ozarque's Journal

Writing science fiction; getting stuck on an off-the-wall science question...
I had said in an earlier post that I was getting nowhere with an sf short story I'm working on, and that what was holding me up was an actual hard science problem for which I've been unable to think of any conceivable solution. Which led to the following comments....

From Anonymous, in the spirit of Working On The Car Together:
"For the science issue, I'll bet you've got some scientists in your audience, and you certainly have hobby-scientists."

From

victoriacatlady:
"I suspect that an off-the-wall science question would be the very kind to prompt all kinds of wild and wonderful suggestions from the people here. Your courage I can't do anything about, other than to say that I would be very surprised if anyone here condemned or looked down on you in any way for asking it."

From

dteleki responding to

victoriacatlady ...

"Second the motion. Plus, if the science idea is extremely outrageous, then turn the entire story based on it into a comic extravaganza -- the sillier and the more self-contradictory, the better. For example, I remember a wonderful story that simply assumed that the second law of thermodynamics could be easily violated; while ostentatiously pointing out that none of the silliness taking place violated the FIRST law of thermodynamics."

And I have decided that even with the high risks involved -- which will become obvious here in just a minute -- the discussion should be really interesting.... So. [Insert emoticon for "gathering up courage here in spite of great trepidation."] Here goes.

For at least the past three years I've been working on an sf short story about a research study on the effects (or non-effects) of prayer. I have setting, characters, plot, dialogue .... all that good stuff. I don't have the one crucial scientific element that would let me finish the story, and the idea of making it a comic extravaganza -- although I see why that can be a useful alternative strategy -- doesn't appeal to me.

Suppose I'm able to write the story well enough to establish -- subject to the usual suspension of disbelief in the reader -- the concept that prayer is some sort of actual force, its nature not well understood, capable of doing work. Suppose the characters in my story want to set up a standard well-controlled double blind experiment -- as in 100 hospital patients with heart disease who will be prayed for and 100 hospital patients with heart disease who won't be prayed for, with no one involved in the study knowing which are which, to find out whether the outcomes for the patients show statistically significant differences that would be evidence for or against the efficacy of prayer as medical treatment. [I am aware that there is a theological question inherent in this topic, but that's a separate issue; for the scientists in the story I'm writing, it's not relevant.]

The fatal flaw in all real-world prayer research studies -- and there are lots of them -- is that no mechanism exists for dealing with the problem of what is called "background prayer." That is, you can set up your study in excruciating detail, with specifications like "each patient prayed for will be prayed for silently by three people, using only Prayer X and three people saying Prayer X aloud, only in English, only while sitting with their eyes closed, once each day at noon for exactly three minutes" (and so on and so on), but that won't control for "composition" or "procedure" or "dose." Because there's no way at all to know how many people who aren't part of the study are praying for that same patient, or how often, or for how long, or in what fashion. There's no way at all to know how many people are praying some generic prayer for all sick people, or all people sick with heart disease, or some other set into which the patients in your study would fall. Even if you dispense with people altogether and try to do your research study with seedlings, or bacteria, or some such thing, you still can't escape background prayer -- because there's no way to know how many people are praying for "every living thing."

There's no way to write a respectable sf short story on this topic unless the writer can come up with some mechanism for blocking background prayer -- some mechanism that has enough scientific plausibility to keep the story from turning into a comic extravaganza. You can't just do some hand-waving and say "and then they activated the Background-Prayer Shield." That's not science; that's waving your Magic Wand. That's like turning on your "Universal Translator." It would move the story along, but it's not science.

The problem seems to me to be analogous to the problem in all those stories about mental shields against telepathy. I've read hundreds of sf stories with alleged shields against telepathy, but I haven't been able to find a single one that offers a plausible scientific explanation for how those shields would work, or even a description of a scientific field or theory that might plausibly produce an explanation. [If you know of such a story, I'd be delighted to know about it.]

So -- there you are. That's the problem. And within the boundaries of the story I'm writing, the problem is independent of the theological question. For example, I'm not interested in writing a story that would end with the scientists all throwing up their hands and agreeing that the experiment is impossible because prayer is a spiritual force or a divine force. I take prayer and the theology of prayer very seriously, but theology -- so far as I am able to determine -- is not relevant to the problem I'm trying to find a solution for.