That's the "explanation" Zac the scientist gives us for this effect. If every atom repelled every other atom, no stable matter would exist anywhere.
a terrorist is a man who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force
Yes, that part about the fundamental constants makes no sense. You just have to suspend disbelief. Perhaps they use a Heisenberg compensator.
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If they had a Heisenberg compensator, then there wouldnt be a problem. I'm sure the electron doubling thing had more to it than what he said. Maybe its explained in a book...
BTW, do non-Trekkies know what a Heisenberg compensator is?
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I'm sure the electron doubling thing had more to it than what he said.
BTW, do non-Trekkies know what a Heisenberg compensator is?
That line gave me chills. I knew the implications, and it was just... so wrong. I can't even say it's correct to call it pseudoscience because it underscored the point that this was a different universe, or the same one with different physical laws, so the way matter behaved was an open question. In any event, it scared the hell out of me.
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Maybe this is a stretch but I think Zac is either dead or dreaming or in some sort of afterlife. (This explains a LOT)
Dreams often don't make any sense whatsoever, yet we accept that they are REAL as we are experiencing them.
Its also possible that he is so headstrong that he refuses to put all of the pieces together. Like a man in a dream, he refuses to conclude that things don't add up even though its so blatantly obvious. Like a scientist who has not yet found a conclusion, Zac continues to collect information- refusing to resort to any supernatural explanations.
Its only by the end of the film that he begins speculating that the other characters are mere manifestations of his mind. In contrast, Api drew conclusions about the supernatural right away, believing he was a ghost.
I think you guys are missing something here. Namely, you're basically assuming that the charge of the electron has doubled, but everything else has stayed the same. But -- this was never said in the movie! It could very well be that the charge of the electron doubled, but some other conditions changed accordingly, creating a new "balancing point" and thus enabling the universe's continuing existence (though, losing everything alive during the moment of the transformation).
Basically this isn't necessarily nonsense according to modern science, it is only nonsense if you assume a couple of other things which were never stated in the movie.
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science. fiction.
SCIENCE. FICTION.
or, if you'd prefer, speculative fiction.
gosh. did you like the REST of the movie? i loved it. i own it.
No, simulations have been done about the "balancing point" you mentioned, increasing or decreasing equally all physical constants such as the force of the strong and weak nuclear force, gravity, electro-magnetism etc, and the result was always unstable : either no life or no matter at all.
The anthropic principle is based on exactly that idea, that what whichever constant you change, however you compensate for it, the universe changes radically. Either no matter at all, or no stable carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, iron, nitrogen etc A universe with the life elements being as radioactive as plutonium is not expected to ever harbour life. On the other hand, the anthropic principle, when taken to the extreme, can be thought as if the universe evolved to harbour life, rather than the other way around (life evolved to exist in the universe), which is arbitrary and unprovable, aka pseudo-science. At its core it is a tautology ("We know that the universe is friendly to life because we are here to observe that"), not real science.
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And here I was just chalking it up to good old Technobabble... :P
shareI know this is an old thread but I want to make a correction. Zac does not say the charge of the electron has doubled, he says only that it has changed and is oscillating between two values. He says he doesn't know what those values are.
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That was complete nonsense, because if any fundamental physical constant changed even a little matter would disintegrate, so they would all die at a sub-atomic level.
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Scientists posit that there could be functional parallel universes that look like ours which are being created all of the time, but also have different laws of physics. One of the main theories of this film is that those who were at the point of death were actually transferred to a parallel universe, an alternate New Zealand, while everyone else in our world are still carrying on their lives as normal.
Long story short, this universe that Zac is now in, is an alternate universe with a different set of physics. It makes sense given the last scene where he ends up in a totally different version of the universe, where Earth was just a moon orbiting Saturn.
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*Your* post is nonsense. The universe is not infinitely fine-tuned such that any change in a so-called physical constant would prevent life or matter from appearing. Besides, the physical constants can change a lot while the physical laws themselves change, and life still be possible.
Anytime I read someone mention "pseudo-science" in a derogatory manner that tells me a lot about what they know about science. What is called science is a convention, there is no definitive answer to the demarcation problem, the problem of distinguishing between what is science and what is not science. If you use the criterion that what cannot be disproven is not science, then you have to throw away a lot of the modern scientific theories as "not science". If you use the criterion of falsifiability, which is weaker than the previous, then what is not science is a human convention, not an objective truth. Many people think that if a theory is falsified it is disproven, it's not.
A theory can be falsified and disregarded and yet still be the correct one, because you can never know for sure whether there aren't unaccounted for effects acting on what you are measuring or on your instruments of measurement themselves. As one example, if dark matter is never found it will not be disproven, but it might be considered falsified at some point if scientists conventionally agree to change their equations such that they describe the universe without dark matter, which is always possible to do. Then dark matter would be said to be falsified, it would be disregarded, called pseudo-science, and yet maybe there *is* dark matter.
In the true spirit of science all possibilities would be explored. This behavior of putting down possibilities as "pseudo-science" is not science, it's tyranny.
leo_c wrote:
In the true spirit of science all possibilities would be explored. This behavior of putting down possibilities as "pseudo-science" is not science, it's tyranny.