Wired.com spoke with Patrick Di Justo, Wired magazine contributing editor and co-author of the new book, The Science of Battlestar Galactica. Together with the show’s science advisor, NASA scientist Kevin Grazier, Di Justo jumps beyond the red line to delve into the science behind the story.
Wired.com: What was the purpose of this book?
Patrick Di Justo: Battlestar Galactica has been called “a science fiction show without the science.” There are some episodes of Galactica that are almost like The West Wing, they dealt more with politics…. They never really highlighted the science in the show unless it drove the plot. That was very good from a dramatic point of view, but it did leave a lot of science unexplored and unexplained in the show.
So we thought, hey, no one’s really building up the science in the show, and it’s there. Why don’t we do it?
Wired.com: So in the show’s philosophy, who wins in the science-versus-drama battle?
Di Justo: There’s actually a quote in the book, where it says, “Drama wins every time.” That’s essentially it. It’s not that they completely threw science out the airlock. It’s just that there would be times when they wouldn’t mention or play up the science.
Wired.com: Can you give an example?
DiJusto: Very basically, how could Cylons pass medical tests? They never explained that, never went into any detail about it. It was just accepted that Cylons could be so wonderfully indistinguishable that it would take a demented genius like Gaius Baltar to build a special type of machine that could differentiate the two. You wouldn’t tell them apart from a standard medical test. And the show never explains how that works, how that happens — it just happens.
Same thing with the FTL drive. They never explain how it happens, it’s just spin up the drives and whoosh — off you go.
Read the entire interview here
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