The Joy of Physics II

In my previous post I noted that riding on a ray of light is an awesome and evocative SF image. It lead little Albert to develop the theory of Special Relativity as a twenty-something. And it now leads me to wonder … what would some other awesome and evocative SF images be?


* What would it be like to orbit a black hole?
* What would it be like to touch the event horizon of a black hole?
* What would it be like to view the universe from outside it?
* What would it be like to enter a higher dimension?
* What would it be like to visualize a quark or a lepton? Or a string?
* What would it be like to step outside of time?
* What would it be like to travel back in time? Or forward?
* What would it be like to be ‘beamed’ from a spaceship to a planet?
* What would it be like to instantaneously travel from Earth to another star system?
* What would it be like to instantaneously communicate to that star system?
* What would life on a gaseous giant like Jupiter be like?
* What would life on any other of the planets in the solar system be like?
* What would it be like to move an object with your thoughts?
* What if any of the physical constants, such as Planck’s, or c, or pi, were slightly different?
* What does an electron ‘see’ when it ‘orbits’ a nucleus?
* What does the nucleus ‘see’ when it ‘watches’ an electron?
* What if stars or planets were ‘conscious’? (Try to disregard the kooky factor here – perhaps there are other forms of consciousness, eh?)
* What would it be like to dive into the Sun if you were impervious to heat or pressure?
* What would the physics of a completely alien civilization look like?


A lot of these ideas are standard issue in SF, such as faster-than-light travel or ‘subspace’ communication. Gateway, by Frederik Pohl, is an excellent novel of what might happen if you touch a black hole. I thought Lightning, by Dean R. Koontz, a quite interesting tale of time travel by someone quite unexpected, though the physics was not too developed. There’s lots of other examples for most on this list. Any of these topics could be made into a short story or a novel, even the more weirder ones, with a little exertion of the brain muscle. And like little Albert’s vision, it might even lead to something revolutionary.