Hey! You Got Science in my Science Fiction (Essays)

Introductions

Hello out there. For a long time, I've been trying to figure out how to make use of my scientific knowledge to write science fiction. I have a Ph.D. for doing the first simulations of rotating black hole spacetimes, wear a long Dr. Who scarf in the winter, and have a long lasting love of things otherworldly. Somehow, though, when I write I mostly wind up telling stories about vampires, monsters, and wizards where black holes are not relevant.

So here goes--I'm venturing into non-fiction, telling you all the basics of how star drives, time travel, etc. should work. Hopefully, I can make it simple enough for non-scientists. Hopefully, I can do it without equations (but there may be a few simple ones, I'm not sure).

So, first things first.

There's a very simple device that writers of sci-fi love to put on their starships. It's called a gravity generator. Very conveniently, it keeps people's feet glued to the deck, allowing them to get around their ship. Truly, every starship should have one, and who's to say someone won't invent something like this?

What you may not realize is that such a device is not a simple thing to construct, and if you could make one you'd likely also have the ability to travel faster than light and travel through time (more about why this is so in later essays). Unless your story is about a very advanced civilization, you should not use gravity generators in your stories.

Fortunately, however, there's a very simple, low-tech way to get gravity on your starships. You can build them in the shape of a ring or cylinder and have them spin for gravity--to use centripetal force to hold your characters to the walls of the ship. Don't leave home without it.

Note: @wdhenning points out that gravity is also simulated by acceleration. If you accelerate your starship at 9.8 meters per second squared (9.8 m/s^2 or 1 gee) you will also feel gravity, and up will be the direction of acceleration. I meant to bring this up.

You can also combine the two methods. I don't think I can describe this without a picture (I need to make pictures for all this stuff). Essentially, though, your ship looks like a bracelet with beads on it, where the beads are living compartments. When the starship is accelerating at 1 gee, it does not rotate and all beads share the same notion of up. When the starship is not accelerating, the bracelet rotates and up is inwards. Does that make sense?

Next time, I'll talk about the speed of light and why it's a much bigger problem than the speed of sound.