Image: Lucasfilm
If the first six Star Wars movies only whetted your appetite for whirling lightsaber duels and thickets of blaster fire, then you're in for a treat starting Friday, August 15.
That's when Star Wars: The Clone Wars—the first animated installment of George Lucas's epic Star Wars saga—opens in theaters. Watch as Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Mace Windu and their other Jedi pals, backed by an army of cloned soldiers, takes on a droid army led by General Grievous and Sith Lord Count Dooku.
Spacecraft, robots, far-off galaxies—all are familiar subject to readers of ScientificAmerican.com. In this special report, we bring you a selection of Star Wars–themed science, from robots and artificial intelligence to cloning and alien life. Read excerpts from Jeanne Cavelos's 1999 book, The Science of Star Wars, then check out our interview with the author and peruse a selection of stories from our archive to find out what's happened since.
And because there's more to life than science (or so we've heard), you'll also find an interview with David Filoni, director of The Clone Wars film and an animated series coming this fall, as well as an image gallery of Clone Wars characters, old and new.
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3 Comments
Add CommentCouldn't be nearly as crap as the first three installments
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDisclaimer: I have not read the movie ads for Star Wars featured here, and I probably will not given constraints on my time. This may be one of the few times I have not read SCIAM from cover to cover in a spirit open-mindedness, i.e., to avoid judgment without review.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBetween the editors and readers such as myself, we all know that these articles are purely advertising and SCIAM makes most of its revenue from advertising, probably including the fees paid to run these Star Wars ads. More to the point, it is not science or even related to science.
With no offense intended, this reply is to the complaint department, if there ever was one. Seeing the various bizarre comments sent by the so-called SCIAM community, I am sure the editors ignore the vast majority of complaints.
To Steve Mirsky who seems to be preoccupied with fantasy and science fiction films (judging from his July 2008 column), it is unfortunate that you or anyone else at SCIAM would waste your mind pushing this type of thing. I suppose video entertainment like Star Wars, or more likely the fees from Lucas Productions, is of more concern to you than sharing commentary on real science relevant to problems we face in the real world, elucidation of any science, or even anecdotes of science gone wrong, etc.
Attacks on fundamentalist propaganda do not constitue science.
Your inclusion of your insider's view of the author of Expelled does not make your own article any more intelligent. To the point: you cannot make your own opinions more profound, more true, or more relevant by pointing out that someone else is an idiot. That SCIAM sees no problem with this kind of appeal is, again, an unfortunate lapse of critical thinking.
On the topic of advertising, I would also like to note that Michael Shermer's July 2008 column was no more than self-promotion. Because so much of his article relied on references to some god, almost certainly due to Michael's own narrow-minded cultural bias, it was not very convincing that he had some rational claim for which the reader ought to buy his book.
It's an awful movie... really it's just an ad for a television series.
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