Star Wars - science or fiction?

Star Wars – “May the force be with you.”  Science or Fiction?
by Julie Peschke, Athabasca University 

This, now iconic, quotation from the Star Wars film series is an allusion to a fictional galactic world depicting a universal battle between the forces of darkness and light – embodied in the respective personas of the Galactic Empire Sith lord, Darth Vader, and Luke Skywalker, the Protagonist, who wishes to free a Princess held captive in their planet-destroying space station, the Death Star.

But is it all fiction or can there be a scientific basis to these universal forces and their proactive, interactive and reactive encounters on the space- time landscape of our twenty-first century Universe?

Let us examine the array of forces which determine our earthly destinies in a Cosmos of almost uncountable galaxies and phantasmagorical phenomena which are, for the most part, beyond our imagination.

The EMERGENCE of LIGHT from the DARK VOID

QUOTE:  Michio Kaku  (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NbBjNiw4tk  [19:00 - 20:41 minutes]) 

"In the beginning God said, the 4-dimensional diversion of the

anti symmetric second rank tensor equals zero and there was light – "

The BIG QUESTION:  Where and when did IT all begin?

The ANSWER:  The FORCE of the BIG BANG

The explosion in a dark and void “nothingness” which set in motion the structured Canvas of our space and time Universe as we know it today.

Birth of the Universe (published on May 9, 2018 by Naked Science)

“In the decade of the 1920’s, an astronomer named Edwin Hubble discovered that what scientists called the Andromeda Nebula was actually over 2 million light years away, many times farther than the farthest distances that had ever been measured at that time. Hubble subsequently realized that many of the objects which astronomers called nebulas were not actually clouds of gas but were collections of millions or billions of stars that we now refer to as galaxies.”

The FORCES that DETERMINE our LIFE on PLANET EARTH

The BIG QUESTION: If an apple can fall from a tree, does the moon also fall from the sky?

The ANSWER:  The FORCE of GRAVITATION

Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation (laying the foundations for planetary motion)

And the creation of Calculus:  the mathematics describing the motion of objects in a flat Euclidean space

The BIG QUESTION: Once an object is set in motion, can it go into a state of perpetual motion?

The ANSWER:  The FORCES of PROPULSION and INERTIA

Newton’s Laws of Motion (laying the foundation for classical mechanics. These laws describe the relationship between a body and the forces acting upon it, and its motion in response to those forces)

And the treatise:  Principia:  Mathematical Principals of Natural Philosophy

And the creation of a new kind of telescope.
 

The BIG QUESTION: From ancient times, do the gods propel lightning bolts and create thunder meaning that they are angry with us?

The ANSWER:  The FORCES of ELECTROMAGNATISM

 Faraday’s Law  is the basic law of electromagnetism predicting how a magnetic field will interact with an electric circuit to produce an electromotive force (EMF). 

Maxwell’s Equations of Electromagnetism    led to the discovery that the sequential creation of electric fields producing magnetic fields which, in turn, generate electric fields - continuing on ad infinitum. These oscillations form a wave of electromagnetic energy predicting how a magnetic field will interact with an electric circuit to produce an electromotive force (EMF).

                and the discovery that:  light is an electromagnetic wave!

The FORCES that DETERMINE LIFE amongst the STARS

The BIG QUESTION: If everything in our Universe is comprised of only matter and energy, how are they defined and how are they related?

The ANSWERS:

Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity:  E = m c² is the theory that mass and energy of motion are the same physical entity and can be transformed one into the other with the constraint that the ratio of energy over mass is always constant and is equal to the square of the speed of light. 

Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity:  Einstein’s Field Questions describe the transformations of matter and energy as we approach the speed of light.  This set of ten distinct tensor equations relates the local spacetime curvature with the local energy, momentum and stress within that spacetime fabric. 

The Existence of Anti-Matter:  the entities that have the opposite charge of the particles of matter, such as the anti-electron or the positron, anti-hydrogen, and anti-helium.

The Existence of Black Holes:  arising from the singularities in Einstein’s Field Equations for the Theory of General Relativity. These are points in the spacetime landscape of infinite gravity, which mathematically implies mass approaches 0. To our eyes, they are black and do not emit any light rays which we can see.
 

The BIG QUESTION: How does matter stay together; How does it reproduce? How does it break apart; and How does it stay apart?

The ANSWERS:

The Weak Nuclear Forces, first proposed by Enrico Fermi in 1933, are responsible for the radioactive decay of subatomic particles. Fermi was an Italian physicist and the creator of the world's first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1.

The Electroweak Theory and the Origin of the Fundamental Forces (published on November 4, 2020 by PBS Space Time)

The Strong Nuclear Forces are responsible for the binding of the component particles of an atom’s nucleus together. Strong nuclear forces include the binding energies of the forces of nuclear fusion and nuclear fission. Nuclear fusion accounts for most energy production in the Sun and other stars. Nuclear fission involves the decay of radioactive elements and isotopes, although it is often mediated by weak nuclear force interactions.
 

The Dark Hidden Forces

The Dark Side of the Universe (published on April 17, 2015 by World Science Festival)

“For all we understand about the universe, 96% of what’s out there still has scientists in the dark. Astronomical observations have established that familiar matter—atoms—accounts for only 4% of the weight of the cosmos. The rest—dark matter and dark energy—is invisible to our telescopes. But what really is this dark stuff? How do we know it’s there? And what does it do? From the formation of galaxies to the farthest reaches of space, it appears that darkness rules.”

and

The Quantum Forces of Other BIG BANGS

When matter and anti-matter collide with each other (as opposites attract), there is an explosion of energy (as defined by Einstein’s famous equation). This results in their mutual annihilation and the production of intense photons, neutrinos, and sometimes less-massive particle–antiparticle pairs.

For example, this is evident in the phenomenon of the emission of particles near the event horizon of a black hole. See Stephen Hawking’s research paper on Particle Creation by Black Holes.  

All laying the groundwork for

The Theory of Quantum Mechanics in a 4-dimensional spacetime universe.

Quantum Reality: Space, Time, and Entanglement (published on February 16, 2018 by World Science Festival)

Brian Greene, an American theoretical physicist, mathematician and string theorist, moderates a discussion exploring the fundamental principles of Quantum Physics.
 

The SCIENCE and the BATTLE GROUND of STAR WARS