This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Working Title: Nameless YKTTW: From YKTTW
Fire Walk: "500 years ago, people thought that the Earth revolved around the Sun". I'm assuming this is a typo. I guess there's going to be questions re Heliocentrism, but just checked, and Copernicus's papers on the matter were written 1514. So it's actually pretty accurate, which had me surprised. But in 50 years it'll be wrong! That's this trope in action, baby!
Sikon: Yes, it was a mistake. I corrected that.
Tulling: It has been some years since I read Solaris, so could someone explain how the science is faulty? What I remember is that in the world of the novel there is an entire "Solaristikk", a science discipline devoted to the study of the planet. And, of course, an entire planet which surface is covered with an ocean of thinking matter that is capable of making personages from the memories of humans tangible is a fantastic concept with no basis in science either in the 1960s or now.
Fire Walk: Where would Yuggoth of H P Lovecraft mythos fit in? It was originally described as a small planet at the edge of the Solar System. Only this was before Pluto was discovered, and it seems to match the description. Seems similar to this trope, but kind of the other way. And yet, not quite.
Shoggoth: Planet Yuggoth is much larger than Pluto; it is about the size of the then theorized Planet X beyond Neptune's orbit (larger than Earth, but smaller than Neptune). And as far as we know, there is little possibility of a fungoid civilization existing there. Lovecraft was just extrapolating on the theories that lead to the discovery of Pluto (which turned out to be incorrect, anyway).
On another note, the Niven section has an absurd time interval quoted: 10^-60 seconds. That's way shorter than Planck time, in the order of 10^-44 seconds, that can be used in any meaningful way in quantum mechanics. Let's call it the shortest time interval possible as of current knowledge.
arromdee: There's the first series of Star Blazers/Yamato, where the Yamato goes through what's obviously the Kuiper Belt outside Pluto... Only the Kuiper Belt wasn't even a theory for many more years, and wasn't discovered until the 1990's, while the show's from the 1970's.
Sikon: Removed Star Wars, as it's an example of Zeerust, not this trope.
arromdee: There is no chance that Vesta will ever be classified as a dwarf planet on account of being round, because we already have pictures of it in enough detail to know its shape, and it's not round. I changed that to refer to Sedna, which may very well be round.
???: It's not 'roundness' that classifies a dwarf planet. Just because a piece of space junk around the sun might be 'round' doesn't make it a dwarf planet. It must possess enough gravity to overcome the tensile strength of its materials. Hydrostatic equilibrium and such. When and if we find that Vesta minus its giant hole in at such equilibrium, we could easily revise it to being a dwarf planet. Just look at Haumea...it's not very round. There's a wiki article on the subject if you care to look. Sedna looks round though, so it's probably the better choice anyway.
arromdee: Vesta isn't round. We have pictures.
joeyjojo: at the end of the day there's nothing stoping you use a slide rule in the year 9000 A.D. i think that references to dated technology shouldn't be here (Technology Marches On perhaps?)
Cpt Button: I'm deleting the 2001: A Space Odyssey entry. Dave Bowman ends up in a fake hotel suite, not a fake of his own house. He can tell it is a fake because the books are blank inside or part of the bookcase, the drawers don't open, etc. There is no mention of a slide rule. I think the original editor is confusing 2001 with Heinlein's Have Space Suit - Will Travel where Kip recovers in a fake of his bedroom where the slide rule is part of the desk. I did reuse some of the original troper's words adding 2001 to the Aliens Steal Cable page.
Daaark: I can refute all the tv stuff. Modern TV technology still has many signal reception problems, including missing chunks of the picture, scrambled image, and even blank screens. Just because it's digital, doesn't mean it's flawless, especially in an age where most have dishes that will choke badly whenever there is a storm or thick clouds.
Khathi: I think the point is not in that digital TV doesn't have bad reception, but in that bad digital reception looks different than analog one — blocky picture, stilting movement and such, not static, ghosting and faded colors.
Madrugada: Deleted the Neuromancer example. Payphones still exist (although not many), and "a television tuned to a dead channel" is still grey-and-white static snow. He's not talking about poor reception, he's talking about a channel that is not broadcasting anything.
