While Sarah Newton gets everything, but everything wrong about hard science fiction to rage against a problem with it that does not exist, she inadvertedly gets the spirit of it spot on in her introduction:
ow, a hundred or so years ago, it was widely regarded that all the known laws of physics had been discovered, and that theoretical physics was a “completed” science, with nothing more to do other than cross a few t’s and dot a few i’s. It was also believed that if you travelled more than 15 miles per hour in an automobile you’d probably suffocate…
Can you see what’s wrong with that? That’s right, “a hundred or so years ago” gets you to 1911, after the Wright Brothers, when the automobile was well on its way to become more than just a rich man’s toy and when steam locomotives had been travelling at speeds greater than fifteen miles an hour with no reports of suffocation for donkeys ages. Worse, 1911 was smack dab in the middle of the Einsteinian revolution, six years after Einstein’s Annus Mirabilis in which he introduced the special theory of relativity, his observations about the photoelectric effect that helped get quantum mechanics started, not to mention that whole E=MC squared thingie.
In this small paragraph Sarah gets her facts wrong, doesn’t think through when “a hundred years ago” was and ignores actual history and science for comforting myths about Progress — sounds remarkable like most hard science fiction to me.
(It doesn’t get much better in the rest of the post. Thanks James.)