Turning reality inside out, Part 1

Graham Doskoch
Universe Factory
Published in
5 min readSep 30, 2015

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Those who know me well on Worldbuilding know that I’m a stickler for getting things right and keeping things realistic. That’s why I was one of the earliest — and possibly the most energetic — proponent of the hard-science tag, which asks answerers to back up their responses with reliable sources (e.g. peer-reviewed, published papers). I dislike hand-waving various problems away. It’s a heck of a cop-out, and I’ve always felt that the creator of a world should be able to convincingly explain everything that goes on in it, with the exception of worlds with magic.

How much, though, is it necessary to back up various phenomena in a world? Many audiences won’t understand the subtle mechanisms that differentiate the possible from the impossible, as in the case of tachyons and how they behave (see this Physics Stack Exchange post for more). Do you really need to delve into field theory in the middle of, say, a book to explain why your characters can’t use tachyons to communicate faster than light, even though scientists in your world have discovered them? In this blog post, I’ll talk a bit about just how much rigorous justification is enough.

I typically divide problems into one of three classes: Class 1, Class 2, and Class 3:

Class 1 problems are secondary issues that typically come up as side effects of a certain setup in a world. They’re not the focus of any action that goes onside it. Some pseudo-handwaving (in the form of no explicit attempts at explanation) can be used to deal with them.

— Class 2 problems are linked in some way to the main features of a world, but they aren’t overly important.

— Class 3 problems arise from one of the main features of a world, and must be explained to preserve some hope of reality.

Class 3 Problems

Take a look at one of my questions on Worldbuilding (with the hard-science tag), Can stars exist that are not powered by nuclear fusion? I asked that question in part because I was interested in developing a world that revolves around some sort of artificial star. However, I simply couldn’t think of a way. I tried Kelvin-Helmholtz contraction, accretion onto a degenerate object and other methods (and by “tried”, I mean that I spent hours doing research and calculations). For the first time, I had hit an astrophysical problem. So I asked the question, hoping to get some positive answers. At first, the answers I got were mainly negative; I later put a bounty on the question and got one hopeful half-developed answer (which I awarded the bounty to). I still consider it an unsolved problem for me to tackle.

The problem of creating a star-like object that does not rely on nuclear fusion was one that I desperately had to solve in order to make my world convincing. Whenever a society differs from Earth’s in any way, the difference(s) must be explained. I had a heck of a lot of explaining to do here, and while I had nothing to do so with, that requirement still held. I would designate this as a Class 3 problem — a case where a phenomenon must be explained.

An artist’s impression of the Sirius system. Image available in the public domain.

Class 2 Problems

Take a look at another question I asked with the hard-science tag, How large can a volcano be? Here, I was interested in recreating an environment similar to Mordor in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth. Unlike astrophysics, geology is a subject that I know not much about, and so even after some research, I was unable to figure out if my setup was realistic. I turned to the folks at Worldbuilding Stack Exchange, and I was able to get some pretty good answers.

In the question, I wrote that the plot of the story (I was interested in writing a story here, not just building a world) centered around the impending eruption of a supervolcano. My motivations soon changed to the Mordor-esque environment I settled on, as I abandoned my original idea in favor of a world in which the volcano does not take center stage. Given that possible eruptions would only be of secondary importance, anyone learning about my world would be less interested in the plausibility of such a setup, especially since (I assume) many consider large eruptions simply an enlargement of normal eruptions. Unlike the artificial star problem, where a phenomenon arose that would surely cause people to say, “Wow!”, the volcano issue was less important, and would have been worth less explaining. For this reason, I’ll classify it as a Class 2 problem, requiring minor justification.

Class 1 Problems

Finally, I turn to my third question, Asteroid flux or: How to make a planet perfect for mining. Here, I was interested in figuring out how slightly different conditions in a stellar system would impact future mining operations. This was an extremely minor issue, really just a calculation I was interested in doing on the side. Because of its minor role, I’ll call it a Class 1 problem, the least important of them all.

Attentive (or perhaps inattentive) readers may have noticed that I chose only my own questions to analyze for this post. The reason is simple: The classification of any given problem really depends only on the person who has to solve it, namely, the creator of the world, or the writer of the story. In some cases, there are exceptions; you could hardly call my artificial star issue a Class 1 problem. On the whole, however, it’s up to the world builder to decide just how much explanation is enough. My guidelines for explaining — thinking about just how different the world is from things in our universe, and considering how major a role the phenomenon takes — may be good starting points. Ultimately, however, the decision is yours. Choose wisely.

You may have noticed that I amended the title with “Part 1”. Next time, I’d like to delve into the subject a bit more.

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Graham Doskoch
Universe Factory

PhD student in radio astronomy. Pulsars, pulsar timing, radio transients, gravitational waves, and the history of astronomy.