SIO349: Thomas and an Astrophysicist See a Star War

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:17 Thomas: Welcome to Serious Inquiries Only episode 349. I'm Thomas. And thank you so much for listening. Thank you so Much for tuning in. Right. Here's the episode I teased last time. It was already available for patrons. So, you know, a little nudge, patreon.com/seriouspod, where you can get ad for, by the way, ad free episodes, probably the most important part. You don't want the ads. Come on. Tell the ad company, but the ads suck. No ads. It's great. It's a good deal.

But also early episodes and hopefully other stuff, TBA. Speaking of early episodes, the next episode is out for patrons and it is a really fun episode on ADHD with none other than Stormy Decisis. Dr. Alan Smirbeck, but you may recognize Stormy's name, a little pseudonym, I guess. So, And more on that on the Patreon, but just wanted to give a little teaser. In the meantime, so glad that you all get to hear this episode.

This is a fantastic breakdown of some physics, some astrophysics in Star Wars that Last Jedi. Of fun. And I am excited for you to get to know and listen to Brian. There is lots more astrophysics recorded and ready. It's really good, it's really fun. So, so much to look forward to on the show. But again, just thank you so much for listening and sticking with me. And now let's get on over to Brian and I going and seeing a Star War.

0:01:39 Thomas: I am joined by Dr. Brian Gilliss. How are you doing today, Brian?

0:01:42 Bryan: Doing very well, thank you, Thomas. How are you doing?

0:01:44 Thomas: I'm doing great. I'm so pleased that you reached out and I'm happy to do this recording. I am so excited. So Brian reached out, and had a great idea to to record about Star Wars, the second one of the new ones, which is called The Last Jedi, and some of the, you know, probably less than stellar astrophysics going on in there. Am so excited about this, but I want to ask you a few questions about yourself. So can you introduce yourself to the audience a little bit?

0:02:10 Bryan: So I'm Brian Gillis. I'm a Canadian -American -British astrophysicist. That's roughly in order of life experience, though it gets a bit complicated in the middle. Born in Canada, raised in the U.S. for the longest time around the Chicago area, Went back to Canada for university, bachelor's, master's, and PhD, studying at University of Waterloo, which, if you don't know about it, is is a very big math and science and computer programming university just about an hour outside of Toronto. That, I went around applying for jobs in astrophysics and ended up getting one at the university of Edinburgh. Edinburgh. So I moved over to Scotland to work and my workplace is actually at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, where the university rents out space. And yeah,

0:02:57 Thomas: Okay. OK, so I saw you say in your email, I happen to be an astrophysicist at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh. And I would have to say I imagine a big tower and then you sit in like a chair that's and it's a Royal Observatory. So I assume it's like a throne type chair. And then there's a big old eyepiece that like comes down from the ceiling and you glance in it every once in a while to look at like, I don't know, stars or planets or whatever crap. And then you, like, jot some indecipherable notes down. Is that how close to your day-to-day job is my description, would you say?

0:03:13 Bryan: Yeah. Okay. Take out the throne and all of that is there. I'm just not the one doing it. So it's a decently sized workplace. We've got got a few hundred people working, originally it was a observatory, um, actually the first in Edinburgh, they built one in the city center, which anyone who knows anything about astronomy trying to look at the stars from the city centre is not exactly the best idea yeah, so as the city built out, they realized, okay, this really isn't working, uh, then Then, oh,

0:03:35 Thomas: Okay, okay. Yeah, not a great idea. I want to picture one, like disgruntled astronomer, like guys, can you stop building? I had the perfect spot. Okay, I'll move. Fine. I'll moved. Hey, did you know that my wife and I just visited Edinburgh?

0:04:07 Bryan: Yeah, yeah. Yeah I do remember you mentioning you went up to visit Scotland.

0:04:16 Thomas: Beautiful place. Absolutely. So you get to live in that beautiful place all the time is what you're telling me. Ah, it's

0:04:17 Bryan: Oh. And work in it too. So the Royal Observatory, they built it outside the city at the time. Though the city has since expanded so it's now once again inside the city.

0:04:30 Thomas: The same guy. Damn it. Okay. All right. I'll move again.

0:04:34 Bryan: Yeah, except it's a hundred years on so now he's got a really long grey beard.

0:04:37 Thomas: it'S still the same. Same guy. Yeah.

0:04:38 Bryan: Yeah, yeah same guy, longer beard.

0:04:39 Thomas: There's like 300. Yeah.

0:04:40 Bryan: Yeah. So this one is out on Blackford Hill on the south side of the city and a gorgeous place. When you drive home from work every day, you get a view of Arthur's Seat, this big extinct volcano that's right in the center of Edinburgh. So it's an amazingly gorgeous place to work.

0:04:56 Thomas: A great place. Like, like true. This was, you know, again, not the topic of the show, but Edinburgh, you My friends at Puzzle and the Thunderstorm went there for a live show a while back, and it was one of those trips where every single one of them was like, you have to go to Edinburgh. There's some places we go and they're like, eh, Manchester, you don't have to. Don't go out of your way to go Manchester. They're like you have go to edinburgh. And I'm so glad we finally did because it truly is like when you actually go there, it's just beautiful. So you're very lucky. I'm very jealous. Us. I'm also trying to gauge, you know, you said Canadian, American, British,

0:04:57 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. So,

0:05:32 Thomas: I'm trying to gauge like how polite that means you are, you know, like are you apologizing 50% of the time, the full -on sorry, sorry, you know, but that gets mitigated by the American.

0:05:40 Bryan: It's been enough that, um, most of the Canadian is built in, me, and, uh, it surprising how true that stereotype is. When I was going to university in Canada, I once caught myself apologizing to a goose, which is basically the most Canadian thing possible, um,

0:05:56 Thomas: I do apologize to my cat all the time in ways that I'm sure it doesn't understand. Right, well, this is super cool. Anything else about your bio that you think listeners may want to to hear or know about?

0:06:06 Bryan: Just a bit specifics of my work, so I'm actually working on the Euclid Space Telescope project, uh, uh, you may have heard of the James Webb Space Telescope, which went up just in the last year. So to lay out the difference, the James Web is aimed at looking deep into the universe and going as far back in time as possible and getting good pictures of that. And the Euclid is trying to go wide and get as much as possible. Now, this does mean it's not going to give as fascinating of pictures, but it gives useful scientific data in a very different way.

And so what we're planning to do is basically take the broad data from as much of the sky as possible, we're able to get useful data from around a third of the sky, and then boil it down, put it through massive coding pipelines, and come out with a few numbers in the end which characterize what we call the equation of state of the universe, which is just basically trying to figure out what dark matter is. If we can demonstrate that it looks like it isn't one thing, or is consistent with what

0:06:14 Thomas: Sure. Oh yes. Yeah.

0:07:12 Bryan: We call a cosmological constant, which, if anybody's looked the history of relativity, you might have heard that term come up

0:07:17 Thomas: Oh, these are all, these are all my favorite things just as a science like enthusiast that I love reading about and learning about. I got to say two notes. First off, I've thought of 900 other topics we could talk about on the show in addition to movies. And secondly, That old Scottish man who keeps building his observatory has got to be his mind blown at this point. Like, holy shit, what are you talking about with this wide field? He's just had one, like, you know, a couple lenses. I was like, what is all everything you just said, I guess. This is, I'm, this has outgrown me, I'm done. So cool, though. I never thought about the idea of like a super wide field. I didn't even know that existed. I thought you just had to move the telescope around forever to try to look at different parts of the sky.

0:07:19 Bryan: Yeah oh yeah I've got my own list yeah you There are some of that, usually it doesn't take the whole sky at once, it takes a lot of individual pictures, and so it is a lot of moving. Although there are different types of telescopes that do it differently, some of the ones on earth just take advantage of earth's rotation and take pictures, let earth rotate and just do a streak across the sky. Most of them do move on their own and then we just piece together lots, lots of individual pictures.

