Talk:Nightfall (Asimov short story)
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i like it, it is fun
Yeah I agree. One of the greatest books ever written.
A relevant commentary on how humans perceive and react to the indifferent Universe.
We have a long way to go before we grow up on a cosmic scale.
- Hmm, I read it slightly differently. The biggest problem was not the fear of darkness or ignorance of the universe but rather the dichotomy in society between the scientists and the cultists. Each guarded their own knowledge and rejected the other's when they might have put 2 and 2together in cooperation and prepared the whole society to face what was to come. At least that was the impression the novel gave, I was very very young when I read the short story. --JamesTheNumberless 16:16, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
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[edit] Pitch Black
Pitch Black's fate wasn't any better than the movie version of Nightfall? Wha? --RYard 18:18, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Daybreak
If the 1992 version of the book is discussed then some explanation should be made about the plot of Daybreak. Daybreak is actually better in my opinion and deserves some acknowledgement somewhere. Zuracech lordum 08:57, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Asimov commits schoolboy howler
Some might consider it to be the height of impudence on my part, but I cannot but disagree violently with Master Asimov’s depiction of celestial mechanics in “Nightfall”. Let us ignore the fact that any system involving no less than 6 suns and one planet would be wildly chaotic and almost certainly could not provide the harmonious conditions necessary for life. After all, perhaps a one in a googol chance might end up with such a set up. We have to allow for the fact that this is science fiction.
What can’t be overlooked tho is that the whole Nightfall set up involves a system of mutually attractive bodies orbiting in PERFECT periodicity, that is, after a given time, the configuration of the suns is EXACTLY the same as it was at the earlier time, like a clock ending up back at 12 pm, after which it repeats the cycle. This condition of perfect periodicity is not explicitly stated as such in either the short story or novel, but is an inescapable consequence of the events described. That event is the regular eclipse, every 2000 years, of the only sun shining on the planet. This means that the orbit of the eclipsing planet must be a rational fraction of the orbits of the sun that it eclipses. That situation could never occur, because there is an infinite number of irrational numbers to every rational one, as Pascal demonstrated. Had I been on the planet and been aware of the “Laws of Gravitation” I would myself have been a religious nutcase, because the Celestial Mechanics described by the book could only have been put in “by hand”, that is, be a product of Intelligent Design. No natural configuration of planets would allow for eclipses to occur with the accuracy of a Switch Watch in a necessarily chaotic 6 sun system.
Asimov might have written any number of fiction and non-fiction books about Astronomy, but his formulation of this system is that of a school boy, and not one studying astronomy either. Knowing of Asimov’s work in general, I was not surprised that the plot was typically turgid and simple-minded, but I WAS surprised to find the collection of school boy howlers in this regard. Please don’t reply to this if you don’t know what you are talking about. I am going to post this note however on Wikipedia’s Science Reference Desk as a question, and see if anyone there can throw some light on this. Look up the science ref desk and search for myles to see my question and the responses, if you are interested in following this up. Myles325a 06:27, 17 September 2007 (UTC)
- Please don't get violent. :-)
- Asimov was ~21 when he wrote it, so he was almost a schoolboy. That the situation was wildly unlikely must have been obvious, but Chaos theory wasn't understood back in those days. To save the story,
- The two bodies causing the eclipse don't have to be in exactly the same place, since the occulting body has significant angular width. They just have to have been close enough on the last few occurrences of this situation; 20,000 years is not a long time astronomically. The other suns just have to be below the horizon; if their positions vary from eclipse to eclipse, it won't change the effect.
- —wwoods 17:00, 17 September 2007 (UTC)
It’s 2000 years, not 20,000. And I disagree. The eclipsing planet only comes back every 2000 years as stated in the book (else it would be observed at other times, either in other eclipses, or by the perturbation of other orbits.) So the whole gimmick depends on the eclipse occurring precisely at the time that there is only one sun in the sky. This means that the system in periodical, there’s no getting away from that. A 6 sun system would be wildly chaotic, (and in the story there are no less than 8 bodies in orbit around each other, 6 suns and 2 planets) .But even a simple sun, planet and eclipsing body (a 3 body system) while inherently more stable, would still not allow for celestial mechanics on this precise scale. Imagine a situation in which there is a total solar eclipse every year on march 2nd . That would imply a precise configuration of sun moon and earth, which could only have been put in by God. Myles325a 02:42, 21 September 2007 (UTC)
- Yes, but 20,000 ought to cover the multiple 2,049-year periods referred to in the story. (I think; it's been a while since I read it.)
- —wwoods 05:49, 21 September 2007 (UTC)
The really glaring oversight is that the eclipse will of course not affect the entire planet (at least not right away), since at least half of it has got to be exposed to most of the suns. The original novel (somewhat contradictory) states: "The eclipse that results, with the moon seven times the apparent diameter of Beta, covers all of Lagash and lasts well over half a day, so that no spot on the planet escapes the effects." A "half a day" eclipse that somehow manages to cover the entire surface? Supermagle (talk) 22:16, 25 January 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Other annoying things about Nightfall
There seems to be only an Observatory, a bar, and an archaeological excavation site on the planet.
They have supercomputers, but it has been only several decades since the Laws of Gravitation (Newton’s Laws) have been discovered.
Since that discovery, no one has bothered to work out almanacs of where the suns were and will be in the distant past and future.
Although the scientists are obviously inheritors of Earth’s Enlightenment, and the cultists are the irrationalist counterparts of our own, there seems to be absolutely no scientific discussion on how such a system as theirs could have begun.
The people are a lot of wimps. On Earth, people survive concentration camps. Here, we are expected to believe that the entire civilization goes caput becoz of a few hours of darkness. And yet, darkness is always present on the planet. All any of them have to do is shut their eyes for a moment. And of course, all they had to do was use electric lights for the few hours of darkness. None of it adds up. And the romance is geekboy fantasy at its worst. As is the the caricature of the priests. As a novel, this made a great short story. Myles325a 02:44, 21 September 2007 (UTC)
- I haven't read the extended version — partly because I figured there wasn't enough story to stretch to that length. You might be interested in Dawn (1980), which is a variation of the story. It's set on a medieval-esque world, and deals with a one-time event, which takes care of some of those objections.
- —wwoods 05:49, 21 September 2007 (UTC)
[edit] numerical order of stars
I rearranged the stars slightly, to suggest what was evidently the origin of their names: Numerals. I can't tell exactly which language Onos, Dovim came from, but they appear to be some Indo-European language for "1, 2" (Onos, of course, is the primary, while Dovim has secondary importance in the story), while one binary pair are apparently Romanian (compare Trey, Patru with trei, patru "3, 4") and the second Swahili (compare Tano, Sitha with tano, sita "5, 6"). It would be POV to state this explicitly, but it can hardly be coincidence. kwami 10:15, 12 November 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Fair use rationale for Image:Nightfall cover.jpg
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BetacommandBot (talk) 14:59, 8 March 2008 (UTC)
