Abstract
Science proceeds by making a series of testable hypotheses that are progressively more accurate approximations to reality. The best science fiction is simply an extrapolation of this process, and this chapter examines a number of particularly convincing science-fictional hypotheses, from James Blish’s theory of antigravity to the wormholes in Carl Sagan’s novel Contact. Some hypotheses, such as the idea that the world around us is merely a computer simulation, can never be falsified—what the theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli called “not even wrong”. Pauli himself was jokingly alleged to possess a psychic talent—the “Pauli Effect”—which destroyed experiments before they could disprove his theories.
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May, A. (2019). The Relativity of Wrong. In: Fake Physics: Spoofs, Hoaxes and Fictitious Science. Science and Fiction. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13314-6_2
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