0:08:09 Thomas: Right.

0:08:21 Thomas: And the ones on earth, I think, are you really contending with the stupid internet satellite thing that Elon Musk did, or whatever that's ruining all. So lots of telescope talk for another time. That's super fascinating and I can't wait.

0:08:21 Bryan: Oh, Yeah. Yes. Definitely. Yes.

0:08:34 Clip: Here's some money. Go see a Star War.

0:08:37 Thomas: We see a Star War? What do you think?

0:08:39 Bryan: Okay, us set the scene. According to the opening scrawl, this is sometime after the end of the Force Awakens. Uh Empire the used Star Killer Base to destroy the central planets, the New Republic. Uh Star Killer Base was then destroyed afterwards before it could wreak any more havoc. And then according according to the plot summary, shortly after this, the entire New Republic has collapsed and the Empire is once again in charge. So it's a bit unclear what they mean by "shortly after," but we're basically back in the setting of the original trilogy of movies.

0:09:14 Thomas: Yeah, let me translate. They remade the first Star Wars again for the first time And they killed the Death Star again, and there's a lovable droid again, and all that stuff. I'm going to not turn this into not liking Star Wars, because I do want to say this one was my favorite to the new ones, The Last Jedi. Now, all the inaccuracies of physics aside, this was probably my favorite one. And then the third one, what they did was they're like, "Hey, everything good for the second one? Let's undo that and say nevermind. Nuh-uh. Reverse. Forget that."

0:09:19 Bryan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the thing that gets me as I one, a lot of the science, it threw me off too much to really enjoy it. But I can appreciate what it was trying to do. It was basically doing the same thing as The Empire Strikes Back. You had your first movie, the rebels are victorious. Now the empire comes in and they're winning everything in the second act. The rebels, or resistance, as they're called, trying right things but largely failing, and the best they can hope for is that some of them survive and a little character growth along the way. And sure, that's a great premise for the middle movie of a trilogy, and looked into the reviews of this, and there was a critical that this was, uh, the audience reception was very positive, and then for some reason Disney turned around on it and undid

0:09:46 Thomas: So frustrating. Yeah.

0:10:03 Thomas: Yeah, yeah.

0:10:33 Thomas: Look,

0:10:34 Bryan: Everything, um,

0:10:35 Thomas: I'm going to try to not waste too much of your time with my opinions, but the If I were to distill one thing, I watched this movie again, not a huge fan of the reboots, but I was like, all right, I'm here, along for the ride, this could be fun. I loved getting to see Luke one last time. I love that we got to see Leia, some, you know, before shortly before she passed away, super cool. But like, the, my favorite thing of this movie, honest to God, my favorite thing was like, I love how Rey is like, who am I, who are my parents, or whatever, and then Adam Driver is like, nobody, you're, you're nobody. I love that because I love the message Of like, yeah, yeah, you don't have to be some fucking aristocracy.

0:10:35 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah,

0:11:09 Thomas: You could just be anybody.

0:11:09 Bryan: That could have been so good.

0:11:11 Thomas: And even the message of the movie, you know, it was a little corny, but you see the kid in the, you know like the stables or whatever, the space stables. I don't know what that was. And he's like sweeping, sweeping up, you Know? And I love that message. And then the third one, we're like, oh no, sorry. You actually do have to part of a dynasty of aristocracy to do anything in this universe. Terrible. So frustrating. Still mad about that, Brian. I'm okay. I'm going to set it aside. Side, I'm as mad about that as you are about the physics, so let's get to the physics and we'll we'll both be mad. Yeah.

0:11:15 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. One Yeah! Okay. Yep. Okay. So the movie opens with the space battle, classic Star Wars, and you know, one thing to say about Star Wars is it doesn't really care about the physics and it isn't trying to accurately represent space battles at all, and I'm not gonna rag it for that. If do care, there are a lot of little things that stand out, like in the battles, whenever something gets destroyed, it falls downwards.

0:11:49 Thomas: Right. I Love I love this, I love it, it's it's such a like, I love those things in movies where you're like, okay, that doesn't make any sense, but the human brain like wants to see that, you know, we're like, oh, that ship is hurt, so it's gotta fall because it's got an owie, it's it's got to go like, ah, my ship knee. Ah, you got, you know? And I was just thinking like, it's funny to imagine, what if in this universe, there's actually a massive planet way below everybody. Like it's just, it's just one huge planet, and they're always engaging their fuel to stay slightly, you don't like to stay in orbit. And then when they get disabled, they start falling into this like super massive planet billions of light years away.

0:12:03 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:12:46 Bryan: That does does explain a lot of Star Wars pretty well. Because the way they set up the battles more resemble air battles on Earth than they would space battles. And particularly if you go back to A New Hope and the Death Star run, that was deliberately based off of, you know, planes running in a trench on Earth. And so if you think, okay, this is just air battles in a space theme, I get what you're trying to do, fine. I'm not going to rag on all the little points that

0:13:09 Thomas: Way. Yeah. I love how aerodynamic their spaceships are. Does that ever bother you? We're like, wow, they've got a lot of aerodynamics. I guess in the Star Wars universe, they do fly kind of in and out of atmosphere, I suppose. Yeah, yeah, sure.

0:13:17 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. Well, Yeah. When you're going in and out, it makes sense. Um, and you know, some of the ones that are always up in space don't look very aerodynamic, so this Um, and also when the story is good enough, sometimes even I don't don't notice what's going wrong with the physics, like in this first scene, uh, they're trying to bomb one of the Empire's dreadnoughts. And they are able to successfully open the doors and let the bombs fall out. And the first time I was watching, I didn't even realize, okay, this is space. Why are they falling out? You know, thinking about it more, I can maybe give them credit. Okay, they've got artificial gravity inside the ship that pushes them out. And then they go the rest of the way. So

0:13:32 Thomas: Okay. Give them credit. Give Yeah yeah.

0:14:03 Thomas: Why Biggest things, actually, that when I read it one time or some I heard some physicists say it, that's one that it's hard to unsee where it's like, yeah, thing every space movie does, virtually all of them, except for like a choice few tiny ships. Somehow there's still gravity inside, you know, like even even when they try to explain the gravity in bigger ships. Oh, there's a you know there's an artificial gravity unit that's like this giant thing. But in the small ships, they should just be floating around like. But no, no, they got like a cup of coffee there that they're drinking in the smaller ship.

Totally fine. But I do want to say, you already said this, but I do wanna say, this is just, for me anyway, this is all in good fun. I don't say that like, oh, okay, the movie sucked because of this. I do think that movies should try a little hard. Like I think we all draw our lines and my line is, don't too insane with the physics. Like I'll go along with you for fun, but if you go like totally nuts, then I'm like, all right, that's too far. But yeah, this isn't, for and me, anyway, is Just for Fun. I love learning the real science

0:14:18 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:14:58 Thomas: Behind movie things. Things.

0:14:59 Bryan: And I think, um, of the reasons I like, I looking, uh, into it is some of the times it gets the physics wrong, it's bad enough that you don't even need a physics background to notice it. It kind of violates how we think reality should work, and once that's in your brain, it's just like, oh, but why don't they just do this. And I, I think that's the biggest flaw in this. It isn't something super subtle that they got wrong, and And also, from another angle, it isn't something that they, they deliberately got wrong, like theming the space battles like they're air battles. They do that on purpose. You know, having the Force, that completely violates physics. But you don't have Star Wars if you don't have the Force.

0:15:07 Thomas: Yeah. Sure.

0:15:37 Thomas: Hey, I'll go with your world. I'll go with whatever your world is. If your world is like, yeah, in this world you have the force. Okay, that's fine. In a different universe. We don't know the physics of that universe, but when it's implied that the rest of physics should be the same as our physics, besides the force, that is where you have a problem.

