People, Gresh & Weinberg didn't get everything wrong. One thing they got right was how to do comics/SF science. The key isn't 'consistent rules', as someone else put it, but being plausible within what's known to be true or to somehow be outside that known. The trick is to stay as close to the bounds of the known to be credible while on the edge enough so as to avoid being outright disprovable. A consistent story with a purple-polka-dotted sky for our current Earth can be written but it doesn't pass muster since it fails for the disprovability aspect.
For instance, using a known thing like gamma rays to explain the Hulk is just asking for trouble since it can eventually be proven or disproven that such a thing is possible. Claiming 'spider-powers' for Peter Parker when spiders don't even have those powers isn't just bad comics/SF science, it plain gets the essential facts wrong.
But the original concept behind Kryptonian sun-based powers was 'ultra solar rays' that passed through the Earth day and night. They were a kind of mysterious energy that real world science hadn't detected in the same sense that fish don't realize they're in water or we took thousands of years to realize air occupied supposed empty space around us. Later writers goofed when they equated the solar aspect with actual light energies, though it must be noted that red sunlight can be and is different from yellow sunlight. Aside from the difference in sheer energy, red dwarf sunlight is missing carbon-cycle hydrogen fusion, red giant sunlight includes fusion reactions from helium up to silicon, red dwarf sunlight may contain complex molecules since the temperatures are cool enough for molecules to exist. While the energy from yellow sunlight isn't anywhere near able to power even a mobile plant, fer goshsakes, it certainly can be a catalyst in the same sense that the presence of oxygen combines with the glucose (the real source of energy, not oxygen) in our cells to fuel our activities.
Yeah, and transporter technology is theoretically possible even considering Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. It's now more a matter of technological and engineering advances as opposed to any theoretical objections to accurately, precisely transmitting quantum information from one location to another.
http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/quantuminfo/teleportation/ http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw62.htmlFor someone who made the sweeping statement that Superman couldn't accelerate to relatavistic velocities in short distances and timeframes, perhaps it would be better to temper such statements with an element of doubt or 'IMHO'.
You see, really gifted writers like Asimov or London or Crichton make it a point to know more about the real world and science and incorporate that understanding into their stories. Where they've bent the rules like with warp drive, they skate on the outer fringes where their technobabble just might be plausible and not directly disprovable. Jules Verne surely had this right for his era and he was quite prophetic in many regards about what actually transpired in real world science. It is an odd coincidence that real world scientists are now coming up with plausible ways for multiverses and warp drive to exist that eerily are close to their SF cousins.
The better and best writers are actually better educated by law, science, etc. and generally about the real world than the pathetic wannabes who think writing is an easy out from getting a proper education. Good writers know more about real world science and the world in general. Writing is not about just making stuff up. What was the expression? "10% inspiration and 90% perspiration?"
As I said on another thread, the Dalai Lama has an appropriate quote about this: "Know what the rules are so you know how to break them properly." Asimov and his compatriots surely have this down cold.
EDIT: An interesting fact is I calculated and posted on other forums many years ago based on real world energy efficiencies and gravitational adaptability experiments in centrifuge experiments that Krypton's gravity was probably around 35 Gs or ours is about 0.0286 of Krypton's. Waid's Birthright #1 states Earth gravity is 0.03 of Krypton's which is my figure rounded to two decimal places. My reciprocal gives us 35 and Waid's gives us over 33. That's pretty darn close. Either Waid duplicated my reasoning to come up with a similar figure (or rounded it to two places), or he saw my posts and liked what he saw. Action Comics #1 levels are more plausible than world-moving levels. Waid even tips his hat to Wolverton re: an anti-grav neural network to explain flying in BR. That mass-energy conversion in Superman's digestive tract was first mentioned in a speculative post I made several months earlier on Alvaro's about then-existing canon implying Superman could mass-energy convert in his metabolism.
