Teaching Physics in a Fantasy World
I have been a physics teacher for more than twenty years, and I still love it. There is something wonderfully absurd about the questions students ask. One of my favourites was this: If Superman flies west at 300 metres per second and fires a bullet east at 300 metres per second, will the bullet move?
The short answer is no, at least not relative to the ground. The bullet’s motion cancels out Superman’s. From his point of view, it fires normally, but to someone standing still, it simply hovers. The beauty of physics lies in that balance between logic and imagination. It lets the impossible make sense once you look at it closely enough.
Another time, when I was teaching a younger class about astronomy, a student asked, Where does the old moon go when we get a new one? They thought a new moon meant a completely new celestial body. That question still makes me smile. Curiosity like that is what keeps me teaching. No question is ever foolish, because questions are where discovery begins.
Physics has always been one of those subjects people either adore or dread. It is demanding and filled with ideas that stretch the mind until it aches. The twin paradox and time dilation, for instance, still fascinate me. I never studied quantum mechanics in depth at university since I am an environmental physicist by trade, yet relativity opened my eyes to how strange and beautiful the universe truly is.
Of course, in my books, the people of Teloshka are far from reaching that level of understanding. They live in a world still figuring out how nature works, long before they have words like gravity or constant of proportionality. Yet necessity has always been the mother of invention, and Teloshka is full of necessity.
Physics is precise, but fiction gives it room to breathe. The question then becomes: how does it work when magic is involved? Perhaps magic is not real at all, or at least not in the way we think. Arthur C. Clarke once said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” To the untrained eye, even the simplest principle can appear supernatural.
A rainbow, for example, forms when sunlight refracts, reflects, and disperses through countless raindrops at specific angles, about forty-two degrees from the observer’s line of sight. A double rainbow appears when the light reflects twice inside each droplet, reversing the colours. Knowing this does not make the sight any less enchanting. The science explains the mechanism, not the magic.
Fantasy works the same way. The most convincing magic has its own logic. It obeys internal laws that may differ from our own but remain consistent. I do sometimes find myself shaking my head when a story breaks the basic laws of thermodynamics without reason. I adore fantasy, but energy cannot simply appear or disappear, not even for dragons.
That does not mean physics should control storytelling. It means the illusion feels stronger when it has a foundation readers can trust. Even if they cannot name the principle, they sense when something follows cause and effect.
Sometimes, of course, we bend the rules. I do it often enough. My upcoming novel An Envious God (out 30 November) introduces characters who blur the boundary between the natural and the impossible. Without spoiling anything, think about the electric eel. It generates up to 600 volts to stun prey or defend itself. To anyone without modern science, that would be sorcery. Yet it is completely real.
That is the intersection where I like to write. We live in a world built from physics, so our imagined worlds can draw from that same logic while keeping their sense of wonder.
Einstein’s thought experiments often play in my head when I write. In one of them, you sit in the middle of a train moving at great speed. Lightning strikes the front and back of the train at the same moment. To someone watching from the platform, the strikes are simultaneous. To you, they are not. You are moving toward one flash and away from the other, so you see them at different times.
Who is right? Both of you are. That is relativity in action.
Now, think about time instead of lightning. In special relativity, a moving clock ticks more slowly than a clock at rest. If your parents travel at near light speed while you remain on Earth, they will age less than you. You can even choose the speed and duration so that you end up the same age when they return.
For example, suppose your parents travel at about 0.866c. The Lorentz factor γ is 2 at that speed. If 64 years pass on Earth, only 32 years pass for your parents on the ship. Start with you at 18 and your parents at 50. When they return, you are 82 and they are 82 as well. That is the twin paradox in action, and it follows directly from measured time dilation.
Even film and television borrow these ideas. One of my favourite examples is the 1990s Sam Neill classic Event Horizon. In it, faster-than-light travel is explained using a simple piece of paper. Draw two dots on opposite corners, fold the paper until they touch, and you have a shortcut. The shortest distance between two points is not a straight line but zero. The ship moves by folding space itself.
A warp drive works on a similar principle. It does not push faster through space; it manipulates the fabric of space so the destination comes closer. It is speculative, certainly, but it does not ignore physics entirely. It takes an existing principle and stretches it just far enough to imagine.
That is the art of both science and storytelling. The best discoveries and the best tales stretch what we know without snapping it in half. They live in the tension between the possible and the almost possible.
Fantasy does not need to reject science. It thrives when it cooperates with it. When gravity pulls, when energy transfers, when light bends, and when cause and consequence remain, the magic feels more alive.
So, as both teacher and storyteller, I tell my students and my readers the same thing: curiosity drives everything. Whether you are wondering about Superman’s bullet, the moon’s renewal, or how to fold space itself, you are already participating in the oldest experiment there is — trying to understand the universe. And that pursuit, whether through science or imagination, is still the most magical thing of all.
Photograph by P. S. Davis — taken with an Olympus E-30. This image is not AI-generated. Prints and merchandise available on Redbubble.