0:15:39 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyways, starts we're out, we've got a to try to bomb a Dreadknight. It succeeds, but at great cost. And the rebels are fleeing from it. And this sets up the main bulk of the movie, where you've got the Imperial fleet led their flagship, which if you look in the source materials, it's called the Supremacy. And the rebels have three main ships. Their flagship is called the Raddus, named after some famous calamari. There's a ridiculous amount of detailed Star Wars source material. Yeah.

0:16:06 Thomas: Yeah, you're On your own there. I got got nothing for You sorry.

0:16:27 Bryan: Yeah. I'm Just gonna say for when I'm using the all the names of the ships, those are the ones I'm talking about. Supremacy, that's obviously the Empire, and then Radis, obviously the other one. So there's uh a quote here that um sums up the presence of it. Uh, Hux is on the bridge of the Supremacy asking one other guy there what's going on. And he says about the resistance fleet, "Well, they're faster and lighter. They can't lose us, but they can keep at a range where our cannons are ineffective against their shields."

0:16:28 Thomas: Yeah.

0:17:00 Thomas: Faster.

0:17:01 Bryan: And that one line basically sets up the next arc of the movie, Explains why.

0:17:04 Thomas: And Lighter. Yeah.

0:17:06 Bryan: It is. And I gonna jump forward an hour in the movie, Luke Skywalker says something which I think works here. "Every word of what you just said was wrong."

0:17:14 Thomas: They're Lighter and faster, okay, so they accelerate. I'm trying to, you know, I'm not the physicist, but that would tell me, okay, they accelerate faster, you would think they get away faster and then I don't know, you know, if it's true that like the giant ship has more, you know, could have more like sustained acceleration, possibly that takes it longer to get going, but in this world they can just hit a little boop and then they're in the hyperspace. So I don't really know how that's supposed.

0:17:19 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh. Yeah. They set that up in the film. The part of the premise is that the Empire figured out a way to track the rebels through, through hyperspace, and they only have enough fuel for one jump. And so if they use up that fuel on a jump and get tracked, there's nothing they can do.

0:17:55 Bryan: So they're looking for some other solution. So the plot breaks down that the main fleet, Leia gets knocked unconscious early and Admiral Holdo takes over, comes on board. She doesn't tell any of the heroes what her plans are, but secretly her plan is to lead the fleet off to an old abandoned rebel base where they can bunk down and have a defensible position. Um, the best plan, but it's what she has available. And then if we follow our heroes, Finn uh meets up with a mechanic named Rose, um, they brainstorm a little and come to the idea that there must be exactly one tracking device on uh Imperial, Imperial Flagship, which is tracking them. And I'm not sure if they don't explain this well, or it just doesn't make sense what they're trying to do. But they say, okay, we destroy it. Oh no, if we destroy it, they'll just switch to another ship tracking us. But if we disable it, then obviously they'll...

0:17:54 Thomas: Ah, Well, I think, okay, let me, let me give this, uh, here was my understanding of it. And it could be oftentimes my brain just tries to make things make sense. I don't know if this is what they were actually going for. But my impression was, look, they're tracking us with this one currently. We just shoot it down now, they'll just switch to another one. But if we can time it right so that we disable it and then we make the jump and they haven't tracked that jump, then we're anywhere in the universe as far as they're concerned. So it's like a timing issue, you, right?

0:18:55 Bryan: Yeah, can see that. Although part of the problem with that is they They aren't coordinating. They're doing this plan off the books. Admiral Holdo doesn't know they're doing this, but maybe what they could do is instead of turning it off, they just hack it so it reports false data. And then that'll give a big enough bigger timing window. Then you go to Admiral Holder and say, yeah, we hacked it. You can jump away anytime.

0:19:30 Thomas: Right. Sure. Right.

0:19:46 Bryan: But OK, we'll give the show this premise. There are a few ways to make it work. So

0:19:50 Thomas: I just resent it. Look, you've got this billion zillion dollar property that's treasured by so many of us. And so it's more or less. Like, you know, I'm not a Star Wars nerd or anything. But, like, I've always loved the Star Wars. I've watched them a billion times as a kid. And you've Got This property. You've got full control. Your Disney zillion dollar corporation. I resent so much the, the risk aversion. They have to put everything in this cookie cutter. I get that you can, you know, you can make things a little similar. There's ways that stories are always going to be a little similar. I get it, but it's so cookie cutter with, especially the first film was just a carbon copy. And it's It's like, take a little bit of risk. Give me just a little bit of a risk because it just feels like such a waste of an opportunity.

0:19:53 Bryan: Yeah.

0:20:31 Bryan: After you've already had the first film, You, you... Copy once, you don't need to copy the second in the series as well. Um, haven't even got into Hoth 2.0 yet, but that's in the third act. Yeah, the best part of the movie. Jumps, a desperation move, Holdo stays behind on Around, and engages in light speed And In possibly Straight through the Supremacy. Yeah.

0:20:33 Thomas: Right, right.

0:20:50 Thomas: Love that part, so amazing looking, I love that, ah, I loved that part that was really great,

0:20:54 Bryan: Yeah. That When I was re-watching it, I had to watch over that scene about three times, just being able to rewind it, and that was very well done. Artistically. And I just have to, uh, give it to the director. I believe that was Ryan Johnson on

0:21:04 Thomas: Yeah, yeah Ryan Johnson, but, know, there's plenty of CGI to complain about in life, but then there's a scene like that and you're like, oh boy, those people, those are artists, you now, that is so

0:21:17 Bryan: And The audio design too, just having the sound cut out so you're not even thinking about the sound, just looking at the spectacle of the Supremacy cut in half. Yeah. Okay. From a physics perspective, I, I'm gonna just say I don't have anything to say about this. Light speed travel is just, no way to say whether this is realistic or not. Um, if you look into, um, of Star Wars, this is something that hasn't happened before, and in the next movie they have to say it's a one in a million chance, which, okay, she's in a desperate situation, she tries a desperation move, and it works. Great.

0:21:17 Thomas: Cool oh yes yes fantastic loved that part yeah yeah because it sort of brought up the question of like well why wouldn't there be you always be like with these little ships that seemingly can also constant

0:21:51 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. Why don't you just put like, uh, warp engines into um, torpedoes and have them warp through, or, uh, doing it. It seems too powerful. And so they have to say, well, it usually doesn't work that way. And it was just lucky it did this time. Okay. Yeah. So let's talk science. So the physics issue with this movie, which broke suspension of disbelief the most, is the main chase. And so what's going on there is honestly pretty simple from a physics perspective. You've got a chase in space. You're got the Emperor's flagship, the Supremacy, following the Raddus. There are a few other ships, but we can break this down. There's no gravity. There is no air resistance. It's all traveling in a straight line, so from a physics perspective, it's dirt simple and

0:21:59 Thomas: Right yeah sure it was like a high school problem

0:22:46 Bryan: Yeah, yeah, see where you're at, and I'm going to just ask you a few questions about this, and if you could answer and maybe explain it in a way that the audience could understand if they're coming from a lower baseline. So just start with some basic concepts here. So first, what's the definition of speed?

0:22:54 Thomas: Sure.

0:23:05 Thomas: Speed. Well, I remember being velocity, you the directional component speed was just, yeah, distance over time. Right. Just any sort of. Yeah.

0:23:10 Bryan: Yeah. Yep. At the rate of change of distance over time. Or if you want to get a bit more accurate, it's the magnitude of velocity, where velocity is the rate of change of position over time which includes the directional component, so Yeah, basically that. And so then next is, what is the definition of acceleration? Yeah.

0:23:24 Thomas: Mm hmm. Right, right. Yeah, yeah. It's the rate of change of, I guess, speed or velocity or whatever over time, right?

