Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/37834
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/37834
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

+1 Galastel. Along the same lines, you can keep a "supernatural" element in the realm of science fiction by having characters refuse to acknowledge it as supernatural, and insisting (as scientists would) that just because we don't know how something works, and just because it seems miraculous, does not make it supernatural.

My crowd (professional scientists that eschew ALL supernatural explanations [which is not 100% of scientists by a long shot]) would say that anything that doesn't fit with our theory of physics is only proof that our theory of physics is wrong or incomplete, we'd say there just is no such thing as phenomenon that are not natural. We would rather say "I don't know" than accept **any** explanation that cannot be proven by logic and experiments. This is one reason we reject String Theory; it has been shown there are more possible solutions to String Theory than there are protons in the visible universe. IMO (and that of others) It has strayed into the realm of faith.

Thus even though there ARE no supernatural events, there are at least a dozen phenomenon (even now IRL) that do not fit the most advanced and current models of particle physics and gravity. Einstein's theory of general relativity tests very well, super accurately. The current theory of Quantum theory tests very well, even more accurately than general relativity. _They cannot be reconciled and one or both of them are wrong._ But no scientist should ever accept that the exceptions to these theories should be attributed to supernaturalism, or God's Will, or anything else.

For scientists, such attributions are a brick wall that shouldn't exist, a false explanation that, intentionally or not, thwarts any further _real_ explanation, and thus interferes with or even prohibits scientists from finding a deeper or different model that will explain all the current models do, _and_ explain some or all of the apparent anomalies in the bargain. That would be an advance in science.

So, given a setting of a complacent science that thinks it has all the answers, justified by the fact that what they do actually does work, any apparently supernatural event that is _prohibited_ by their science should cause a hurricane of activity in the scientific community to see where their science has gone wrong, in prohibiting something so obviously possible.

Or trying to debunk what happened as an illusion, intentional or not. (No real scientist believes Penn and Teller can make either a coin or a woman vanish, we know there **is** a trick even if we don't know what the trick is.)

Accompanying that hurricane will be tornadoes of the non-scientific, of various stripes, pointing at the event as proof the snooty scientists have been wrong all along, there is a God, or magic, and by implication an afterlife and all those they loved still lived on another plane of being!

Like Star Wars, Star Trek, Dune, Heroes, and the current series "Colony" and "The Expanse" and many other scifi movies and series, you can include devices and events that are effectively impossible (e.g. FTL travel) by real-life current science, and even unexplainable by your in-world science (in the Expanse, the Alien Ring portal, slowing down time, etc).

The trick they use is to not **call** it supernatural, or magic, or anything but some version of "unexplained". For SciFi, as an author adopt the scientific attitude: Embrace the answer "I Don't Know," and let the non-scientific amongst your readers think and say what they will.

Original score: 7