Is modern science becoming too abstract for sci-fi to meaningfully engage with it?
I’ve been thinking about how science is deeply tied to the values, anxieties, and imagination of a given era. The sci-fi of an era reflects the technological progress and the psyche of the leading thinkers in that era. The scientists, theorists, engineers, philosophers, writers, and policy makers as well. People whose ideas end up shaping the direction of the world.
But I can’t help feeling that scientific temperament is no longer central to public life in the way it perhaps once felt (if it ever truly was). A lot of people seem increasingly distant from science. Not necessarily hostile to it, but disconnected from it. And I wonder if part of that has to do with the nature of modern science itself.
A lot of cutting-edge science today, especially in physics, feels so far removed from everyday intuition and tangible human experience. The average person has almost no way of mentally grasping it. The frontier seems to only exist in a realm of mathematics, abstraction, and scales of reality that don’t map easily onto our senses.
My question is: has science become so abstract, and so distant from ordinary human intuition, that it’s also becoming harder for science fiction to build narratives around it?
Because I definitely feel like sci-fi has shifted away from engaging directly with cutting-edge scientific ideas. Because those ideas are now harder to dramatize, visualize, or emotionally ground in a story.
Curious to hear what people think, especially if you read a lot of sci-fi or follow developments in physics/science more broadly.