Once there were two aliens Phlix and Claz, deep in the galactic cluster.

Phlix: I've figured out how to travel between stars, all we have to do is create a machine that can improve its speed by 10% in a second. Claz: So if it is going 10km/h it can go 11 km/h... that is not going to help us reach the nearest stars. Phlix: You are neglecting the power of the exponent, if it continuously increases its speed by 10% every second, after an hour we would be travelling at 8 10^15 km/h or 2.2 10^16 m/s. Claz: But we don't understand energy and motion yet. Perhaps you should formulate a theory of these, to decide the feasibility of what you want to do first, before you set your heart on building this machine.. Phlix: But that would be admitting the possibility of defeat and not being able to create the future I want, I need to maintain my faith, else I might give up prematurely, without having done all that I could do. The future of our race depends on it, no longer would we be tied to the fate of a single planet. It is only a matter of time before a star goes nova in our vicinity, the geological records have shown the number of time that life on this planet has been reduced to less complex life, due to the radiation bursts. Perhaps next time we won't be so lucky and the entire atmosphere will be ionised. Claz: If this speed of travel is so easy, why haven't we seen other intelligent life forms visit us, from all across the skies yet. Phlix: Well that must be because intelligent life forms are very rare.

I'd have more sympathy with Luke (and thus more forgiveness for Lucas) if instead of the whole X-Wing moving when he tries it, we see a much less dramatic effect; perhaps aerials that were drooping stand up, or the flaps lift gently, or some such.

However, in such films the plausibility of the character's behaviour is always sacrificed in the interests of better visuals, or better drama; cf the zillion ludicrous excuses scriptwriters present for characters not telling each other what's going on.

Funny though this is, it's all conditional on Luke implicitly believing Yoda when he says it ought to be possible.

Consider the analogous situation if he'd tried to lift the X-wing out by simply wading out there, getting his hands under one end, and heaving with his arm and back muscles. He might manage to get the air-filled cockpit end to lift a little bit, briefly, with its buoyancy to help him, but he'd pretty quickly be convinced that it wasn't feasible to get the whole ship all the way out of the water like that and furthermore that he risked putting his back out irreparably if he tried any harder. Even if the galaxy's best weightlifter and weightlifting coach was sitting beside him opining that it was a feasible lift, I think it would be entirely reasonable for Luke not to repose complete trust in that judgment, to think "that's very easy for you to say", and to still be unwilling to try it again, at least until he'd had a lot more coaching to build his muscle, train his technique and increase his confidence.

Yoda, of course, is more interested in training Luke to resolutely and competently oppose evil than to lift spaceships, since in most cases other than this one the latter can be done at least as conveniently with a crane; so rather than spend another few years of patient coaching on lifting heavy objects, he just lifts the thing out himself and gets back to more important matters.

For the love of sweet candied yams! If a pathetic loser like this could master the Force, everyone in the galaxy would be using it! People would become Jedi because it was easier than going to high school.

Eliezer, for all the many, many things with which we disagree about, and all the ways in which I think your various projects are wrongheaded, I still think you're an awesome guy. And this is exhibit #1.

Retired: I think it's a cultural cannon. Milton was a lot smarter and more skilled as an author than the authors of the Bible but he still used it as a starting ground for his stories.

@MV: Thanks, Michael.

@scott clark: George Lucas wasn't trying to teach anything more important than that Luke was a whiny brat, who was reckless, implusive, and lazy. That's the point of my question, scott. Why is George Lucas (or the other authors whose novels he adapted in the series) to be considered an appropriate (valuable?) teacher/observer?

I'd have more sympathy with Luke (and thus more forgiveness for Lucas) if instead of the whole X-Wing moving when he tries it, we see a much less dramatic effect; perhaps aerials that were drooping stand up, or the flaps lift gently, or some such.

Ever see someone walk on a tightrope, or cross a narrow bridge far above the ground? Ever see those people do fine, until they look down and realize what they're doing, and then be unable to go forward, because they cannot let go of their awareness of where they are? I have. I've even been one of those people.

That is why Luke manages to shift the ship, then gives up. His partial success causes him to examine again his belief that the ship cannot be moved, and his awareness of that belief makes it impossible to move the ship.

retired,

I meant that as George Lucas isn't the teacher/observer. George Lucas told a story that lots of people of my generation connected with in a big way(which is no small feat, of course). Its Eliezer that is acting as the teacher/observer, saying remember the situation this character was in, what if he did this instead?

If Eliezer told a similar story about a friend of his, his point would have been the same, but he would have had to work a lot harder to set the stage.

scott clark,

I think your history is a bit off. The plan wasn't 'originally' for Luke to kill Vader, his father; it wasn't until midway through filming Empire (or at least, after the release of A New Hope) that Lucas decided that Vader was Luke's father.

[nerd] Eliezer, one's mastery of the Force isn't based solely on practice, but on the prevalence of Midichlorians in your blood. Due to his family ties, Luke has plenty - it's just the application and faith that he lacks.

This scene rang very true with me and I don't agree with your gripes. Luke has been training like mad for weeks. He's still at the stage of balancing rocks, while his friends are in great danger and he has no way of reaching them. His frustration reaches breaking point in this scene, hence the sulk. In an ideal world Yoda would use this as a lesson for him. Time constraints and the impending doom of the universe etc mean that he can't, hence the display of mad Force skillz.

Can't believe I wrote all that. I'm reminded of this.

