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What We Now Know to Be True

151 statements
28 feature instances
11 referencing feature instances

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What We Now Know to Be True	comment	So you've got this great idea for a science fiction story. There's just one problem: an element of the story is blatantly contradicted by a piece of actual science, and you don't want it to look like you honestly didn't know this. But wait! Science Marches On, right? Science is always evolving, and sometimes what we thought was certain turns out to be incomplete or incorrect. So in a story involving people from the future, ahead-of-their-time scientists, or Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, one way of getting around a scientific inaccuracy is to mention the current theory... and then have one of the characters dismiss it as an outdated misconception. This serves as a quick Lampshade Hanging which acknowledges the departure from the facts, and allows you to get on with the story. This kind of dialogue can also be used when the science itself is in a state of flux at the time of writing—the characters discuss the competing theories, and whichever one "was proven accurate" is the one taken as accurate in the story, whatever happens later in Real Life. This trope can also be Played for Laughs, especially when the difference from real-world science is ludicrous: "People in the twenty-first century used to think that? They must have been really stupid!" Compare Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions (for cases involving cultural or religious ideas rather than scientific ones) and Acceptable Breaks from Reality (for cases where ignoring some inconvenient real-world restriction has become a standard part of a genre). Tends to make a work a softer science fiction.
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What We Now Know to Be True / int_1e9b6aa9	type	What We Now Know to Be True
What We Now Know to Be True / int_1e9b6aa9	comment	Sam & Max had a joke in both the comic and the animated series where Sam and Max breathe fine in space and it turns out "those wussy astronauts just never thought to try taking their helmets off."
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What We Now Know to Be True / int_20191a57	type	What We Now Know to Be True
What We Now Know to Be True / int_20191a57	comment	Bleak Expectations: A Running Gag is things being proclaimed a "true fact of Victorian science", such as how Isaac Newton invented gravity (not proved it existed; he literally invented it, causing an explosion of fall-related deaths), lightning being a modern panacea, and men being unable to sit on a cushion another man has sat on. Also done the other way around when Sir Phillip Bin describes his sister and brother in-law going to marriage counselling, which is not as advanced at it is from the time he's narrating. Therapy consists of the psychiatrist yelling at both parties, including telling Pippa that science proves as a woman she cannot think.
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What We Now Know to Be True / int_20bd532b	type	What We Now Know to Be True
What We Now Know to Be True / int_20bd532b	comment	Monty: In one storyline, Monty spends the night in an old mansion and asks time-travelling Doc to accompany him. In the house, Monty reveals this is supposed to be a Haunted House but "As a man of science, [Doc] doesn't believe in ghosts, right?". Doc replies that ghost were actually proven to exist in 2078, at which point blood starts leaking from the nearest door.
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What We Now Know to Be True / int_2ba1d958	type	What We Now Know to Be True
What We Now Know to Be True / int_2ba1d958	comment	Another episode reveals that old people are used to create energy, just like in The Matrix. Bender and Fry point out the various reasons that doesn't make sense, with Leela just saying that no, it really works.
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What We Now Know to Be True / int_31a48eed	type	What We Now Know to Be True
What We Now Know to Be True / int_31a48eed	comment	In an episode of The Outer Limits, some visitors from the future arrive and meet some present-day scientists. When one of the present-day researchers mentions time-dilation to a visitor she's chatting with, he winces a bit, although he doesn't correct her assumptions because he can't afford to change history by telling her where her ideas are wrong.
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What We Now Know to Be True / int_37aadb6c	type	What We Now Know to Be True
What We Now Know to Be True / int_37aadb6c	comment	According to the Bernice Summerfield novel Down, feathered dinosaurs do not exist, with archaeopteryx being proved to be a hoax in the 22nd century (and other examples not being mentioned because the book was written in 1997.)
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What We Now Know to Be True / int_389ea38f	type	What We Now Know to Be True
What We Now Know to Be True / int_389ea38f	comment	The Complete Adventures of Lucky Starr: Dr Asimov wrote forewords to his novels in The '70s, which are now themselves somewhat out of date. But at least he recognized that Science Marches On and wanted to avoid having the readers of his novels get confused.
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What We Now Know to Be True / int_397c83a1	type	What We Now Know to Be True
What We Now Know to Be True / int_397c83a1	comment	Sailor Sun: "DNA is completely fictional." (Though funnily enough, she's the one from the future.)
