Science and Star Wars

I hate plot-holes. Unfortunately, Star War has the most plot holes ever, so I will address the science related ones.

First, we have time dilation, the difference in time in two places often due to differing gravitational potential.
This seems to have no effect in the Star Wars universe, seeing as in Solo, Han escaped a black hole without any significant change in time on the outside. However, this was addressed in one legends story, about this guy who traveled 190 years forward in time due to time dilation. Why? Because of relativistic shielding. This was a random technology in legends that protected the ship from time dilation. No explanation on how it did this, but that will have to do for now. Next we have Hyperspace. E=mc^2 will be important here, as simply it can be put to mean that energy and mass are interchangeable. You can rearrange that to see that it would be basically impossible, because everything with mass would take too much energy to move at lightspeed. Therefore, in the real world, hyperspeed is impossible to everything but photons, which are massless. We will now use the holdo manuever as an example If ships take the hyperspace approach to connect with the star destroyer during the holdo manuever, the raddus would have to be accelerating. And if it uses the photon method, then it would be massless. However, it had too little mass, it would only destroy itself, and too little speed and it will just bounce off, so the conditions would have to be perfect, perhaps in conjunction with the experimental shield of the raddus. I was thinking that hyperspace travel would use string theory, and actually not go faster than light, but then how would they get hit by purgils in hyperspace lanes if they aren't in the same dimension as the purgils? Therefore, someone become massless might be the most probable. The other option is someone creating enough energy to travel faster than light, which would destroy the universe, so probably not that. Next we have flight dynamics of space. George Lucas is not a physicist, so he based to space travel on travel in earth's atmosphere. Planes bank to turn, because of air pressure. However, in airless space, this is unnecessary , but they do it anyway. If they banked in space at such high speeds, the center of gravity would be maintained, so whatever direction they are going is still constant, but the g forces generated would most likely kill the occupants. However, they use something called an inertial compensator, so I guess that explains it. As for why they do it in the first place, real answer-george lucas is not a physicist. in universe answer- I guess they were used to it and never stopped banking?
Finally, we have blasters. Lasers have no sound, and and travel at the speed of light, and are invisible, so dodging one would be near impossible, so we can assume that they are not shooting lasers or plasma based light. One explanation that is provided is that they are some sort of particle beam, which is a stream of neutrally charged particles. This is supported by the fact that magnetically sealed surfaces deflect them. Also apparently tibanna gas is used as a coolant, instead of the fuel source, which would support this theory better.
Finally, we have lightsabers. Lightsabers are usually described as plasma contained in a magnetic shield. However, this is impossible because lightsabers produce heat, which a magnetic field is incapable of doing. And the touching of the plasma lightsabers would result in magnetic reconnection, which would make both blades explode, so we can assume that it is not made out of plasma. In the Euler-Heisenberg experiment of 1936 showed that light can actually interact with itself at sufficiently high intensities, due to the random change of energy in a spot, known as quantum fluctuation. This connection would scatter photons down to the hilt of the lightsaber, and since photons have momentum, they would exert a force on the hilt, giving an impression of having a solid blade. However, an extremely large amount of energy would be needed to do this. To run it for one minute, you would need about 10^25 Joules of energy, which is something like 9 times less that what the Sun produces in a second, which sounds small, but is a large number. Basically, you would need some energy we haven't discovered yet. Also, we have to account for the force in making the lightsaber, which might account for some of the power provided.

That was long.

 

obviously, but its still interesting to look at these supposed plot holes using science. we cant figure out the rules of that universe, but we can still apply it to ours to make more sense of it.

--- Double Post Merged, Nov 20, 2020, Original Post Date: Nov 20, 2020 ---

also it does say a galaxy far far away, so it is still in our universe, so technically it should apply

 

i know that, and they answer a bunch of things with the force did it or just made up devices. But it is still interesting to see how they apply in the real world.

 

have you seen interstellar?