>No, seriously, there's a douchey brushoff of the idea at some point,
>which has to do with the preposterous notion that they're literally
>not alive when anyone's looking at them - which places them
>somewhere just to the right of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal
>on the "idiotic concept" scale, I should think - and "you can't kill a
>stone".

Things that turn into not-things when people are observing them is actually kind of cool. That would be a rather effective form of camouflage, really; if anyone observing you (and assuming that electronic or other forms of remote surveillance counts) can't see what you really are because you literally are NOT that thing anymore, then a whole world of possibilities opens up. Like a more extreme Somebody Elses Problems field, really.

But did they seriously say "you can't kill a stone?" Because that is indeed an idiotic concept. You can't KILL a stone, sure. You can't kill anything that isn't alive. But you can make it stop being a stone. Or you can render it unusable for it's intended purpose. Turning a statue into a pile of rubble doesn't kill it, but it does destroy the statue.

You'd think they could have put some thought into it. Just off the top of my head, you could set up some sort of mutually-reinforcing protection thing; you can't kill the Angel by destroying the statue because, indeed, you can't kill stone, but you also can't destroy the statue because it's only a statue some of the time and the not-statue part of it will just keep reconstructing the statue.

(I'm reminded of the relationship between Dworkin and the Pattern in Roger Zelazny's Amber Chronicles, where Dworkin's big theory was that neither he nor his Pattern could be hurt because he'd protect the Pattern and the Pattern would protect him.)

It took me two seconds to come up with that, and I'm not paid a lot of money to write Doctor Who.

>If it helps, then, let's go with "the laws of physics don't work that
>way". Shit, in UF not even magic works that way. Things that
>are made of stone and yet alive, sure, that's basically what the
>Prague Golem was. Things that are sometimes made of... something...
>and alive, and sometimes made of stone and not alive,
>interchangeably based on an incredibly crocky apprehension of the
>observer effect? That's just somebody not having a goddamn clue how
>quantum mechanics works. :)

Well, to be fair, trying to bring actual science into either Doctor Who or UF is risky business at the best of times. Usually "good enough to get past peoples suspension of disbelief and/or seem really cool" is the threshold to beat, it seems.

I mean, I know personally a couple people with physics backgrounds who have a lot of trouble with any sci-fi that involves FTL travel because their brains are constantly yelling "THE UNIVERSE DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY. CAUSALITY AND FASTER-THAN-LIGHT TRAVEL ARE FUNDAMENTALLY INCOMPATIBLE" at them.

-Merc
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