A Little Science in Our Science Fiction Would Be Nice

[vitruvian23]

Halfway through the second episode of Fringe, and it may be losing me at this point. Spoilers ahoy....

Okay, so Walter is supposed to be a scientific genius, and Peter is supposed to a genius with a 190 IQ with at least minimal background in chemistry. So why does neither even question how the rapidly growing baby manages to get around conservation of mass issues with its growth? It would be one thing if the hospital were shown to be feeding an endlessly hungry infant massive quantities of formula over the next several hours of growth, but there's no indication that it was fed anything at all. How does it grow? Does it suck in nutrients from the air? If the mass comes from literally nowhere, then whoever is behind the Pattern has access to infinite energy; if you can conjure up mass from nowhere, you can do the same with energy.

To not even have the question brought up so it can be handwaved is kind of insulting. And that's the thing - I'm usually willing to forgive a lot of my televised science fiction. When Star Trek (any iteration) had plot and logic loopholes you could steer a Constitution-class starship right through, I willingly provided not only suspension of disbelief, but active collaboration in the form of coming up with my own explanations for why they weren't really mistakes. I've recently made similar efforts on this blog with regard to Marvel's recent superhero movies. But they don't even bother to address a very simple, central point. One that need not even have come up; how would the story have been hurt if it was in fact the case that the newborn drained the hospital's entire store of infant formula in the course of growing to adult size over a couple of hours, rather than a couple minutes?

Oh, and Walter comes up with a device within hours that can put images from a dead woman's optic nerve up on a monitor. Presumably he can work it the other way around, and make cybernetic eyes as a matter of course. Nobody's going to think that there's actually a market for this sort of thing, one that Massive Dynamics, for all its resources, is evidently not providing the goods to... or Walter's feat would already be old hat. Just like there's no indication that nifty prosthetic limbs are being sold to the medical sector, or even the VA for Iraq War veterans.