0:23:38 Bryan: In physics, I properly, when we say acceleration, we mean change of velocity. And then if it's change of speed, um, we would either say change of speed over time, or magnitude of acceleration, if the acceleration is directly aligned with velocity. This is actually a good point to bring up, one caveat here is that a lot of this physics, there are a lot complications that come in. And for the sake of it being understandable, we've just got to skim over some of that. Author Terry Pratchett came up with the phrase, lies to children, which applies well to how we teach physics and that there are layers and layers of complication, but we tell people the simplified version first so they can understand that before we go into the more complicated, like to go with another physics example, explaining gravity.

The first lie is, okay, well, things fall down. The next lie is, well, things are attracted towards the Earth with a constant acceleration. Then the next is, okay, well, everything's attracted to each other following Newton's Law. And then finally we get on to our current best understanding, which is Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, which simplifies down to Newton's Law in many cases, and then that simplifies to constant acceleration exploration. Um, we can explain it like that, and obviously we're, you can't start off with the most complicated. If you try teaching children Einstein's Theory of General Relativity first, you would lose everyone. So

0:24:03 Thomas: Right. Mm Hmm.

0:25:03 Thomas: Right. I think we do have a baby book called Relativity, Relativity for Babies. I'm actually serious about that. I can't remember. I don't. Yeah, it exists. I can't if I've read it to Phoebe, if it made any sense to her, but they try.

0:25:08 Bryan: It Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and you can get the ideas across, at least special relativity. So relativity is kind of split into two parts. There's a special, which is the easy part to understand, and there's general, which is very, very difficult and mathematical. Explaining special relativity, you can do that pretty reasonably, at least get the principles. But yeah, anyways, let's, thing to define, this is something you might not have heard, is what is a reference frame, or frame of reference? Yeah.

0:25:44 Thomas: You're asking me? Yeah, no, it's just, I general or in specifically, I guess you can.

0:25:48 Bryan: In physics.

0:25:49 Thomas: Yeah. In physics, I means, there is no one frame of reference and that's kind of the whole, whole interesting part about relativity, is my understanding. But like, I guess in a given, I know, physics problem, it's like the stationary, stationary that you're thinking you're of movement in, I guess, right?

0:25:50 Bryan: Yeah, that's a good way to put it. Choose It's one thing to consider stationary and basically, for instance, you have one body in a problem and you center everything around that. So in the case we have at hand, we have two spaceships, the Supremacy and the Radis. So let's make things easy on ourselves and make the Supemacy our reference frame. And when we do this, this means that at every time its position is zero, its speed is zero and its acceleration is zero. And then the important physical thing about a reference frame is that when you're shifting between one, at least before we get into Einsteinian relativity, it's pretty simple. You just subtract the difference in position between the frames, subtract the position in velocity, subtract that the difference and acceleration. Operation. So if we wanted to shift over to the reference frame of the Radis, we just take all the values and subtract off one, and then we can do the same problem from that

0:26:26 Thomas: Right. And Yeah.

0:27:04 Bryan: Perspective. So that's the basic physics here. And this is a simple problem. So it's really a simple result. So let's go back to what they've told us about the setup. So the first thing they've told us is that the other ships are lighter and faster. And for now, let's ignore the lighter part and faster, so what does it mean to say one spaceship is faster than another? This is the thing that often doesn't make sense to people intuitively about space because it's different from on Earth. In principle, because there's no air resistance.

So on Earth, when you try to go faster and faster, the air pushes back at you harder and harder. And so however powerful your engines are, you're going to reach some maximum velocity where your engines are pushing you as hard as they can and the air is pushing back with the same force. It balances out and you keep going at the same speed. So we'll often talk about things with the maximum speed they can achieve, because that is a concern. But once you take away the air resistance, all you ever have is engines pushing something forward. So the speed just increases to infinity. There is no maximum speed to any ship.

0:27:34 Thomas: Yeah, mm- -hmm. Yeah. Right. Yeah, Right. Yes. So literally, you could have, like, ignore, again, ignoring any other gravitational pull of any kind, if you're just in a blank void of space, you could have the biggest ship ever and you could have like a little tiny little engine on the back, like just a teensy tiny thing, and in theory, with enough time, that like even it's just pushing out a little bit of tiny little bit thing, in theory, given enough time, that could get up to whatever speed, right? I mean, essentially, yeah, right.

0:28:28 Bryan: Yeah. Yep. Yep. Exactly, um, as it can't exceed the speed of light, that is the one limitation.

0:29:01 Thomas: It gets, I was gonna say it gets, it gets fast enough to a near relativistic where, where then the mass starts increasing or whatever it is with the ship. That's how I remember it anyway.

0:29:02 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we don't even need to consider that here. So the first part, saying they're faster, isn't a sensible statement to to make in space. So what they probably mean mean to say is that they have higher acceleration, or that's at least the best translation. And that also fits in with saying they're lighter. So you can think of this as the difference between trying to throw a baseball and trying to throw bowling ball. When something's lighter, you can apply the same force and accelerate get it it more. Lighter ships, if they have of better engines, or at least better, relatively speaking, they can get in more acceleration.

0:29:15 Thomas: Right, yeah. Right. Yeah, It would be like the, the essentially the ratio of of the force the engine is able to output, or whatever, versus the mass of the whole kind of system, right?

0:29:54 Bryan: Exactly. Let's So go on to the next part of the sentence describing us, which says they can't lose us, Which, if you think about it for a bit, yeah, just, yeah.

0:30:02 Thomas: That doesn't, yeah, that's never made sense to me.

0:30:05 Bryan: Just following your intuitions, if they can accelerate more, unless Yeah.

0:30:10 Thomas: Why? Yeah.

0:30:10 Bryan: They start out already heading straight for you and are trying to accelerate away, they're going to keep going away.

0:30:17 Thomas: Yeah. Made sense. Never made any sense to be. I don't, I'm trying to, I'll try to make it make sense just for fun. Let's say we don't. Do we have any indication of how fast the non space jumpy, you know, stars going blurring, going to plaid speeds are like, Like, could it be that they are, that they start to approach relativistic speeds where they can't go any faster? So, like, it'll get, sure.

0:30:17 Bryan: Yeah.

0:30:38 Bryan: Actually. Yeah, actually makes that a bit more complicated because what you're both at close to relativistic speeds, it seems the same to you as if you were at what we would consider stationary. Speeds, you only see the effects relatively, so. Once you are both at close to the same speed, you don't even notice that compared. To. Some other hypothetical quote unquote stationary observer, you're both close to speed of light and very little difference, so the maths gets complicated there, but suffice to say it doesn't really work from. That perspective.

0:30:50 Thomas: Mm. Uh-huh. Oh, okay. Yeah, and it doesn't seem like that's what they're doing in the movie, right? It just seems like, the movie - it feels like the movie thinks there's some maximum speed of a ship. Like, of a given ship, it's like, yeah, it tops out at this speed in space. Why? I don't know. That does - there's space resistance? Distance? I don't know.

0:31:16 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I. Human intuition on Earth, and I get why people would think that, but even then they're saying the other ships are faster, and if they're faster, they're going to get away, they don't. Their maximum speed is higher, so once you shift to the frame of reference, they're still moving away steadily, so. When.

0:31:42 Thomas: Yeah. Was there any tractor beam involved? Is that what we're, I can't, no?

0:31:53 Bryan: That's. A Star Trek thing, I don't think they have tractor beams in Star Wars. Huh?

0:31:57 Thomas: Oh, no, they have tractor beams. They got the Death Star tractor beams them in in the first, but they haven't, I thought there was, but I don't think that's what happened. That would have been a way to get out of it. If they're like, all right, we, they're far enough away that they, we can't we can tractor beam them and it just kind of slows them down enough to like lock it.

0:31:58 Bryan: Oh. Yeah. Yeah. You're. Right. Right. Yep. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:32:16 Thomas: That So like, so now let's say, okay, so I'll say the small ship, yeah, they're faster. They can accelerate faster. They're going to continue increasing their lead until they run out of fuel and then they will stop at that speed. And presumably, maybe the giant ship could eventually get to that speed to catch them or above that speed, maybe.

