FASTER THAN LIGHTin the Rocket city inside the science of episode I II III IV VIV

ePiSoDe V:

The Empire Strikes Back

Directed by: Irvin Kershner

Released: May 21, 1980

First weekend gross: $4.9 million

Total domestic gross: $290.3 million

Total worldwide gross: $534.2 million

Academy Awards: Nominated in three catego-ries. Won for sound mixing and also won a special achievement award for visual effects.

The good: Those incredible imperial walkers. Han Solo’s incredible smugness as he’s about to be frozen: “I love you.” “I know.”

The bad and the ugly: Incredibly stilted dialogue between Leia and Han in the first hour of the movie. They behave like fourth-graders. And C-3PO is at his whiniest worst here.

“A bad feeling about this”: Leia, as she, Han and Chewie investigate what turns out to be the innards of a giant space slug.

Limbs chopped off: 1) Luke cuts the arm off of a Wampa creature on Hoth. 2) C-3PO is completely disassembled on Bespin. 3) During their lightsaber duel, Papa Vader cuts off Luke’s hand.

Three years after the destruction of the Death Star, Imperial forces continue to pursue the Rebels. After the Rebellion’s defeat on the ice planet Hoth, Luke Skywalker journeys to the planet Dagobah to train with Jedi Master Yoda, who has lived in hiding since the fall of the Republic. In an attempt to convert Luke to the dark side, Darth Vader lures young Skywalker into a trap in the Cloud City of Bespin. In the midst of a fierce lightsaber duel with the Sith Lord, Luke faces the startling revelation that the evil Vader is in fact his father, Anakin Skywalker.

Great quote:

“I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.”

- Darth Vader

Sources: “The Science of Star Wars” by Jeanne Cavelos; “Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination” by National Geographic and the Bos-ton Museum of Science; “Star Wars: The Complete Visual Dictionary” by David West Reynolds and James Luceno; “The Star Trek Encyclopedia” by Michael Okuda, Denise Okuda, and Debbie Mirek; StarWars.com; Inter-net Movie Data Base; www.the-numbers.com; Lucasfilm Ltd.images: Courtesy of Lucasfilm

Space sizes

But not everyone is ready to give up the idea of hyperspace or warp drive, A physicist named Miguel Alcubierra theorized in 1994 a way hyperdrive could happen within the existing laws of physics.

Alcubierra’s theory involves warps in the fabric of space. A craft would move very fast through compressed space fabric ahead of it, while being pushed by expanded space fabric behind. But within its own bit of space fabric, it wouldn’t move at all.

Impossible? Perhaps. But several years ago, while taking a tour of the set of “Star Trek,” physicist Stephen Hawking took note of the starship Enterprise’s warp engine prop and messaged, “I’m working on that.”

What you could use is way of folding — or warping — that paper to bring you closer to your destination. The device that could cause this to happen might be referred to as your warp engines. Hyper-space might be the conditions that sur-round your ship as you use this device.

Here’s another way to look at it: Imagine space in only two dimen-

sions, as a piece of paper. You’re at A and want to travel quickly to

B. But it would take much too long to travel all that way.

That’s how Luke Skywalker describes Han Solo’s beloved Millennium Falcon the first time Luke sees it. Luke eventually comes to appreciate both the quick thinking pirate and his speedy freighter.

You can hardly blame him, though. At one point, Han brags to Luke and Obi-Wan Kenobi that his ship “made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs.”

In her book, “The Science of Star Wars,” Jeanne Cavelos explains: A parsec is a “unit of distance used by astronomers; It’s equal to 3.26 light years... Han’s claim is like runners saying that they run a 10-kilometer race in 8 kilometers! It doesn’t make sense.

“Astute fans of “Star Wars” may notice that Obi-Wan gets a pained look on his face when Han says that line. Maybe he is wincing at his pilot’s braggadocio,” Cavelos writes. “I choose to think Obi-Wan knows his units.”

James Clerk Maxwell’s equations — which built upon work by Sir Issac Newton and Albert Einstein — predicted wavelike disturbances can travel in the combined magnetic field, Dove says. These waves would travel “like ripples on a pond,” he says, but at a fixed speed.

But as one accelerates closer to the speed of light, one’s mass increases, physicists tell us.

“At 10 percent of the speed of light an object’s mass is only 0.5 percent more than normal, while at 90 percent of the speed of light [the object] would be more than twice its normal mass,” Dove says. “It can, in fact, never reach the speed of light, because by then its mass would have become infinite.”

And as its mass becomes infinite, so does the amount of energy required to get it there. “For this reason,” says Dove, “any normal object is forever confined by relativity to move at speeds slower than the speed of light. Only light, or other waves that have no intrinsic mass, can move at the speed of light.”

And then there is the seat belt factor. The acceleration required to attempt light speed would turn the rocketeers “into mush,” says Dr. Les Johnson, deputy manager for NASA’s Advanced Concepts Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Hunts-ville and the technical consultant for the movie, “Lost in Space.”

And, if you beat the mush challenge, “It would take two months just to get [up] to half of light speed,” Johnson says. And even if you did manage light speed, it would still “take four years to get to the nearest star even at light speed,” he says.

“Fun. But not real,” says Johnson.

“If Einstein’s Theory of Relativity remains correct, and we have been testing it for nearly a century now, traveling at light speed is impossible for any object possessing mass, i.e., you and me,” agrees Dr. William cooke, of the Marshall Space Flight Center’s Meteoroid Environments Office.

Just how large are the spacecraft we see in the “Star Wars” saga?

Millennium Falcon Length: 87.6 feet

TIE fighter Length: 20.7 feet

Rebel blockade runner (Princess Leia’s ship at the

beginning of Episode IV) Length: 495.4 feet

Imperial star destroyer Length: 5,269 feet

First Death Star (From Episode IV)

Diameter: 524,934 feet (99.4 miles)

Second Death Star (From Episode VI) Diameter: 2,952,775 feet (559.2 miles)

X-wing Fighter Length: 41.0 feet

Saturn V rocket Length: 360.9 feet

Is there no hope we’ll ever be able to climb into the Millennium Falcon and shoot off across the galaxy to visit other star systems? “Our laws of physics don’t seem to apply in ‘Star Wars,’ ” says Paul A. Dove, computer engineer in the Flight Computers branch of the Avionics lab at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center.

The speed of light: Nature’s own speed limit

How ‘hyperspace drive’ could work ‘What a piece of junk!’

Graphics and research by Charles Apple/Special to The Times Interviews and research by Lee Roop/The Huntsville Times

Cockpit

Main sensor antenna

Laser cannons

Freight doors

Docking ring

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