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What We Now Know to Be True / int_3ce03501	type	What We Now Know to Be True
What We Now Know to Be True / int_3ce03501	comment	Time Squad is set in a future where there's no more war, no more pollution, humans have cracked time travel and bacon is good for your heart.
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What We Now Know to Be True / int_468bebb0	type	What We Now Know to Be True
What We Now Know to Be True / int_468bebb0	comment	In a Discworld book, Vetinari comments how centuries ago they thought the Disc was round, but now it's a scientific fact it's a disc on the back of four elephants standing on a giant turtle.
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What We Now Know to Be True / int_4c300a8c	comment	Lilo & Stitch: The Series: As revealed in "Spike", you don't want Jumba on your trivia team precisely because of his knowledge of advanced alien science, which often contradicts Earth wisdom. For instance, he gives the distance between Earth and Jupiter as fourteen feet because of "subspace folding".
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What We Now Know to Be True / int_524e2e3b	type	What We Now Know to Be True
What We Now Know to Be True / int_524e2e3b	comment	This very fact is riffed in, of all places, a Donald Duck comic, where Gyro Gearloose has built an FTL-capable spaceship. (Something which happens somewhat regularly.) When asked how it works, he replies that it transforms the ship's particles into tachyons for the journey... prompting Hewey to mention that he thought the existence of tachyons to be merely theoretical. "Oh, they didn't exist until I invented them." was Gearloose's reply.
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What We Now Know to Be True / int_52e8fba	type	What We Now Know to Be True
What We Now Know to Be True / int_52e8fba	comment	In the Mark Crilley's Akiko, (a lighthearted Wizard of Oz-inspired fairy tale in space), Akiko is surprised that she doesn't need a helmet in space. She is informed that Earth's scientists were plain wrong about that, and that you can breathe just fine in outer space, thank you very much.
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What We Now Know to Be True / int_59e65a05	type	What We Now Know to Be True
What We Now Know to Be True / int_59e65a05	comment	The Manchurian Candidate mentions "that old wives' tale" that hypnotized people can't be forced to do things that are against their natures.
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What We Now Know to Be True / int_5d354f8	type	What We Now Know to Be True
What We Now Know to Be True / int_5d354f8	comment	Red Dwarf: In "Holoship", a crewmember of the titular ship reveals to Rimmer that a few centuries after his own time humanity outlawed parents when scientists finally realised all our neuroses and hangups are caused by them. Rimmer, who has spent his entire life and post-life blaming his parents first and foremost for his inability to succeed (before everyone and anything that's not him), is overjoyed to hear this.
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What We Now Know to Be True / int_70814599	type	What We Now Know to Be True
What We Now Know to Be True / int_70814599	comment	The Tollans, an advanced human civilization in Stargate SG-1, have studied quantum physics... "among other misconceptions of elementary science". In the early days of quantum mechanics, many scientists (including the likes of Einstein) were convinced that, to put it simply, there had to be a logical explanation behind the mess that is quantum. Bell's theorem proved them wrong.Kinda. Those scientists thought quantum effects were caused by "local hidden variables": states corresponding to a particle that couldn't be measured directly, but that would show through quantum. The "local" part means roughly that those states "travel along" with the particle. Bell's theorem showed that a theory of hidden variables required those variables to be affected by other variables instantaneously, no matter how far the other particle be. (Note that the instantaneous "communication" is only an artifact of framing quantum mechanics in this way, and would not allow transmitting information at FTL speeds.)
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What We Now Know to Be True / int_77711848	type	What We Now Know to Be True
What We Now Know to Be True / int_77711848	comment	In Journey to the Center of the Earth, Axel expresses concern that the adventuring party will encounter great heat and pressure in the interior of the Earth, which will probably kill them. Professor Lidenbrock argues that the heat will not be great, and they will be able to acclimate to the pressure. He's right. In fact, this was a popular theory in the days of Jules Verne: that the only thing that happened as you get closer to the center of the earth is that pressure continued to increase, until you would eventually get to a point where the pressure was so great that the air itself was forced into solid form, representing the core. It was based on this theory that he wrote the story.
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What We Now Know to Be True / int_8fda7950	type	What We Now Know to Be True
What We Now Know to Be True / int_8fda7950	comment	Matthew Joseph Harrington uses this gag a few times in the stories he wrote for the Known Space series: lung cancer was discovered to be caused by a virus, not smoking, and the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs hit Iceland, not the Yucatan.