0:32:36 Bryan: That. That could in principle work if we say that the Supremacy has much greater fuel reserves, enough to bridge that, yeah, it doesn't match what we see in the movie, the. The movie, yeah, they're at the same distance away, and it's as if the movie is confusing acceleration with speed and speed with position. So I think, so try to say, let's pretend we were physics advisors on this movie. How do we fix this?

0:32:46 Thomas: Yeah, they are just in a constant distance, aren't they? To make sense of. Of.

0:33:04 Thomas: Sure, I feel like we're both qualified to do that equally.

0:33:08 Bryan: Yeah, yeah. Perfect. Perfect. So the first rule of being a physics advisor is you have to bow to the plot they want to tell. They want a tense scene in space that rebels are going to be under attack. They're not going to be destroyed, but it's going to feel dangerous. It's going to be tense. And there's a time limit. And you also need to bow to the other demands that allow the other ships to go out, jump to warp speed, come back and re -dock at either ship, which this part actually isn't too troubling, the smaller ships, um, they have proportionately more powerful engines, it would have to be significantly more than it's, uh, easily feasible for them to catch up which with, whichever one they want to dock with, um,

0:33:09 Thomas: Yeah. Right.

0:33:54 Thomas: Now why doesn't the Empire have those smaller ships, though? Don't?

0:33:58 Bryan: They do, they just, oh, For whatever reason, they weren't Using Them.

0:34:02 Thomas: Oh, yeah, do they? Does the rebel ship shoot them down? I can't remember.

0:34:03 Bryan: Yeah. Well, yeah. Early in the movie, they sent TIE fighters out to attack and they should be stocked with a lot more. It just never seems to come up.

0:34:09 Thomas: Yeah yeah, they're just like, Ah, we don't care about that idea anymore. Or maybe it's, yeah, maybe like the weapons of the big rebel ship can take out the TIE fighters. Maybe that's what it is. Who knows, we'll go with that, yeah.

0:34:16 Bryan: Yeah, let's Just say something like that. So to try to set something up that could work, first thing that I can get with the fewest modifications is, okay, they're a set distance away and through a huge cosmic coincidence they're traveling at exactly the same speed, speed initially, and with the same acceleration as the Supremacy. So in this case, um, you shift to the frame of reference of the Supremacy, you'll have the set distance away velocity, you subtract off the same value so the velocity goes to zero, acceleration, drop out the same value, acceleration goes to 0, and in this frame of preference you've just got them sitting out ahead, head at the same position, which as they say with how their um cannons and shields work, your cannons can touch them but not really do anything. And so this technically works, just barely, if you accept the cosmic coincidence and don't start thinking about it too much, yeah.

0:35:25 Thomas: I think I can fix this all for you, but I don't want to go now if you want to keep going with you.

0:35:30 Bryan: Yeah Oh, I have fixes as well, but let's just think about this a bit, bit more. So the about this is you have to basically balance on a knife's edge to keep this, and you know, as we talked about before with things being lighter being easier to accelerate, if either one of these ships were to jettison some mass, they could gain acceleration, um, you, this happens naturally in the movie when Finn and Rose, uh, jump off, they take a ship and now it's lighter. And now it's got a bit more acceleration and can get away over time. And this can lead into a ridiculous chain of events where they realize this. So the Empire decides, okay, we'll just take a few stormtroopers in need of discipline, throw them out the hangar. Then we're lighter.

0:35:52 Thomas: Oh yeah yeah I was gonna say we start seeing bowling balls flying out, they're just throwing losing all their weight. In theory, too, the smaller ships could have like gotten out and helped push the bigger ship, right? I mean, then the mass would go away and maybe you'd get a little more acceleration, it would be really funny though if you just had a trail of stormtroopers, like, just they just kept, forever, they're just like, yeah, now just keep ditching more, they're worthless.

0:36:18 Bryan: Yeah.

0:36:29 Bryan: Yeah. Lots of ways and it basically turns the movie into a farce.

0:36:43 Thomas: Anyway, they can't hit anything. What do we even have them for, yeah.

0:36:43 Bryan: The Empire just throws them out and then you go over to the rebels and they're having these noble sacrifices where they draw straws. One of them gets the short straw and hops out. And then about halfway through it, they realize that maybe starting by sacrificing whole bodies isn't the best, and just throw out all the junk they have around the, the ship, yeah, the loose chains out of your pockets, I'll strip naked for that matter, throw your clothes out the airlock and

0:36:47 Thomas: Yeah yeah It's a very different, this is a Disney movie. I'm sorry.

0:37:10 Bryan: Okay, yeah. So this solution doesn't really work. So, said you had a solution, so what have you got

0:37:12 Thomas: Oh, I've got a fix. Well, it's kind of what I said earlier. So here's what I think would have to be true. I think it has to be true. First off, this is the first time I can remember fuel being a problem in the entire Star Wars universe. And that bothered me because like up until now, I'm like, yeah, I assume it's all like nuclear reactor space thing, you know, like I feel that's what it looks like, you know, when they when they accelerate, you don't do you see much much like jet, I don't know what the word for it is, but you know, like the fire coming out of that chemical propulsion, or do you see lights?

And my, yeah, my memory is it's pretty much just lights. So I feel like it should just be nuclear, whatever. And the minute they're like, we're going to run out of space fuel. I was like, what's your space? How are you running out of that? That doesn't, that sucks. But okay, we'll go with that for Not only do the rebels, you could lead me to believe that the Rebels have a ship that needs fuel of some kind.

You cannot lead me that the giant Star Destroyer has an engine room with coal that they're shoveling on. I don't understand the fuel that that one needs. But let's say, okay, here's what we're going to say. Those Rebel ships do have limited fuel. And if they have limited field, and let's pretend the massive ship for whatever reason doesn't. You know, like it just

0:37:18 Bryan: Yeah a propulsion yeah yeah it looks like lights, usually, yeah. Yeah okay

0:38:34 Thomas: Has nuclear, a whole nuclear station that Homer Simpson works on in there. It's just a whole, it's forever. It can go forever. So that would mean it's inevitable that no matter how fast the smaller one can go and accelerate and blah blah blah, it is inevitable that the bigger one will catch it, because eventually when it runs out of fuel it will continue at the speed that it was going, and the other ship we can imagine is like slowly accelerating this whole time, because that's how space works, so here's here's my, here's what I am postulating, let's say, because all this is known now, this still doesn't get around the fact that you're right, they should ditch all the weight and all that, like definitely should have done that, but dishing that aside, let's assume all this is known and they say, all right, in order to maximize the time before that happens, we're just going to set our speed so that we maintain that constant distance, just out of reach of them, so that gives us the most time before they catch us, so we're not using all our fuel at maximum all the time, now

0:38:54 Bryan: Okay yeah okay okay that's a good idea. Now, how that would work, whether that'd be more efficient, would depend on, you know, how the engines work. But we can just assume yeah

0:39:35 Thomas: The engines work there's a good cruise control, like there's just solid cruise control

0:39:39 Bryan: Yeah there's some. If you travel at this acceleration, you can push it further, but you get diminishing returns after that. And sure, fictional space engine, do your thing. So, yeah, I can see that working. That you bring this up, this fuel in space, there's actually an interesting tangent we can get on if talk about actually pushing things in space. So let's go back to physics questions and understanding of acceleration. So in your understanding, Thomas, if you want to accelerate or change your speed, just your own life on Earth, what do you do to change your speed or

0:39:39 Thomas: Sure just as a human or in a car

0:40:19 Bryan: As... A human, as anything.

0:40:19 Thomas: Okay well you gotta, you know, apply some force to, uh, to go the way you want to go, you got to apply, I get to push off with my legs, you know. And, uh, start, start expending some force to go direction I want to get out.

