superscience

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Unobtainium is definetely superscience. Warp Drives are Unobtainium, Marvel's Adamantium or Vibranium are Unobtanium.
I wouldn't agree about adamantium or vibranium. Both of those are purportedly elements. But we know all the elements that make up the periodic table; there aren't any unfilled slots. And elements off the top end would be far too unstable to be carried around as a shield or the like. They're not just "haven't been discovered yet"; they're "their existence would contradict known science."
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Old 06-20-2022, 01:38 PM   #25
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Default Re: 1822 superscience

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Unobtainium is definetely superscience. Warp Drives are Unobtainium, Marvel's Adamantium or Vibranium are Unobtanium.
There are generally two types of unobtainium one runs into in fiction. One is simply a purely-fictional material that has purely-fictional properties - the antigravity metal (humorously named unobtainium) from Avatar, Dreamstone from Chrono Trigger (also the Rainbow Shell for that matter), etc. The other is a theoretical material that modern science predicts could exist, but currently no samples have been found - from what I understand, negative-mass matter falls into this category. What you describe largely falls into the first category, but it looks like the discussion in this thread is about the second. Both are arguably superscience, but the latter is a bit closer to hard science than the former.
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Old 06-20-2022, 01:46 PM   #26
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Default Re: 1822 superscience

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Relativity is a corollary to Maxwell's equations; it reformulates mechanics in terms that are consistent with the behavior of electromagnetic radiation. Maxwell first published in 1865. Before then, relativity wasn't even a problem for physicists.
Arguably the astronomers first ran into relativistic issues when plotting the orbit of Mercury in the 1840s. Photographs of the transit of Mercury near the Sun kept showing up wrong because classical orbital mechanics don't account for the curvature of space-time very close to the Sun.

Of course, in the 1840s, the most likely explanation was another, unknown planet, and that would have been even more true in the 1820s. And it probably wasn't even possible to realize the problem much before the 1840s at the earliest - Kepler or Newton could have, in theory, calculated Mercury's orbit but both lacked access to the precision watches and photographs that were necessary to discover that Mercury was advancing by 43 arc-seconds per century faster than the path predicted by Newtonian mechanics.

Whether or not physicists could have realized they needed relativity in the 19th century, it certainly would have been superscience in 1822 to suggest there was a maximum speed that can anything could move in the universe, that light always moved that fast, and that the Newton's laws of motion were incorrect at speeds close to the speed of light.
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Old 06-20-2022, 01:52 PM   #27
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Default Re: 1822 superscience

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Arguably the astronomers first ran into relativistic issues when plotting the orbit of Mercury in the 1840s. Photographs of the transit of Mercury near the Sun kept showing up wrong because classical orbital mechanics don't account for the curvature of space-time very close to the Sun.

Of course, in the 1840s, the most likely explanation was another, unknown planet, and that would have been even more true in the 1820s. And it probably wasn't even possible to realize the problem much before the 1840s at the earliest - Kepler or Newton could have, in theory, calculated Mercury's orbit but both lacked access to the precision watches and photographs that were necessary to discover that Mercury was advancing by 43 arc-seconds per century faster than the path predicted by Newtonian mechanics.
The interior planet explanation was in fact compatible with classical mechanics. The relativistic explanation was not, and no one in the 1840s had a clue that could have pointed to relativity. A nineteenth century setting where classical mechanics was true might well have the planet Vulcan, as the postulated interior planet was sometimes called.
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Old 06-20-2022, 04:52 PM   #28
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Default Re: 1822 superscience

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Anything Relativity or Quantum Mechanics is basically superscience for the 19th century. So, our GPS "it's like magic!"
Navigation by triangulation with artificial moons, thrown into orbit by giant rockets! (Gosh, a solution to the longitude problem that no one had suggested.) The details of how it’s accomplished in 2022 wanders into quantum theory and relativity, but the trick in SF stories is usually to avoid trying to explain anything in too much detail.

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Airplanes! Flight was considered impossible.
Well, no it wasn’t. Balloons aside, it was undeniable that heavier-than-air flight was possible; you could see examples by looking out the window. They went “tweet” a lot. How you could accomplish the power-to-weight ratios required by manned flight (which was imagined around this time) was obviously a difficult question, but not self-evidently something that defied the known laws of physics.
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Old 06-20-2022, 05:26 PM   #29
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Well, no it wasn’t. Balloons aside, it was undeniable that heavier-than-air flight was possible; you could see examples by looking out the window. They went “tweet” a lot. How you could accomplish the power-to-weight ratios required by manned flight (which was imagined around this time) was obviously a difficult question, but not self-evidently something that defied the known laws of physics.
I didnt mean ballons. I meant airplanes. "To flight like the birds". That was considered superscience, at least by all engineers of the 19th century. They did thought at the time that, while not against the laws of science, it were against any possible engineering.
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Old 06-20-2022, 05:35 PM   #30
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Default Re: 1822 superscience

Does modern communications also counts? Because they had no way to predict in 1822 about about radio and electromagnetism. So, things they couldnt possibly imagine possible also count? Because anything with electricity would be superscience to them in that case, if not outright magic. Computers, internet and even our limited AIs is nothing short of magic to even the most fanatical consumers of SF of the time. Would those also count? Because our own futuristic ideas about teleportation for example are just pure fantasy for now, but supposing it could be possible for a moment in the future (or even EASY), even if for us today that holds as much value as magic mirrors (such as our phones)?

Wouldnt fantastic tech impossible to predict because there's not even ground to allow such prediction count?

Another example: sci fi with psiquic powers (or the Star Wars "the Force") is nothing short of pure futuristic fantasy. But "the Force" is just as magical to us as a computer connected to the internet would be for someone from 1822 (mere 200 years ago, that's crazy)
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