'Journey to the Far Side of the Sun' (1969)

On Jan 26, 12:09*pm, calvin wrote:
On Jan 26, 11:07*am, moviePig wrote:









On Jan 26, 10:43*am, calvin wrote:
On Jan 26, 10:18*am, "Steven L." wrote:
Arthur C. Clarke had written a sci-fi story about a technician working
in some nuclear power plant gets put through a space warp and gets reversed.

One thing Clarke wrote about (which the "Journey" movie ignored) was
that the technician developed malnutrition despite eating a regular
diet. *That's because many nutrients have a chirality (right
handedness/left-handedness) about them: *An amino acid or a vitamin
molecule have a reversed mirror image too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirality_%28chemistry%29

And the technician's metabolism, having reversed molecules, couldn't
bind to the nutrients he was eating. *So they had to procure specially
designed reversed amino acids and reversed vitamin molecules to keep the
technician alive--at great expense.
...

The movie ignored that possibility, but it did not ignore
electrical polarity. *It just smoothed it over by saying
that the two planets were not reversed in that respect.

To me, though, the movie's interest was in the situation.
It also seemed to me that there was no need for the
astronauts to swap places again. *The movie should
have just ended with them enjoying reconciliation
with their wives.

The title seems puzzling. *"The far side of the Sun"? *I go there
annually...

Aside from your joke, the sci-fi premise that there could be
a hidden planet opposite the earth in its orbit does not
stand up to celestial mechanics. *Even if the earth's orbit
was perfectly circular, there could not be a planet in stable
orbit 180 degrees away from it. *Another planet would have
to be at what are known as Lagrange Points, 60 degrees
in front of or behind the earth.

I believe that a few very small objects have been found at these
positions in the earth's orbit, and much larger objects in
Jupiter and Saturn's satellite orbits, as well as in Jupiter's
orbit of the sun, the so-called Trojan asteroids.

I dream of the day when a good scifi is produced (in this century,
that is) that does not stray from science fact or possibility and is
still entertaining.