0:40:20 Bryan: Okay. Okay. Okay. So push off, uh, perfect. So, yeah, on Earth that's what we do, we push off, we use, um, third law of motion, which basically says any force we apply to something else, it applies that force to us. So if I, like with my foot on the floor, I apply some force to it, pushing backwards on the floor. The floor responds by pushing forward on me. That force moves me forward and moves the floor backwards. I mean, the floor connected to Earth is so much bigger we don't notice, but it does happen a little. Now let's go out into space. Suddenly, there's nothing to push off of. So this is a real-world problem that a lot of people actually believed it would be impossible to cause anything to accelerate in space, because there's nothing to push against.

0:40:48 Thomas: Yeah.

0:41:21 Thomas: And yeah. That's interesting. Was it like the airplane with the runway? People thought of it like that. The airplane with a runway that is a conveyor belt. Okay. We got it. We got to do an entire series on that particular problem, but we'll set that aside for another day.

0:41:28 Bryan: Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm familiar with that. I think Mythbusters already did that pretty thoroughly, but yeah.

0:41:37 Thomas: They, I thought that was after MythBuster.

0:41:38 Bryan: Oh no, they did it. They they definitely did.

0:41:39 Thomas: Oh, okay, cool. Oh well, I'm going to go watch it. I'll be right back. You stay here on the line. I will come back. No,

0:41:41 Bryan: Okay. Okay, yeah. Okay? So our intuition of pushing is that you have to push against something. But there are a couple ways around this. Of the ways is that That you can eject something, basically.

0:41:58 Thomas: I was gonna say if I'm holding a big heavy ball, even on Earth, you know, even though the, you know, Earth's gravity and friction stuff kind of, and wind resistance, makes a little different, but like, if I'm holding a big ball even on Earth and I throw it, I feel the the push backward and so it's like, okay, if I want to accelerate, I could imagine just throwing enough things to where I gets me going, yeah there you go, yeah oh

0:42:01 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or people who shoot guns know this. That recoil is very significant. You're shooting the bullet out very fast and it pushes back on you. So imagine you're out in space. You have a gun that can shoot in space somehow. You point that gun backwards. You shoot it. It pushes you. You go forward.

0:42:36 Thomas: Okay Here's another thing, we don't know how guns work in Star Wars that I know of. It feels like you can just fire them forever. Now, does that mean they should also be firing their blasters backward the whole time just to maybe add a little bit of incremental acceleration?

0:42:44 Bryan: Oh, yeah. Oh, we'll get there. Yeah.

0:42:53 Thomas: Oh, we will get there. Wow. Okay.

0:42:53 Bryan: So, yeah, yeah.

0:42:54 Thomas: I didn't think we were going to get to that.

0:42:55 Bryan: So that's the way most propulsion in space works, that any engines intended to go in space use, you know, backwards propulsion. They push something out as quickly as possible. Depending on the specific engine design what that something is uh varies um but you have fuel uh you burn it to create explosive force backwards and you push it out in order to propel forward um there is one other thing you can do um and this goes into um some of the advanced tricks that learned from relativity in that it and matter are at some level the same thing so if you have excess energy you can you could compress it into matter to create it but the science is just completely impractical But what you can do is use that energy to create light, which is still basically pure energy. But the trick is that light, despite not having any mass, does have energy and it also critically has momentum. And you might remember from physics class, the law of conservation of momentum.

0:43:05 Thomas: Oh, okay. Yeah.

0:44:08 Bryan: And this is actually what we're using when we're doing using something physical to push back when we shoot our gun in space, is that when we add momentum going backwards to the bullet, that has to be canceled out by any momentum it adds to us going forward. And

0:44:08 Thomas: Yeah, yeah.

0:44:26 Thomas: I remember. Am I remembering right? So I took physics in college. I really loved it. Not an advanced one or anything, but kind of the basics again. And I remember that you can do all these problems with different methodologies. It was like, okay, you can kind of the typical like cannonball on or whatever those problems are, you know, just solving, you know what trajectory is this going to go? What speed will it, you know, land at? And it was like you could do all that using force equals ma and all those kind of things. Or you could it the entirely differently by just using like preservation of momentum. Am I remembering that right?

0:44:58 Thomas: It was like a whole, it was fascinating because it was was like, oh yeah, that's the same problem, but you're figuring it out using this different equation. So is that kind of what we're talking about?

0:44:44 Bryan: Yeah, yep, yep. That is Exactly right. Right. So in our example, shooting a gun backwards, you could look at... So solution one is look at the forces that are being applied and figure out how much it pushes over what time period and over what distance to figure out what the change in velocity is going to be to both the bullet and yourself. Or you could, you know, you can look at what the force is going towards the target. You could look out conservation of energy and conservation of momentum.

0:45:17 Thomas: Oh, right. Yeah.

0:45:34 Bryan: Momentum and usually you have to put them both together because you're solving for two different velocities so you need two laws to solve for them. It's one of those uh rules in math, you're solving for two unknowns, you need at least two equations so yeah with cons yes and conservation of energy and conservation of momentum are independent and so you can put them together and solve for it another way.

0:45:42 Thomas: Right. You need two equations. Yeah, two independent equations. Man, I hope the audience loves this stuff even half as much as I do, because I really love, I just love this stuff. It's so cool. Okay, sorry. Sorry.

0:46:02 Bryan: Oh, okay. Yeah, all right. Yeah, so what I was saying is, so since light, it has both energy and momentum, this means that you could, in theory, instead of shooting a gun backwards, you could take a flashlight, point it backwards, and just turn it on, and it will give you a very small amount of momentum forward. Yeah, this, well,

0:46:16 Thomas: Really? So this doesn't, even though like the, you know, the kind of particle wave duality thingy, I wasn't sure if it was like, well, in this instance, light was just a wave. So you're not really, you Know, like adding any, uh, acceleration.

0:46:36 Bryan: It is a wave, and it doesn't have any mass. Well, specifically, it doesn'T have rest mass, as we call it, but it is traveling and it does have momentum. And this is something that fell out of relativity as that light has its own momentum and this can be used to propel things. Now,

0:46:43 Thomas: Hmm. Okay, cool. Wow. So you could have a ship up there. That's just a bunch of, let's say you have infinite battery for fun, that's just a bunch of flashlights and over time it's going to be probably a tiny acceleration, right, just like a teeny amount. Oh,

0:47:05 Bryan: Yeah. Now, if you want to make this practical, you could put solar panels on a ship to gain energy from the sun and then shoot the light back out. But then think about this a step further. You're taking in light and then shooting the light back. It's actually more efficient if you skip a step there, at least if it's plausible with the direction you're doing, and go way back to take a lesson from nautical history.

0:47:37 Thomas: And they make a sail, a light sail. Nice.

0:47:39 Bryan: Yes, exactly. A solar sail, as they call it. And You can just put a big sail on the ship and get some acceleration and depending on how you angle it, yeah.

0:47:43 Thomas: Yeah. Okay. And Then you can dress like a pirate. And then he could do a whole thing. Yeah, ahoy.

0:47:50 Bryan: Yeah, Yeah. So going back to your example, if let's assume that the blasters they use in Star Wars are shooting light. It's never made explicitly clear, but that's what it's meant to look like, and if you shoot those back, yes, you will get some exhilaration. The the catch is, it's very inefficient energy-wise compared to propelling anything out. This is just something that falls out of the math and you have to calculate through. But if you have even a small amount of mass, which you can eject out, it turns out to be a lot more efficient to accelerate that backwards as much as you can than it is to turn all of your energy into light. So it works. It's just not really practical. Yeah.

0:47:52 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, Wow. Okay. Okay. Because like the amount of energy it takes to like make these little light packets is probably way more than it's worth it or something. Okay, Well, I was talking about the blaster. I don't know what the blister units are, whatever that is, like a blaster cartridge.

