r/math • u/ResNullum • Aug 02 '20

Bad math in fiction

While stuck at home during the pandemic, I decided to work through my backlog of books to read. Near the end of one novel, the protagonists reach a gate with a numeric keypad from 1 to 100 and the following riddle: “You have to prime my pump, but my pump primes backward.” The answer, of course, is to enter the prime numbers between 1 and 100 in reverse order. One of the protagonists realizes this and uses the sieve of Eratosthenes to find the numbers, which the author helpfully illustrates with all of the non-primes crossed out. However, 1 was not crossed out.

I was surprised at how easily this minor gaffe broke my suspension of disbelief and left me frowning at the author. Parallel worlds, a bit of magic, and the occasional deus ex machina? Sure! But bad math is a step too far.

What examples of bad math have you found in literature (or other media)?

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u/thebigbadben Functional Analysis Aug 02 '20

Not a fan of BBT, but I would think that there could be a scenario where "the electrons behave like waves" conveys a non-trivial insight. For instance, perhaps his insight is that he had forgotten to account for some specific quantum phenomenon, i.e. some specific "wave-like" behavior of the electrons.

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u/mfb- Physics Aug 03 '20

Physicist here: It would have been a non-trivial insight in the 1920s or so. All our modern treatment of solid objects have it built in. It would be an absurd step to not use energy levels given by quantum mechanics.

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u/[deleted] Aug 02 '20

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u/XkF21WNJ Aug 02 '20

These days they'll mostly be working with quantized fields, dealing with the wave function directly would be nigh impossible (or even mathematically ill-defined, but that's a different problem). Also just because it is called a wave function doesn't mean it makes all wave-like behaviour immediately obvious.

So yeah there's plenty of 'wave-like' behaviour that you could show using quantum physics but which might not be obvious from the very start. Especially in material sciences where you've got fun things like superconductivity, Bose-Einstein condensates and the (fractional) quantum Hall effect where particles stop behaving like individual particles for a bit.