Are we better off reading science-fiction by people like Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke who were knowledgeable about science?

I would say, Yes. Provided you have a sense of what parts are correct science and which parts are fiction, then its a painless way to learn.

The comic book writers and pulp fiction writers from the 30’s through the 60’s were vast storehouses of trivia and arcana (not sure what the difference is, actually). They would use all sorts of obscure facts as the plot points or McGuffins around which the story would be constructed. Consequently, in a natural way, the reader would be exposed to “strange but true”facts that would not ordinarily come up in everyday conversation, or their classrooms, for that matter.

But more to the point, reading Silver Age comic books from the 50’s and 60’s would be a great way to learn how to think like a scientist. The superhero would be challenged by the villain, or ensnared in some sort of death trap, and would have to find a clever and novel use of their superpowers in order to outwit the villain. We know the rules - powers, vulnerabilities, etc., and we’re not allowed to cheat (the Flash can’t escape from a giant block of ice in which he in entombed by Captain Cold (who, by the way, was not a real Captain) using heat vision, but he *could* vibrate back and forth and high frequency, transferring his kinetic energy to the ice, melting it.

Which is the same spirit of scientific research. We know the rules, (E and M, QM), we have a unique problem (high Tc superconductivity) and we have to come up with a novel (or else it won’t be publishable) solution. and we’re not allowed to cheat (no extra dimensions without experimental proof!).

You’d be surprised, though perhaps not, by the number of individuals at comic book conventions who work in high tech industries and are huge fans of real science.

Excelsior (after all, today IS Stan Lee’s birthday!).

Now I have to go rewatch the trailer for next summers Fantastic Four film.

Jim

You drop a mass from a tower - but ignore air resistance. A fiction. You shoot an arrow from a cliff 200 meters above ground, at an angle of 37.5 degrees with the horizontal, and want to know the time before the projectile strikes the ground. A fiction. No one in recorded hiostory has ever cared how long it takes the arrow to reach the ground. I’ve been doing professional physics for over 20 years, man and boy, and I’ve NEVER needed to use this in the lab (perhaps because my lab is in the sub-basement?).

Students always complain: When am I ever going to use this in my real life? Surprisingly enough, when in my classes I use superhero examples to explicate physics principles, those same students NEVER wonder when they will use this information in the real life. The all must have plans, post-graduation, that involve spandex and capes. And knowing how many mad scientists there are out there (you may call them String Theorists, but this is not the time for semantics), I’d have to say this is a good thing.

But as I say, I’m biased. In addition to blurbing Jennifer’s book, I’ve written one of my own (The Physics of Superheroes - who says this isn’t the Marvel Age of shameless plugs?).

Seriously, I’ve done many many interviewws with print, radio and TV. I’ve spoken with VERY intelligent people who want to know how air bags save lives, but preface the conversation with statements such as: I’m a Dummy. I won’t get it.

So, if you start talking about Spider-Man’s girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, and explain how Newton’s second law explains why she died despite the fact that Spidey caught her in his webbing as she fell from the top fo the George Washington Bridge, and that the reason was that the time available to stop her was too short, so the necessary force ot arrest her momentum was too large AND this is what airbags do (increase the time available for braking, in addition to spreading the force over a larger area) well, this they get!

Because these students, and reporters and readers of books about Buffy will not become scientists or engineers. But they will be citizens and voters the rest of their lives. So any little bit we can do can only help.

Face front, True Believer!

(By the way, they cheated : I put my little particle in orbit around single body in Level 1, and they ended the level with a timer, else I would have racked up an infinite number of points…)

http://www.abc.net.au/science/features/whyisitso/

I think it’s supposed to be Newtonian dynamics, modulo the boundary effects. The lack on energy conservation looks like it’s just a bad integration scheme. Look at the scattering when the planets “collide”. There’s a random increase in their kinetic energy, just like what you get from a fixed-timestep integration scheme. The non-conic-section orbits can also be explained this way.

When Berube can spend two days and 20,000+ words deconstructing 2001, a Space Odyssey, a book on the physics of a vampire slayer is certainly well within the norm of non-fictional efforts in examining and describing our culture.

As for the games, there are indeed numerous ongoing efforts in all the academic disciplines to develop vidgames that provide substantial educational opportunities for our future k-12 generations. The early researches are quite illuminating, particularly games that use “expert” system code to facilitate the learning of grammar and syntax, as well as geographical relationships of world and national histories. Can the physics and chemistry of climate change be far behind???