0:48:46 Bryan: Yeah. Photons. Oh, Yeah, I The Bolts. I think they, they say, yeah, I don't know what those are supposed to be, because they the thing is, in reality, lasers don't look like that. You don't typically see the laser as it's traveling battling I and

0:48:55 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So I'm saying they're They're not little packets of laser. Yeah. But I would love this too, because on side, they'd be like, wait, finally a use for all these stormtroopers. Just aim backwards. You don't have to hit anything specific. Just aim. Everybody aim backwards, it's going to help us accelerate a little bit.

0:49:18 Bryan: And hopefully they can hit backwards. Um, they've got a 50 chance

0:49:21 Thomas: Yeah, you can't, they're still firing forward. Damn it! You can't hit anything, even if I tell you to fire 50 % of the way that way.

0:49:28 Bryan: Yeah, could actually have something interesting with all of this coming into play as both of them try to figure out all the tricks they can to change the acceleration.

0:49:35 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, that would be, oh, I love that stuff. That would have been so cool. The only thing that sucks about that is in a universe in which, you it's 11 billion planets and civilizations and space travel has existed for a gazillion years. The idea of like them discovering these new things. Oh, let's throw some weight out the back. No, you would know all of this. Everybody would know All of This because they've been fighting in space for generations and generations. So, but set that aside. I would have loved that puzzle solving aspect of it. It would have been cool.

0:49:38 Bryan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so that's one way you can maybe get this to work. And as I was thinking about this, writers are willing to give us a bit more flexibility, there are other physical solutions that could fit in the plot. Like one of them is, if you look at the plot goals, you want a time limit, it. You want tension and you want people to get there and back. It doesn't need to be a chase for that. What about something like a siege scenario or simply hiding?

0:50:36 Thomas: Hmm.

0:50:38 Bryan: For instance, let's say they find a nebula out in space, which for those who've heard the term but don't know where it is, a nebula is just a gas cloud in space. And for whatever reason, let's say this nebula uh scrambles their sensors um you can see

0:50:54 Thomas: So their location is a bit nebulous is what you're saying. Sorry,

0:50:55 Bryan: Yeah Exactly, yeah, so the the initial altercation the Redis goes off into the nebula, sensors are scrambled, the Imperials follow them in and say, "Okay, uh, our sensors aren't working, we're gonna have to catch them by eye." And so they start scouring it and So you know, at some point sooner, sooner or later, they're going to lock into them. And, you know, the Imperials have more forces to muster. So they call in reinforcements. They go and surround the nebula. So there's no escape.

0:51:12 Thomas: Sure.

0:51:24 Thomas: How big is a nebula? Aren't they like light years across? Yeah.

0:51:26 Bryan: Well, it could be quite big. Very, very possibly light years across. So it can be quite big.

0:51:31 Thomas: Okay. Well, we'll say it's like a small local nebula. It's a couple of square where are acres of nebula

0:51:37 Bryan: Yeah. Small local nebula or for that matter, or it doesn't even need to be a nebula. Have you seen the new Star Trek series, Strange New Worlds?

0:51:42 Thomas: Oh. I haven't, sorry. Okay.

0:51:50 Bryan: Okay, yeah. So minor spoilers for this. There's one point at which they go inside a gas giant and that works for all the same reasons. It's a contained space.

0:51:56 Thomas: I love that Yeah. Yeah.

0:52:00 Bryan: You go inside, it's difficult to see. And so you've got a game of cat and mouse where you're just trying to evade the Imperials. Now, the advantage to the nebula scenario is you can still have the ultimate destination, That Holdo knows there's this old base there. You can't really do that inside a gas giant. You would have to think of something else. But I think this would actually probably make a better movie overall because you can get very interesting visuals out of this. You aren't seeing the emptiness of space, but the colorations of a nebula. And nebula and gas giants, if you go that route, are absolutely gorgeous.

0:52:25 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. They are, yeah.

0:52:37 Bryan: Often they're named about the way they look. Like there's the horse head nebula, which looks like a horse head in space. There's the eye of God, which looks basically like a giant eye looking down on us. Can have shots from the outside showing some very interesting looking nebula. And from the inside interesting colorations, and then as the plot goes on, you have close calls, you see the ship, you have to make a careful escape. You don't want to turn on your engines as, I'll just make you more visible, but if you don't and stay there, they might get to you.

0:52:59 Thomas: Plus You know, we could do other movies in there. The horse, we could remake The Godfather with the horse head nebula. Be great. It's a whole nebula It's a whole nebula in my bed.

0:53:17 Bryan: Yeah, just imagine, uh, that Yeah. A whole nebula in your bed, yeah.

0:53:24 Thomas: What's this wet nebula? It's a horse head nebula. Yeah. But I, okay. I know it probably wasn't, you know, maybe in your script, but like, I feel like my solution does kind of work, right? Doesn't that preserve the, and feel free to poke holes if I'm, if I, if I miss something.

0:53:31 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Not to go at full acceleration, I think that that works. You just have to say that their engines are more optimal if they don't put them at full And

0:53:46 Thomas: Yeah, well, no, it doesn't just have to be the same amount of optimal. I was was just saying, okay, maybe I'm, let's see. Maybe I'm thinking, oh, you won't gain any time because even though, oh know. Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah. So you wouldn't have gained any time even if you, if you save the fuel by going slower, you, you want to have any time because if you were going faster, you'd be further away. And that same time would be how long it takes for them to catch you. Is that what you're seeing? So you would need some efficiency difference.

0:53:57 Bryan: Yeah, well, if it's The same, then there's no disadvantage. You want to get further away to be safer, but yeah. Yeah.

0:54:25 Thomas: Okay. That would make But there could be, there could, yeah, there could be. You're like, well, yeah. If we burn the engines on faster, it's less efficient anyway. Okay. But I feel like that's a pretty reasonable space ship thing. I don't know.

0:54:25 Bryan: There needs to be a disadvantage to going faster, yeah, yeah.

0:54:37 Bryan: If you look at cars on Earth, there's an efficiency curve, and yeah, the engines are going to, the engines in space are going be vastly different, but it's easy to imagine. Imagine that there's some point of peak efficiency.

0:54:41 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. But, That's a good correction on what I was thinking. Cause yeah, you're right. You wouldn't really save any time except for the difference in efficiency. Okay, but I still think that could be a way to go.

0:54:52 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So if you put in something like that, just even when you say it, they're faster than us, but they're short on fuel. They're not going to waste energy burning their engines at maximum thrust. Put in a line that's one line you could add to the movie and this whole problem goes away.

0:55:07 Thomas: Mm -hmm. Mm -Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. Oh, would have fixed the whole damn thing but

0:55:17 Bryan: Yep. There you go.

0:55:17 Thomas: I like your nebula idea. I don't want, I'm not taken away from that, that's a great idea as well. I think that would be a cool visual, uh, movie.

0:55:21 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. Covered this from about every angle here.

0:55:23 Thomas: Oh, Felt like you started a bit of a thing on engines in space that I wasn't sure if we finished. Okay.

0:55:31 Bryan: Yeah, um, so I think it was just leading up to, um, affirming your idea that shooting the blasters back does indeed work from a physics perspective. So for what scientists are looking at, it's almost always of using propellant in real life, because it is so much more efficient than shooting light that basically no practical scenario where you would need to conserve propellent. Think there are new innovations of what they call ion drives, which are, I haven't prepped on how ion drives work, but in my understanding, they much less thrust than traditional engines. The benefit is just in the efficiency. If

0:55:52 Thomas: I was Yeah.

0:56:14 Bryan: You look at it from the rate of how much momentum you gain relative Relative to how much massive propellant you use up, you get a much better return with ion drive. So once you already have something out in space, you aren't hitting any air resistance, you can switch from conventional engines to ion drives and get a lot more utility out of it.

0:56:15 Thomas: And I always thought that was cool. You're just you're just spitting out like a tiny bit of anything. Right. But over time, it just adds up and adds up because it's space and there's no no one can hear you scream. So let's

0:56:48 Bryan: Yeah. No one's there to stop you.

