I'm to the point that I don't think a politician can get on the ballot without being corrupted. Campaigns are expensive in comparison to the salaries politicians earn- VERY expensive (like it will cost you an average of $500,000 to get a seat that will pay you back, if you're lucky, $60,000 in salary over two years before you have to campaign again). That just invites corruption from the start- before a politician is ever elected he's already been bought by one or more special interests.
Actually, even this article seems a bit strange to me- I always thought Damascus Steel required the sacrifice of a young male slave with proper supplication to the gods to temper the steel (the blood of the slave provided the carbon for the nano tubes) while this seems to be a different process.
My point is that the Force is a phenomenon whose existence can be demonstrated even to those who don't have "faith" in it, the classic example being Vader choking Motti without physically touching him. The fact that there's a demonstrable Force that can be used to do this is sufficient: it means that it's not simply the imagined artifact of a non-scientific religion.
Fine- so tell me, how do you scientifically, OBJECTIVELY, prove that a boy untrained in the force, as YOUNG Anakin was, had power in the force to those who could not feel it?
Adding midichlorians to the picture adds nothing, other than exposing the author for what he is
A Agustinian?
Second-rate, lazy authors do this, sure. And that's the point. For Eps 1 through 3, Lucas was a second-rate, lazy author. If you disagree, please point me to the favorable critical reviews of that work.
Now you're believing CRITICS? Point me to a favorable critical review of anything- those people make a living over panning works they could not duplicate.
Apparently critical thinking is beyond yours, so let's call it even.
Critical thinking is an oxymoron. Critics don't think, they merely criticize.
The Force is an observable, repeatable phenomenon, unlike anything in any religion on Earth.
Apparently you have never heard of the shaolin- or the practice of tai-chi. There are quite a few religions that have such observable, repeatable phenomenon. And not understanding that authors simply change a few letters around in soft science fiction between the science and the pseudoscience, makes me think you would likely not care anyway- theology is beyond your capabilities.
It's been too long since I've seen Episode I. Was it ever mentioned *what* the midicholorians' relationship to the force other than as a rough measure of potential ever was?
Oh please, how do midichlorians make it SCIENCE fiction?
The difference between fantasy and science fiction is having a scientific explaination (or pseudoscientific explaination) for phenomena shown. Hard Science fiction conforms to the One Big Lie rule- all physics and chemistry in the story is related to only one difference from the reality we know. Soft Science fiction such as Star Wars Ep I-III and Star Trek are a bit loser than that- but still provide some form of pseudo-scientific explaination for things. Pure Fantasy like Lord of The Rings, the use of the force in Star Wars Ep IV-VI, and Anderson's Xanth series are a releated, but separate, genre.
That's the exact problem with them: as someone else observed, it's just Star Trek style technobabble, with no real explanatory power.
In other words, it's Soft Science Fiction, no different than the technobabble in a Heinlien, or worse yet a Bradbury, novel.
"Watch out Cap'n, the tetrions are going to blow a hole in the dilithium crystal!"
Well, actually, that one is in keeping with certain alternative theories of CURRENT physics (if you read the author's guides provided by Paramount, dilithium crystals are just quartz with a fourth-dimensional protrusion on the crystaline structure, and tetrions are a well known theoretical particle indicated by the math in Einstien's E=MC^2, as particles that can go no slower than the speed of light and thus are traveling backwards in time). Just because you don't have the education required to understand the technobabble doesn't make the technobabble into nonsense- it just means you're too ignorant to understand it. It also doesn't make it any more real- but it does make it a different genre than pure fantasy.
That's not science fiction, it's the cheesiest of space opera.
Actually, space operas are a form of science fiction usually, there's nothing magical in their looser interpretation of science fiction. Unlike Fantasy, where the writer is effectively an omnipotent and omnipresent being who can drop in anything he likes.
Removing midichlorians would only improve the story, and nothing would be lost.
Like I said before- what would be lost would be the difference between a large galaxy-wide religion co-existing with science and a small, insular religion that shuns science. The Sith are fundamentalists, the Jedi start out as moderates, but with the fundamentalists killing off the moderates the moderates become more fundamentalist. Kind of like what happened with Christianity 500 years ago with the Council of Trent, or what is happening with Islam today (only a bit more extreme- there are 10 million fundamentalist Islamics out there, instead of just two, but the effect is the same).
Yeah, I guess when "holding a child's hand" is to receive that honour then I'll finally be able to get over my childhood traumata.
The real question is when will you be able to USE your childhood traumata to become a better person to your children, not when will you be able to "get over it".