Pretty much any depiction of an artificial intelligence from before the 1960s or so will involve vacuum tubes. Then after that we have transistors. These days, most writers have abandoned this sort of thing, as it's unlikely that even modern microprocessors can support a true artificial intelligence & rely on ill-defined fictional Applied Phlebotinum to explain how their robots can think & feel the way humans can
??? Is this referring to the technical limitations of today’s technology or has descarte Dualism coming back in vogue?
arromdee: The Mars meteor comment was worded wrong in a subtle way. What is doubtful is whether those are really fossils in the rocks, not whether the rocks come from Mars.
{{Neil Tarrant}: To say that Eris was 'going to be' named Xena is somewhat of a misrepresentation. It was essentially a nickname before it was determined which class the object would belong, and therefore in which naming class it would belong. I've removed the sentence.
I'd be in favor of moving half the examples to a new page called History Marches On. —Document N
Trouser Wearing Barbarian: Does anyone else think that we could use a trope for when science marching on ends making something more accurate? I just added an example of this to The Land Before Time page, and I know that there are other examples out there.
Regarding Neon Genesis Evangelion, specifically justifying Rebuild: "Also, there are a number of scenes in the anime showing Shinji's SDAT playing, or reaching the end of one side and reversing the tape (indicating he'd been listening a long time) or whatever. These are quite a bit harder to clearly illustrate with a MP3 player that has no moving parts."
We know Shinji listens to the same two tracks again and again because of the display on his player. Most MP3 players have them too.
Not to mention that S-DAT is not a fictional format: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Audio_Tape
Given that optical disks were invented in the fifties and commercially available (as Laserdisk) since the seventies, and DAT is actually capable of better sampling rate than audio C Ds, I'd say Shinji's casette player is obviously either an audiophile's medium of choice or a deliberate stylistic choice on part of the authors rather than an example of this trope.
Sabre Justice: This page could use sorting... but rather than genre, how about sorting it into various fields of science? Astronomy, physics, information technology...
Madrugada Done and done. Further breakdowns are welcome, I just went with very general fields.
arromdee:Deleted:
- Textbooks, while hardly recreational reading material, are subjected to a constant stream of edits as The Scientists change their minds. Particularly comical to This Troper is the way that Miller's goo-to-you model of autogenesis -and subsequent "miraculous" experiment (much ado about electrodes and gases and whatnot) have been completely trashed by Science deciding that Earth never had the right kind of atmosphere.
1) While there has been some questioning of the idea, it's by no means questioned to the extent where we can say it's probably false, and there has even been some questioning in the opposite direction (see the Wikipedia article).
2) The Miller experiment is for obvious reasons a target for creationists and pseudoscientists, who are very motivated to exaggerate the possibility that the experiment isn't good. In fact, the reference to capitalized "The Scientists" in this quote sound very much like that;.
reason: uhh, I know there's No Such Thing As Notability but this is giving a kook theory WP:UNDUE weight. The existence of black hole-like objects is not disputed, it's just their exact nature that the jury is still out on. The authors of that paper couldn't even spell fantasy right. 21/Nov/09 at 11:26 PM by Fluffyskunk 216.224.124.124 Deleted line 44:
- Not to mention troubles with black holes as such. And that's still in GRT — which isn't exactly a holy cow, to put it mildly (thanks to its problems with preservation laws, attempts to make better alternative continue with varying success), so relying on its specific features too much ain't safe bet...
- That's too bad, too. In the Bob And George universe, there's one dimension, where, apparently, microscopic black holes are used as toilets; it's claimed to be cleaner and less wasteful than flushing.
- Not to mention troubles
T Beholder: 2 Fluffyskunk: While i love overly long rants in "edit reason" too, but you could just say "if it's not in mediapediawiki, it doesn't exist". =)
JET 73 L: Moved from the main page.
- In November of 2006, just after the release of Superman Returns, the mineral Jadarite was discovered in Serbia; it has the chemical formula of "sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide", the same formula (except for lacking fluorine) used to describe kryptonite in the movie.
bill4935: The paragraph on engineering advances seems very biased. Space exploration and increased use of nuclear power are very worthy goals in my opinion. Lofty and far-seeing, but certainly no less far-fetched or more expensive than the B-2 or deep sea oil. Charged words like "Absurd" and "unrewarding" demand more explanation/evidence.
Madrugada Deleted the (misattributed) Skinner section from Brave New World example.