0:56:51 Thomas: I have a minor question. Would this be, I don't know if this would be significant at all, but would just the, the, bigger ship following them with that gravity of just that, that big ship's attraction to the smaller ship, have any noticeable impact, or is it just too minor?

0:57:07 Bryan: Noticeable, no. Is, is there, it's always present. Um, you, you know, look at it from the perspective of, um, Earth and uh the moon, like the moon has about one-sixth the gravitational acceleration of Earth, and just think about any uh videos you might have seen of astronauts going around on the moon, and you can see that that's pretty gentle acceleration. And And in the Star Wars universe, the entire Death Star is the size of a moon. So on the surface of the Death Star, you would have that gentle

0:57:08 Thomas: Oh, okay. Mm -hmm. Right. Mm. They really

0:57:40 Bryan: Acceleration.

0:57:40 Thomas: Should have been bouncing around in there. They should have made the stormtroopers even funnier.

0:57:42 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah, that's one of the few times you wouldn't have even needed artificial gravity.

0:57:49 Thomas: Yeah. They're like, okay, we don't need artificial gravity, but it looks too silly to only have one -sixth gravity. So we are going to add in a little artificial gravity just because we won't be sinister if we're looking silly. We'll be jumping around, we'll look delightful, and I can't have it.

0:57:56 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the Supremacy, I looked at the specifications for it, and uh, it's around uh, 13 kilometers long, um, that is basically nothing mass wise, uh,

0:58:18 Thomas: Like, over, if they were both sitting there motionless with no force acting on them, eventually they would come together, right? But don't they say, if I remember right, don't they refer to gravity as like one of the weakest kind of forces overall, like it has the longest range is my memory, is like it's a long acting force far away, that is, but like it's weaker relative to some of the other forces, like the atomic forces and stuff.

0:58:30 Bryan: Yeah.

0:58:40 Bryan: Typically. It is though, actually, the longer range is only kind of true. In that electromagnetism and electricity, just looking at the electric force, has the same relation to distance as gravity does. Both of them drop off with the square of distance. So that is, if you go twice as far away, it'll be one quarter as powerful. So electromagnetismo falls off at the same rate as gravity, um, difference is that in the case of electromagnetism, it's force depends on the relative charges of things, and opposite charges attract and then cancel each other out, so at any significant distance, whatever else you're looking at is just going to be canceled out, so Yeah.

0:58:40 Thomas: Right. Yeah. Oh. Okay. Oh.

0:59:23 Thomas: It all just kind of gets Yeah. Kind of muddied in, yeah, okay, interesting.

0:59:29 Bryan: Grav, yeah, gravity, like things attract and don't cancel out. So it builds up and ends up being the only one that actually does work at long distances.

0:59:36 Thomas: Gotcha. That's So cool, uh, okay, so now let's review the third movie. The whole thing sucked, it was terrible bullshit and ruined the entire franchise for me, god. Why?

0:59:44 Bryan: Yeah, they went back on everything.

0:59:46 Thomas: Why? So somehow he returned, oh somehow, yeah, just from the get-go, wasn't the the Wait.

0:59:47 Bryan: And no, you had to play the video game Fortnite in order to understand that. Yes.

0:59:56 Thomas: What is that true, oh.

0:59:57 Bryan: Yes, they actually had his return be a live event within Fortnite.

1:00:03 Thomas: I didn't even know that, are you kidding me, come on. What a weird, oh.

1:00:04 Bryan: Yeah. Oh, I'll look it up right here just to confirm. I

1:00:09 Thomas: No. No, I I think, I think that sounds slightly familiar, but you're getting, you're telling me, me that in order to understand the like most popular video franchise ever, like just as a random guy, I have to have watched a video games thing. I'd not, why would, what a weird choice, weird choice.

1:00:24 Bryan: Yeah. Yep. I'm just looking it up online here, and his broadcast, um, was, you can originally hear the broadcast, that in the universe happened when he was returned, was broadcast within the game Fortnight, yeah.

1:00:37 Thomas: Weird. What's the physics of that? It just sucks. We don't need to go into the physics of it. It just sucked. All right, this was a ton of fun. I love this kind of stuff, it is, like, honestly, when you emailed, I was like, so excited, because this is the kind of thing that I've always wanted to do, honestly, as a podcast, like, early on, I you know, I listened to a lot of the like Star Talk and that kind of things, and I just love this stuff, I love learning about these kind of things and applying it to kind of sci-fi, and looking at how, you know, okay, you don't have to be a stickler, you don't have to get everything right, but I just, I just think they could do so much better, you know, like, it like if you put, you, you're Disney, you're worth the entire, you know, value of the universe, like you, you've got all the resources imaginable, give one, Brian, hire

1:00:39 Bryan: Uh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, hire a physics advisor, put in five hours.

1:01:27 Thomas: One yeah which, look, I don't want to insult you, Brian, I'm pretty sure they could get you for a pretty good rate is all I'm saying they could get some exhausted, overworked academic for five dollars, and they could have them make stuff work, it would be super cool, it would, you could, you could definitely preserve the plot, more or less, I'm sure of all these things, and yeah yeah and you can make it like educational, you could have it be like, yeah, look at this, it all makes sense, we could even add in some like, on you, the side content that's like, here's how we can teach kids about physics using this movie, which, got it all right, I just don't know why they, they don't do that, it's not that hard, you know.

1:01:35 Bryan: Yeah, well, yeah... Yeah, we just went over it. There's multiple ways the plot works. Yeah, a lot of movies do. One good example from a few years back is Interstellar, which did hire a physicist on, I believe it was Sean Carroll, if I remember correctly.

1:02:15 Thomas: I love Interstellar, yeah. I've heard him talk about being a, being a consultant, I think they had a few of them, and I, I've also heard him say that like it's a weird job because sometimes you just say stuff and they're like, we don't care, and that's the job, you just like go in, and you're like, um, none of this works, all right, thanks for coming in, and then they just ignore it.

1:02:21 Bryan: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, can see in that movie that they tried. There are places where the science fails, but there are some cases where it's a deliberate choice. Some cases where, okay, know what the science is, but we're just going to flip it on its head because it looks a bit better on screen this way.

1:02:35 Thomas: Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Well and and honestly, sci, here, I want, want to ask you a general question, while, get the impression that the reality of physics is kind of a buzzkill in terms of any sort of space, alien sci-fi, anything. And like, that's, that makes sense, because that's the reason there aren't a bunch of aliens flying around all the time. And there's not a bunch of planets we can go to because like, I feel like real science is kind OF a buzz kill. So yeah, sure.

1:03:14 Thomas: You're gonna have to take liberties. But, but my thing is always like, if we're in a fictional universe, I spot you as many premises as you want, where it's like, yeah, okay, in this universe they cracked faster than light travel in this certain exact way that may, or something, you know, because like, otherwise, if you're just stuck to real life, it's pretty much a buzzkill, right, there's not a whole lot of fast space planet travel anything

1:03:12 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and that's a subject we can get into, on going the fast of life, that actually relates to the other show idea on Star Trek. Yeah, so we can talk about that and how it actually works. But yeah, setting up the premise, that's fine. If you don't have faster -than -light travel, you don' have Star Wars. So yeah, sure, we'll give you faster -then -light -travel.

1:03:36 Thomas: Sure oh teaser yeah sure. Well, that's a, that's such a great setup for possibly, possibly the next episode. So, uh, we'll leave that as a teaser. Um, Brian Gillis, I am so excited. This was so much fun. Uh, is there anything you want to throw out for people? Do you have any presence of social media, anything, or are you just a guy that wanted to come on and teach us some stuff?

1:04:03 Bryan: Okay. Um, oh no, I'm not too active on social media, so I'll just leave it there.

1:04:18 Thomas: That's fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on.

1:04:20 Bryan: Yep, no problem. You for having me on.