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No Conservation of Energy: Difference between revisions
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== Film ==
* In the remake of ''[[The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951 film)|The Day the Earth Stood Still]]'', the heat energy from the spacecraft rapidly decelerating should have turned the UN and the surrounding landscape to molten slag.
* Between the mothership, the ship reactors, and...well, everything... [[Bellisario's Maxim|don't think about]] where all the energy comes from or goes in ''[[Independence Day]]''.
* Parodied in ''[[Galaxy Quest]]'', when the crew has to land on a hostile planet to retrieve a "Beryllium Sphere", because it supposedly powers the ship, for reasons completely unexplained and unknown, except that it happened on the TV show.
** This is a direct parody of the Dilithium Crystal that somehow makes warp drive possible in ''[[Star Trek]]''. It is there to "mediate" the matter-[[Antimatter]] reaction and create a pair of tuned plasma streamers. This is only explained that way in official material ''outside'' of the show, which makes this [[All There in the Manual]].
** In the [[Star Trek (film)|2009 Star Trek movie]], Spock uses a drop of "red matter" to collapse a supernova into a [[Negative Space Wedgie]] via some sort of chemical reaction. The wedgie seems to work like a [[
* In ''[[Honey I Shrunk the Kids]],'' the principle behind the shrink ray is explained thus: atoms and molecules are made up largely of empty space between the subatomic particles.<ref>This is true; the distance from the nucleus of an atom to its electron cloud is on par with the distance from the Sun to Pluto, relative to its size</ref> The ray shrinks an object by reducing this empty space. However, this should mean that a shrunk object retains its mass. Ergo, the shrunk children should be just as heavy and ''just as strong'' as they were at full-size. There should be no plot, because there's no way they could get swept up in the garbage by accident, and they should have the strength to jump up and activate the machine themselves - assuming their incredible density didn't make them fall straight through the floor.
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* Averted in [[Anne McCaffrey]]'s [[Tower and The Hive|Talent series]], which explains that the power necessary for the telekinetics to hurl spaceships around like toys comes from ''massive'' generators. Psychic activity (with or without a generator gestalt) also burns ''a lot'' of calories, meaning that, while a telekinetic with no generator handy can get the job done quicker, he's still doing the same amount of work as someone doing it by hand. Many of the telekinetics are shown eating some pretty high-calorie meals and snacks throughout the day to keep their strength up, and get extremely fatigued after teleporting very large objects (even with the generators helping).
** Also, it's stated that energy must be '''absorbed''' when negative work is done (for instance, teleporting an object from orbit down to ground level), although simply being the conduit for such large amounts of energy can still place enormous stress on physical systems.
** Also averted in ''[[The Ship Who...]] Won''. A brainship finds a world where magic actually works, complete with all the standard No Conservation of Energy tropes. Then they discover that {{spoiler|there's actually a huge generator complex powering all this, which the magicians have completely wrecked by using it for stupid things like fireballs and levitation}}.
* Averted in Robert Asprin's ''[[Myth Adventures]]'' book series: magic is fueled by [[Ley Line|ley lines]] crisscrossing the worlds, and you have to be tapped into those forces to be an effectively powerful wizard.
* It's often hard to reconcile stories that involve [[Shapeshifting]] with the related law of conservation of mass. In one of his ''[[Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser]]'' books [[Fritz Leiber]] makes an exception by having a character who's shrunk needing to find a few zillion spare atoms if he wants to get back to normal size. {{spoiler|In the end he gets them from a fat girl, who suddenly finds herself skinny. Eww.}}
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== Tabletop RPG ==
* ''[[Dungeons
** In 3.5 it's explicitly stated that while you do need to follow conservation of energy, you can pull any extra heat you need, for example, from the elemental plane of fire. Which is infinitely large and all of it is fire. So the only real limits are how skilled you are at moving things around. Once you get into the plane of shadow, or the positive and negative energy planes, it gets weirder.
* Explicitly averted in [[GURPS]]'s default magic systems as of 4e. Mages use ambient mana to power spells (if there's not much mana they can seriously hurt themselves). Clerics channel power directly from a deity. Ironically psi powers, which are treated as more scientific, give no explanation for how they operate without outside energy.
* One of the example technologies available for [[Sufficiently Advanced Alien|T+ 4]] ships in ''Diaspora'' is the ability to dump heat into another dimension. This is important, as the game remembers that hard vacuum is an insulator.
* Averted in both [[Warhammer
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