Previous Trope Repair Shop thread: Unclear Description
, started by Malady on Aug 1st 2014 at 12:22:04 AM
Somebody asked about technobabble that makes sense within-universe. I think this is asking for a middle position that does not exist.
Because, if the details be damned, then all technobabble makes narrative sense: we cannot solve the problem, we can only solve it in the nick of time, this allows us to jump to a different star system without having to worry about Relativity etc etc.
But if the audience can follow the technobabble in detail, then it must make sense in detail (which is a much more stringent requirement than making narrative sense). If a TV writer can explain a futuristic technology in detail, then he or she is in the wrong profession and should be bringing the tech to market!
Of course I understand where the question is coming from. In Star Trek we have inertial dampers, Broussard collectors, Heisenberg compensators, warp cores, phasers and many more things which the audience can immediately fathom in terms of how these things operate in the story. But these things are still just technobabble, only technobabble that through repetition has become familiar to the audience.
A more pernicious variety of technobabble is technobabble that is also technobabble in-universe, i.e. meaningless jargon that is used by some character to snow job or bullshit some other character. I call this pernicious because it is all the same to the audience anyway, and the writers create it using much the same word smithing techniques. (This is akin to believing that a dream-in-a-dream is somehow "deeper".)
Edited by tweekatten
For all their love of technobabble, Star Trek writers are curiously unwilling to use actual babble from the real wold technology realm, such as nano- pico- or femto-seconds. Perhaps they fear that too many of their viewers will not appreciate just how tiny things the time intervals described are supposed to be. It is always "a millionth of a microsecond" etc. Apparently microsecond itself is allowed because in the parlance of nonscientists this has some vague meaning of some incredibly short duration of time.
Linking to a past Trope Repair Shop thread that dealt with this page: Split?
, started by DragonQuestZ on Oct 20th 2010 at 5:50:43 PM
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman