h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I think every man and his dog have seen in Star Wars where they switch to light speed and all the stars blur. Is this bad science? What would you *really* see if you suddenly travelled at the speed of light? I'm thinking that due to the different positions of the stars you'd something very different (or maybe nothing at all?) from what they do in the films. (Ignore the bits about g force turning you into a splodge at the back of the ship )

Traveller in Time calculating 'back of ship'
"The length of your ship would be zero

Lightspeed is constant, whether you are stationary or travel at well ligtspeed. There is a phenomena called 'redshift' to explain the shifted absobed colours in distant stars.

Concidering lightspeed is constant I would guess you see bright stars in front, very dim stars in the back an no stars on the sides. Th eonly thing affecting the starlight is the amount o time you have to collect their light.

Further reading: < A273854 > 'Time Dilation'

Not relevant but fun to read; < A685055 > 'Lies, Damned Lies, and Science Lessons' "

If you were to accelerate towards light speed, you would never reach it, but certain effects would become visible.

First, the stars in front of you would turn blue, while the ones behind you would turn red.

Secondly, the sky would become distorted, with a black circle with no stars appearing - but I can't remember whether it would be directly in front or directly behind you. As you got faster, this circle would grow, and all the stars would appear to move away from it.

But in Star Wars, they didn't accelerate to light speed, they jumped it without traversing the speeds in between. The other thing is that they actually travelled much faster than light. It only took them about an hour to cross the galaxy when at light speed it would take thousands of years. So they were travelling at "above light speed".

Accoding to Han Solo, the Millenium Falcon can "make .5 past light speed" and it made the "Kesseul run in 12 parsecs".

A Parsec is a measure of distance, so unless he's talking about making a short cut through the park, that wouldn't make any sense.

1 Parsec = distance at which a star has a Parallax of one Second of arc (1/60 of 1/60 of 1/360 of a circle) relative to its position in space measured from Earth, half an orbit previously.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7d/Stellarparallax_parsec1.svg

For that to mean anything a long time ago in a galaxy far far away there'd have to be an agreed unit Parsec for the whole galaxy, or it'd be different for each system.

Exactly. The only rationalization I've heard for this line (made by a physicist, not Lucas) is that they could be referring to the Falcon's ability to take advantage of curved spacetime or to curve spacetime itself - e.g. it oculd shorten the distance between of the Kessel run down to 1.5 parsecs.

There has been a lot of talk about the 'Kessel Run' comment in various academic and artistic circles. The main conclusion was that Solo, being something of a wide-boy, was making it up as he went along and didn't really know what he was talking about. At least, that's what George Lucas said. Alternatively, the scriptwriters may have just ballsed up and put meaningless nonsense into Solo's mouth. If so, this was extremely remiss of them and forced Lucas into some dandy footwork to get out of it.

It wouldn't be the only mistake in the series, though. There are a lot of well-documented examples in the saga, including one occasion when Luke bangs his head on a doorframe when disguised as a stormtrooper, one where he calls Pricess Leia 'Carrie' and so on.

I always seem to end up linking to this site, but it explains the issue rather well, with pictures:

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/Spaceship/spaceship.html

And don't forget Obiwan's comment about the marksmanship of the unknown people who attacked the jawa transporter: "And these blast points, too accurate for Sandpeople. Only Imperial stormtroopers are so precise". These are the same sandpeople that could hit a speeder travelling at over 400mph, and yet the stormtroopers rarely hit anything in the entire six films.

Now that's a cool link.

I think Lucas just thought he was being clever by avoiding talking about light years as a time measure, and using other science jargon instead. The Star Wars series is not known for it´s scientific plausibility.

The Parsec thing was a Lucas cock-up - but neat geeky explanations for it are abound which do sort of work.

Luke did not bang his head on the door a random stormtrooper did.

This is 'explained' in Attack Of The Clones when Jango Fett bangs his head getting in Rogue. The idea being that Jango is a clumsy clot and as the stormtroopers were based on his DNA they have the same problem with NOT DUCKING!!!

Sad Sad Sad Sad Sad.
















(It wasn't Rogue, it was Slave 1)

Yes, good call, you have me there. I was too much in a rush to check my facts properly...I nearly wrote 'Rogue 1' so I would have been half right!!!

Ain't nothing sad about getting the facts right. That's what we aim for here.

Rogue 1 being the callsign for Wedge Antilles' X-Wing, if I remember correctly

It's a geek-off! DBE has the upper hand.

Well, I was going to mention that Wedge was the only X-wing pilot to survive all three films and then he ended up in Scotland helping out a Local Hero.

Oh and Wedge was actually RED 2...Luke was Red 5. There was no Red 1 but there was a Red Leader...in Star Wars(: A New Hope)

He was in Rogue Squadron from Episode IV (continuing into the excellent video games).

Atcha Be'atch.

Yes you're right. I was thinking about the Star Wars: Rogue Squadron spin-off series of excellent books, in which Wedge was the main character.

Okay, um, can any of you tell me if Wedge Antilles is actually any relation to the Captain Antilles that C3PO claims as his and Artoo's owner at some point?

Back to the original question for a bit. I highly recommend the Frederick Pohl book, Starburst.

The title comes from the effect interstellar travelers experience viewing the surrounding space from their starship at a significant fraction of the speed of light (a short little trip to our nearest neighbor, Alpha Proxima, if I remember correctly).

It's been quite a few years since I read it, so hopefully someone will correct me if I've misremembered it, but I believe they see a brilliant bright spot before them and everything else is completely black (there may have also been a bright spot behind... I wish I had the book handy).

Anyway, the description and explanation in Starburst was fascinating.