From Dune to The 3 Body Problem, the sci-fi popular in the modern era has arguably become more outlandish than ever. The 3 Body Problem imagines a proton, ‘unfolded’ in 11 dimensions, and turned into a planet-sized supercomputer. Even in the realms of the imagination, the possibility of such future science appears far-fetched. Is the outlandishness of our sci-fi correlated with the size of the gaps in our current understanding? David Kyle Johnson argues the more we learn about the universe, the more there is to discover.
 

 “[T]oday's science fiction is tomorrow's truth.”

-- Hal McAllister, Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1952, p. 127.

Although this quote (or something like it) is thought to have been said by Issac Asimov (it probably wasn’t), it is still a common sentiment. “What is science fiction today will be science fact tomorrow.” And if you believe this, you might think it explains why science fiction has gotten a bit more, shall we say, far-fetched lately.

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Think about the three-body problem, which serves as the title of both a work of science fiction (which was first a novel by Liu Cixin and is now a Netflix series) and is a problem in physics. The novel and show are pretty crazy! (Spoiler alert) You’ve got real to life VR, invisible indestructible nanofibers, and apparently, at some point, a proton will be unfolded in 11 dimensions, whatever the hell that means. “Since science has been unable to solve things like the three-body problem,” the argument might go, “science fiction writers have turned to speculating about solutions. And there’s a lot that science hasn’t explained beyond the three-body problem, like dark matter, dark energy, and quantum mechanics.”  

This argument, however, is based on misunderstandings. But clearing them up will be very helpful in improving our understanding of the nature of science, and of science fiction.

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No science fiction ever envisioned relativity or quantum mechanics before they were discovered

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Understanding Science Fiction

First, this argument misunderstands the opening quote. McAllister wasn’t saying that science fiction anticipates scientific discoveries. That doesn’t happen. For example, no science fiction ever envisioned relativity or quantum mechanics before they were discovered. You need a deep expert understanding of science, and a scientific mind, to produce real scientific breakthroughs.

McAllister was actually saying that science fiction predicts technological developments. Now, he was right about that. Flip phones, submarines, video chatting, iPads, drones, robots, credit cards, TV, and the moon landing were all anticipated by science-fiction.* But this doesn’t mean that, when science can’t figure out the way the world works, it needs science fiction to step in to propose explanations. Again, that’s never happened.

Understanding the Three-Body-Problem

Second, this argument misunderstands the present state of scientific knowledge. Take the three-body problem (in physics). Commonly understood, it refers to our inability to predict the behavior of three three-body systems—how, for example, three stars in a trinary star system will orbit one another. In the show, an alien race inhabits a planet in such a system and has to abandon it because its climate is unpredictable from day to day.