HOW FAR CAN YOU? (DAVID LODGE) AND THE SILENCE OF INFINITE SPACE ( OR THE BIG BANG WASN´T REALLY A BANG)

“The silence of infinite space terrifies me,” he murmured, squinting one night through Martin’s telescope at a faint smear of light that the boy assured him was a galaxy several times bigger than the Milky Way.

“Why?”

Austin straightened up and rubbed the small of his back. “I was quoting Pascal, a famous French philosopher of the seventeenth century.”

“Interesting he knew that space was silent,” Martin remarked, “that long ago.”

“You mean, there’s no noise at all up there? All those stars exploding and collapsing without making a sound?”

“You can’t have sound without resistance, without an atmosphere.”

“So the Big Bang wasn’t really a bang at all?”

“’Sright.”

“Doesn’t it frighten you, though, Martin, the sheer size of the Universe?”

“Nope.”

This is the most common way to find science mistakes in films. Sound is a mechanical wave, so it needs a medium to propagate. In contrast, electromagnetic waves, like light, can travel through vacuum.

I think that 2001: A Space Odyssey was the first film to show outer space as silent. “No one can hear you scream in space”, according to the advertising of the film Alien. I am not fussy about this, a film with noises in outer space doesn´t bother me, I understand it´s a poetic license. Indeed, if we want to be very strict, the concept of vacuum is also very controversial