The What in the What-If
Important Groundwork for Science Fiction
Welcome to part two of my own little SciFi through the ages. First I’ll give you a brief run down of the major players (more specifically, writers) in the era. Verne, Wells, and (get this) Jack London are just a few writers who were wetting their pens in the new genre. Novels were starting to give way to pulp magazines, which, in the future, would be the driving force for proliferation of sci-fi. And the movie projector was starting to pick up popularity.
Because science fiction was still a forming genre at the time, there were few novels that can be recalled by history. However, a few very key scientific breakthroughs were laying the groundwork for future novels and ideas that would rock the world. Much of the key work in physics revolved around confirmations and experiments concerning the nature of the atom. Marie Curie was writing about her groundbreaking work in radioactivity. Edison invented the battery, the first way to store power for a later time.
And, of course, one of the most creatively influential scientific and mathematical breakthroughs to occur during the first decade of the 1900s was the postulation of relativity. In 1905, Einstein developed his special theory of relativity, which states that no frame of motion is unique and that all physical laws apply to any inertial frame. Which is to say gravity works if one is standing still on the earth’s surface or if one is standing on a moving train on the earth’s surface. It may just work a bit differently mathematically. This mathematical possibility derived from the works of other strong members of the physics field, including the huge name Lorentz, and Poincaré, a name which may be unfamiliar to nonmath-people (he did amazing work in differential equations).
Many of you are familiar with relativity and the extent with which it has been used and abused by scifi authors. A side theory to relativity is the idea of the contraction of space while traveling at massive speeds, which is not something Einstein came up with, but rather was Lorentz’s child. He was the one who derived the equations that prevent breaking the light speed limit, forcing quite a few scifi authors to develop interesting methods of working around it, such as implementing wormholes or dimension hopping. It is curious to note that Lorentz was actually trying to help figure out that space was composed of a pervading ether. Inadvertently he triggered relativity. Coincidentally, if you come across any tales of ships swimming through space, they most likely came from this era in time. The common scientific theory at the time was that space was filled with ether, and that was how light traveled from the stars.
Max Planck, during the early years of 1900s, developed his theory of quantized energy, which opened the door to countless other minute things being quantized (charge, for one). Believe it or not, this concept has been used in science fiction as a plot device. But we’ll get to those later.
The 1900s was a great time for the scientific community. Technology was on the rise, and scientific theory was paving the way to knowledge of the universe. And, of course, providing shiny for the fiction writers of the time.