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What We Now Know to Be True / int_90c73dda	type	What We Now Know to Be True
What We Now Know to Be True / int_90c73dda	comment	In one of the Animorphs books, the alien Ax is looking through the other Animorphs' text books and comments, "That's not how gravity works at all." In fairness, modern physics is still working out how gravity works on a quantum level. Additionally, the Animorphs are of the age of middle school and high school during the story, so it stands to reason that their school text books would likely cover only the simplified mechanics of gravity as discovered by Newton, instead of Einstein's more accurate spacetime-based formulation, let alone the yet-to-be discovered theory of quantum gravity.
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What We Now Know to Be True / int_a183d57f	type	What We Now Know to Be True
What We Now Know to Be True / int_a183d57f	comment	Often played for laughs on Futurama: In "Mars University", Professor Farnsworth produces a hyperintelligent monkey: Another episode reveals that old people are used to create energy, just like in The Matrix. Bender and Fry point out the various reasons that doesn't make sense, with Leela just saying that no, it really works. And from the episode where we first saw the old people storage:
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What We Now Know to Be True / int_a3fcd166	type	What We Now Know to Be True
What We Now Know to Be True / int_a3fcd166	comment	Parodied in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy. After an explanation on the nature of Magratheea, and how its inhabitants routinely made planets, the Guide finishes this explanation with: "Of course, in these enlightened days, no-one believes a word of it."
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What We Now Know to Be True / int_c43df4d8	comment	Doctor Who, "Shada":
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What We Now Know to Be True / int_c6f7e804	type	What We Now Know to Be True
What We Now Know to Be True / int_c6f7e804	comment	Blake's 7 pulls a two-for-one example in the pilot episode, when the cast discover that their newly acquired spacecraft goes really, really fast:
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What We Now Know to Be True / int_d4a00292	comment	In Queen of Outer Space, the four astronauts find themselves accidentally on an Earthlike planet; examining its exact gravity level, they determine that they must be on Venus. The junior astronaut says, "What about all those lectures we got about Venus having an unbreathable atmosphere and a horribly high temperature?" The doctor says, "Yes, I formulated most of those theories myself. It seems I was wrong."
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What We Now Know to Be True / int_d5505073	comment	The advanced aliens in the Uplift universe have nothing but contempt for the Earth concept of the continuum, and thus for any science not based on discrete mathematics. This may be justified, since even some contemporary Earthlings regard the continuum as a useful shortcut that we can forget about once we have sufficient computing power. Except this is just a trap for Galactic races, laid out by founders of this society — they didn't want to be bothered by children, so they limited they scientific abilities to make them unable to reach them.
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What We Now Know to Be True / int_dd3fe595	type	What We Now Know to Be True
What We Now Know to Be True / int_dd3fe595	comment	Atlas Shrugged: Galt's engine is called out as working on a new principle and proving several laws of physics to be false. Unkind people have suggested it harnesses the power of Plot.
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What We Now Know to Be True / int_e970c492	comment	Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venusnote written in 1954, before astronomers had a clear idea of what the surface of Venus was like: Lucky mentions that "until the late 1900s astronomers thought Venus had no water. When ships began to land, mankind found that wasn't so." Republishing the book under his own name in 1978, Dr Asimov explained the developments in the 1960s which established the lack of any liquids and almost zero water vapour.
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What We Now Know to Be True / int_fc612179	type	What We Now Know to Be True
What We Now Know to Be True / int_fc612179	comment	In the Skylark of Space stories by E. E. "Doc" Smith, the titular spaceship travels faster than the speed of light, and does it without any special phlebotinum for the purpose; it just accelerates until it's going faster than light. The crew is surprised that they can do this, and conclude that, gosh darn it, Einstein was simply wrong.
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The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

What We Now Know to Be True	processingCategory2	Speculative Fiction Tropes
What We Now Know to Be True	processingCategory2	Tropes on Science and Unscience
Aeon Entelechy Evangelion / Fan Fic / int_dd509c96	type	What We Now Know to Be True
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home / int_dd509c96	type	What We Now Know to Be True
Journey to the Center of the Earth / int_dd509c96	type	What We Now Know to Be True
Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus / int_dd509c96	type	What We Now Know to Be True
The Complete Adventures of Lucky Starr / int_dd509c96	type	What We Now Know to Be True
The Manchurian Candidate / int_dd509c96	type	What We Now Know to Be True
Symphony of Science (Web Video) / int_dd509c96	type	What We Now Know to Be True
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (Webcomic) / int_dd509c96	type	What We Now Know to Be True
Atlas Shrugged / int_dd509c96	type	What We Now Know to Be True

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