I'm about to get into a debate with someone on a Godzilla board and I've brought up some calcs that I've done on several monsters.
To quote:
That is, if he puts any faith into your calculations. Mathematically your calculations may be sound, but that really amounts to nothing when debating fictional characters.
Now what do you really say to people like this? I've tried responding as you see in the thread, but for some reason I just don't think it's going to work.
Shadow WarChief wrote:I'm about to get into a debate with someone on a Godzilla board and I've brought up some calcs that I've done on several monsters.
To quote:
That is, if he puts any faith into your calculations. Mathematically your calculations may be sound, but that really amounts to nothing when debating fictional characters.
Now what do you really say to people like this? I've tried responding as you see in the thread, but for some reason I just don't think it's going to work.
He = Brendosaurus
Me = Godjira
The calcs come up about 3/5 down the page
So really, what do you say to these guys?
Simple: everyone performs calculations; they simply aren't precise about it. When you see two fictional characters and one is obviously much larger and stronger than the other, you perform a simple mathematical comparison: A > B. The difference between him and us is that we try to figure out whether A is 1.8B or 500B, while "A>B" is good enough for him. This may be enough for the most simple-minded comparisons.
However, when you try to get into more complex questions (eg- is A greater than 2B, or is A greater than B when B is enhanced by 50% due to X), then you need those fucking numbers.
Mathematics is simply a method of assigning objective accuracy to observations. To deny the applicability of mathematics is to deny the validity of the observations themselves.
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There is a point that mathmatics are not 100% sound, but they hold enough background help make a base for arguements to be made off of. The person does have a point, but the only way to truly argue a fictional character is to use both traits and background knowledge of the abilities of the character as well as mathmatical bases to try and emphasize points. Tell that guy that the most usefull arguements will come at an equilibrium of fictional knowledge and winged calculations.
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If he's trying to compare monsters from the same dimension, then you can probably get by without too much calculation.
OTOH, if he's trying to compare, say, the Japanese Godzilla monsters to the cheesy 50's giant insects, then you'll need to do some calculations to do some baseline comparisons.
Calculations are pretty worthless when applied to such bizarre things as regularly crop up in science fiction (if we could make sense of them in today's physics they wouldn't exactly be science fiction). You can't do experiments, or test your hypothesis by making predictions in these fields. Those are critical tools in science. Therefore, the fundamental level appears to be, not calculations, but definitions, or so I have seen so far. Most big universe franchises employ at least one person aware of the differences between Joule and Watt, or sometimes even the writer knows this.
In most cases you can pretty much assume that the writers did not bother to calculate exactly how much energy this received from that (as example), and so I don't know how you would expect to get reasonable or even self-consistent answers. You end up just running after the writers, trying to patch anything that goes wrong into a coherent theory. There's no reason at all why that should be possible.