Thom, spot on. Just to elaborate somewhat, in the exposition scene where Luke is hanging from the platform on Bespin, David Prowse actually said 'I killed your father', so even the cast and crew on set didn't know until the film came out. From IMDB:

Security surrounding this movie was so intense that George Lucas had regular reports about "leaks" from actors. George Lucas was so determined that the ending be kept secret that he had David Prowse (Darth Vader) say "Obi-Wan killed your father", and dubbed it later to be "I am your father". In fact, only six people knew about the ending: George Lucas, director Irvin Kershner, writers Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan, Mark Hamill, and James Earl Jones.

[/nerd]

[nerd]

I don't believe in midichlorians.

[/nerd]

Stupid HTML. The link to IMDB above is still good.

midichlorians is the worst part of the prequels. Destroys all that was cool about the jedi and the force.

I don't believe in midichlorians.

I find your lack of faith ... disturbing.

@Retired Urologist: ISTM it's a combination of two things:

1. It's a bit of nerd cultural heritage most of us have in common.
2. Science fiction, more than other fiction, tends to deal with ideas, especially science ideas, and future predictions. That's not to say that it usually deals well with them - science flubs are more common, and the aforementioned Star Wars is a big offender. But it's usually wrestling with them at least a little bit, and therein lies another reason it comes up frequently in idea discussions.

I agree with Ben Jones here; scott clark's repetition of the old official history is wrong. As someone who spent far too much time on Star Wars when I was younger, I can heartily recommend The Secret History of Star Wars for a good look into how it all actually developed. (The full PDF used to be available at http://www.secrethistoryofstarwars.com/ but what's left is still worth the reading.)

retired urologist,

Did your question stem from the misunderstanding that the dialogue between Mark Hamill and George Lucas was a real-life dialogue, instead of a fictional dialogue written by Eliezer?

Since the dialogue was fictional, this is not an instance of Eliezer choosing George Lucas as someone having wisdom worth repeating.

Aleksei:

Indeed, I did misunderstand that! No wonder I was so impressed that the actor's refined position in the debate. My gullibility is showing. However, the underlying reason for the question was the many, many references to SF over the past posts and comments, and I think I have a better understanding now. Vassar, I think, put it best for me.

Eliezer: You should believe in Midichlorians. As far as I can tell, they manifest Lucas' disturbing lack of faith. My guess is that when he made the original series he was a fairly serious Buddhist, and the Jedi are sort-of an advertisement for Buddhism. By the time the prequels were made he had abandoned Buddhism, so he decided to make the force materialistic and Jedi wisdom almost reliably wrong.

My guess is that when he made the original series he was a fairly serious Buddhist, and the Jedi are sort-of an advertisement for Buddhism.

Strange... excepting that the nature of the Light and Dark are reversed, and the movies make the Dark out to be inherently evil (when the reality was that both Vader and the Emperor represented perversions of Darkside use), the Star Wars movies are pretty good advertisements for Taoism.

Lucas seems to have gotten Zen Buddhism, Taoism, and some misconceptions about the nature of samurai, all entangled.

Oh, and Star Wars isn't actually science fiction. It's fantasy with a technological setting. I really wish people would get this sort of thing straight.

"My guess is that when he made the original series he was a fairly serious Buddhist"

For the record, as late as 2002 in a Time magazine interview Lucas describes himself as "spiritual" and a "Buddhist Methodist." He was raised a strict Methodist in the San Joaquin Valley - thus the emphasis on clear lines of good & evil - but his friend Gary Kurtz introduced him to Buddhism, as perhaps did the general northern California vibe. I think it's important to recall that Lucas knew Joseph Campbell personally. Finally, the Force didn't exist in the earliest drafts of the story.

In the conceptually impossible possible world where the Force exists in the first place, midichlorians are a foreign invader in the simplest explanation of the Force's structure. You want to move something, therefore it moves.

Fascinating. I'd have thought that a chance to render the Force into a physical instantiation would have been music to your ears.

Magnets can pick up paperclips even when you don't know about electromagnetism. However, to fully understand the magnet, you need a theory of electrons. If you want to use the Force to move something, you don't need to know about midichlorians. However, a good physicalist / reductionist would surely know and feel that the Force should be the result of a physical thing in the universe. As far as I'm concerned 'his midichlorian count is off the charts' and 'the Force is strong with this one' are pretty much synonymous, and I don't have any beef with either statement. I didn't need a physicalist explanation of the Force, but I'm not going to be upset if one is presented. Midichlorians slotted in fine for me. And they're still a good explanation for:

• Strength with the Force being hereditary
• Your potential level being, to an extent, predestined (very Star Warsy)
• People being able to move shit with their minds

What you're saying is that once we've suspended our disbelief about the Force as a cool mysterious property of the universe (three films earlier) there's no call for it to be explained, particularly not in such a crappy way.

That's fair enough.

Oh my various gods! That was possibly one of the best articles here. Granted, it was a bit far afield from usual, but it brought the concepts that this site discusses home in a relatable story. +5, if I could. Though I should be clear, every article I have read on here has taught me something. This one didn't really have a specific lesson to teach, but it was thought provoking and made me laugh a lot more than many of the other articles.

Though I doubt it, if there is anyone here who hasn't heard of the fanfic Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (you will probably recognize the name of the author) I cannot reccommend it more highly. It is positively brimming with story-told knowledge and wisdom like this.

Midichlorians are good for something.

Jo Walton, an sf writer, spent quite a while trying to explain that she couldn't write a story until she knew what the mode for it was, and she just couldn't get the idea across, though it seemed to be something like a concept of what would fit in the story and what wouldn't.

Then Lucas came up with midichlorians, and all she had to say was that midichlorians didn't fit the mode of Star Wars.