Reply To: A new way of generating electricity

[Rezwan]

Breakable wrote:

I used the word fiction in that case to mean that which has not yet been proven. Predicting surface conditions of a gas giant is science fiction.

You could call it speculation, but i think fiction is something different.
For example while we could speculate that life forms exist inside suns photosphere,
thinking they could be of the same biology as ours would be completely fictional.

How about “simulation”? From Intuitor.com:

Movies and physics have a lot in common: neither are completely realistic, both are simulations of reality.

Physics not completely realistic? Shocking! But consider a simple classroom example: measuring the depth of a well by dropping in a pebble and timing how long it takes to hit the water. For the calculation we would typically write a simple equation that says the Earth is flat and has no atmosphere. (in other words, the gravity field is constant and there is no air resistance.) Furthermore, we’d assume that the speed of the sound produced by the pebble hitting water is infinitely high and ignore all sorts of effects like the gravitational attraction force of Jupiter.

Why would we digress so far from reality? If all possible influences were somehow miraculously accounted for, we’d be unable to measure the difference. Hence, the physics model used for measuring depth, while not absolutely realistic, is operationally realistic. It accounts for the major effect and yields predictions well within our measurement accuracy.

There’s a big difference between operationally correct movie physics and the ridiculously spectacular marketing-driven special effects designed to boost box-office take.