One of the things I love about Star Wars is that it is many things to many people — for some an adventurous escape, for others a deeply insightful myth, and to others it’s a vehicle for sick bounty hunters and costume designs.
However, one mode of engagement with Star Wars consistently puzzles me, which is a pseudo-scientific, rational inquiry into the saga. This mode of engagement is partially responsible for Youtube channels devoted to plot holes, Reddit threads bikeshedding on the plausibility of lightsabers, and fan distress over the canonical status of their favorite story elements.
These behaviors have in common an expectation for Star Wars to be essentially self-coherent, rationally intelligible, and fundamentally knowable. These expectations are not unreasonable considering their origins: on one hand, contemporary cinematic powerhouses like MCU and GoT were built from the ground up under these premises; on the other, the space-faring futuristic setting of Star Wars leads viewers to conclude that Star Wars is mostly “scientific” even if it takes some liberties. And this is not to mention the broader Western preference for empirical science above other ways of knowing. Indeed, the expectations of most practicing scientists and engineers are exactly what I mentioned above: that nature herself is fundamentally knowable through rational inquiry. If nature works in this way, why not Star Wars as well?
However, the expectation of rational self-coherence cannot be applied to Star Wars without contradicting rationality itself. I will prove this as rigorously as I can, to a counterintuitive conclusion: removing the expectations of rational self-coherence in Star Wars is profoundly liberating.
Scientific Background & Proof
First, a note on physics. The fastest known particle in the universe is the photon, or the light particle; in fact, the speed of light, c, is a useful physical constant in many cases (including Einstein’s famous equation). However, the photon can attain this incredible speed only because it has no mass (equivalently, it is completely weightless). Any object with non-zero mass cannot attain the speed of light without an infinite force applied to it (this is a consequence of conservation of momentum). Infinite force requires infinite energy, which by conservation of energy is impossible (energy would need to be created for this to occur).
As a result, physicists agree that faster-than-light travel is fundamentally impossible.1 The laws of logic dictate that if this is a true statement, then its opposite (“faster-than-light travel is possible”) must be false.
However, in Star Wars, faster-than-light travel does exist.2 In fact, if Star Wars is rationally self-coherent, then it must exist or every single plot point after Tatooine couldn’t happen. So we have to suppose that there are in fact 2 true statements: “lightspeed is possible” due to its presence in Star Wars, and “lightspeed is impossible” due to the laws of physics.
To summarize, we have proved that only 1 statement in a set is true, and also shown that 2 statements in the set are true. We have proved 2 = 1.
That may seem like no big deal, but if 2 = 1 is true, we can prove anything is true. For example: Han is in a room with Darth Vader, but since 2 = 1, Han is in the room alone, so Han is Darth Vader. Jar Jar and a Sith Lord are in a room together… you get the idea.
QED.
Using only the rules set for us by rational, scientific inquiry, we can develop a proof that can justify any possible statement about Star Wars, including completely wrong statements like Darth Jar Jar.3
Now, the logic here is airtight (it’s just a restatement of a famous Bertrand Russell lecture where he proved himself to be the Pope), so one of the following is wrong: modern physics as we know it, or the assumption that Star Wars is internally rationally coherent.
Given that we can’t deem modern physics to be incorrect without undermining our ability to examine things rationally in the first place,4 I think it’s overwhelmingly preferable to choose the latter. Star Wars is not rationally coherent; it is not scientifically knowable; and it is not physically intelligible.
So What?
… one of the things I struggle for is to create a kind of immaculate realism in a totally unreal and fantasy world. It’s a science that I can make up. But once I make up a rule, then I have to live with it.
George Lucas, in an interview with Bill Moyer, 1999
It is a testament to the immaculate cinematic realism of Star Wars that its science seems so plausible. However, Star Wars has ever only used its realism and its pseudo-scientific setting as storytelling tools for a very different purpose:
… when I did ‘Star Wars’ I consciously set about to recreate myths and the classic mythological motifs. And I wanted to use those motifs to deal with issues that existed today.
George Lucas, in an interview with Bill Moyer, 1999
In other words, Star Wars is not meant to contain scientific truth, but rather emotional truth. Most fan criticism of the films hinges on a misunderstanding of this fact; it is most often of the form “I expected this scene/character/film to act ‘logically’, and it didn’t, so this is a bad scene/character/film.” Left unsaid by these critics is the implication that “logic” is exclusively scientific, physical, and rational.5
I hate to disappoint these critics, but they are measuring Star Wars with the wrong yardstick. Star Wars is a miserable failure of a scientific textbook or logician’s handbook; it is also a magnificent triumph of myth and emotional truth, of good vs. evil and hope against all odds. Many of the rationally incoherent moments in Star Wars are also the most emotionally powerful, from Luke’s salvation of Vader to the tragic fall of Anakin. When we release our expectations of scientific/rational coherence for Star Wars, it is like conversing for the first time in one’s native tongue — “I was using the wrong language all along? No wonder it didn’t make sense!” Switching to the native language of Star Wars, emotion and myth, erases the need to worry about plot holes and canon and objective truth; instead we can watch with new eyes the myth of Star Wars, learning to hope and grow alongside our favorite mythic figures.
Footnotes
- Yes, alternative theories exist, but no evidence has yet demonstrated the existence of tachyons or the feasibility of FTL technologies. I’m only an armchair astrophysicist, but I know enough of the scientific method to know that “no evidence” is the same truth-rating as phrenology and the four humors.
- To get around the impossibility of FTL travel, people tend to claim that Star Wars engineering is significantly more advanced than Earth’s. This doesn’t work because engineering cannot contradict physics, only work within it. To go one step deeper, one could argue that Earth’s Standard Model is an incomplete paradigm and Star Wars simply has more complete ideas about science. However, scientific revolutions very rarely reverse the conclusions of the previous paradigm. Take for example the evolution of orbital mechanics from Ptolemy to Copernicus to Kepler to Newton to Einstein — though the theory got significantly more robust, the basic predictions of the Moon’s orbit never changed between these paradigms. New theoretical models only get accepted if they fit extant data, and no data we have ever gathered permits the possibility of FTL travel (see 1).
- It’s not just the lightspeed example, either. Sound in space, X-Wings banking their turns in a vacuum, curving lasers, the lack of general relativity in the films, the energy efficiency of a Star Destroyer, or even the existence of a slower-than-light laser beam would all tidily satisfy this proof.
- One could also argue that Star Wars operates under the same physical laws as Earth, but in a pocket universe where the fundamental physical constants are tweaked to allow for faster-than-light travel, but if you’ve done that math, then link me to your dissertation (:
- Physics expresses itself solely through mathematics, which is itself the foundation of formal logic. Thus, it’s no use to say “I accept the scientific inaccuracies, but what I hate are illogical characters” — that’s like saying “I don’t eat gluten, but let’s eat Domino’s for dinner”. The two are inseparable. Not to mention that illogical character actions are the essence of plot; without fallible characters there would be no conflict.