I find it very interesting that events that we'd have considered character building 30, 50, even 70 years ago, are considered abuse now. But I don't find it surprising- 70 years ago they were passing the first child-labor laws cutting families off from what had been considered a valid source of income for the 100 years before that, merely because the children were being "exploited".
Oh, yeah- I did get accosted in the store the other day because my 3-year-old didn't want to hold my hand or ride in the shopping cart...he was crying and a clerk thought I was abusing him.
The midoclorians point really was extremely stupid.
The midiclorians point was the difference between the Jedi Order and the Sith- one includes information and the other hides it. Episodes IV-VI show the common human element that to beat the enemy, one must in some ways become the enemy (just as the KGB replaced the NKVD who replaced the Czarest secret police; or for a more recent example, just as the United States isolated Japanese Americans at the same time the German Nazis were isolating Jews).
Explaining Lazarus's resurrection as a temporary coma, or the walking on water as walking on rocks just below the surface indeed DOES take away the miraculous.
No it doesn't. The core of any given miracle is the FORTUNE of the FORTUNATE coincidence. Do you think Mary and Martha cared if Lazarus was dead or just in a temporary coma? No, they just wanted their brother back. Do you think the Apostles cared if Jesus was walking on water or just knew where the rocks were? No- they were happy to be rescued from a potentially dangerous storm. It's a very bad definition of miracle that has taken hold in America; it hides the miracles all around us that happen every single day.
OTOH, finding incontrovertible proof that the stories of the Bible tell about scientifically verifiable true events would turn the Bible into a book of history and add some very large sections of "known unknowns" in physics. Just a fantastically advanced being fooling around with the history of some apes with techniques that seem magical, but aren't. No miracles to see here.
I've got no problem with either of those- because my definition of the word miracle is not so narrow that it requires God break the laws he wrote to accomplish them.
You said it better than I could- and a clod who doesn't know that the Bible is a spritutal explaination of WHY isn't going to understand the idea of Katholikos Jedi and Gnostic Sith (and the fact that to win you have to accept the tactics of your enemies as your own). It's all beyond such people.
I didn't "just learn about them in high school"- but I suspect many of the people who comlain about the mitichlordians failed to. Some of the rest just prefer magic fantasy worlds instead of SCIENCE fiction- and the rest apparently didn't get the even more subtle destruction of a Katholikos-style religious order being the prime population control tactic of the Republic (Jedi Temple) and replaced with a secret-knowledge Gnostic order (Sith, Yoda as the Last Jedi).
It turns something vague and mystical that can be learned (remember at one point Ben Kenobi even offers to teach Han Solo the ropes) into something definite and "scientific" that you have to be born with.
You can play basketball too- but you're no Michael Jordan with inborn talent I'd suspect. However, by the time Han Solo is born, the religion has changed: The Sith (Gnostics) are in control and have destroyed the Jedi (Katholikos) order. Gnosticism rules in IV-VI in the same way Katholikos ruled in I-III.
This makes very little sense with, for example, Han Solo's dismissal of the force as "simple tricks and nonsense" if it is a scientifically explained process that can be quantitatively measured.
Oh, I see- you don't understand the true purpose of religion. It's in the Jedi's best interest to have their science and "worldview" of the universe cloaked in myth and legend- it insures that fewer rivals pop up, and also allows them to control the majority, more superstitious population. Religion is really about providing a common morality among diverse peoples for the purpose of governmental control- always has been.
Similarly, the "I find your lack of faith disturbing" scene suggests that even many people in the empire believed the force was superstition (so it's not that the empire just suppressed knowledge of it among the common people over the course of 20 years or so), and that the force was an issue of faith, not just physics.
What you're forgetting is that it was in the Jedi's best interest for it to be BOTH- for the secret of the midichlorians to be somewhat hidden. Several religions do similar things.
As for your "two different mythos explaining the same phenomena," I'm still not convinced that squares with the eastern/gnostic "luminous beings are we, not this crude matter." In IV-VI, we see nothing to suggest a materialistic explanation: it is treated exactly as a religion, based on faith, with many people either believing or disbelieving it. In I-III, we see nothing to suggest a religious aspect. Explanations, when they are given at all, are purely materialistic and scientifically verifiable. The two just don't fit, not in so short a time span, before the information had a chance to die off/be suppressed.
I see something very large to suggest a religious aspect in I-III: The Jedi Temple, the way Jedi are defered to throughout the Republic, the faith placed in the Jedi for providing a common morality and keeping the peace throughout the Republic. This is the role in society religions have always played- whether "eastern/gnostic" or western. The fact that there are more people with a lack of faith in the Force in IV-VI is an artifact of the difference between the Jedi and the Sith- the Sith are more Gnostic (there are always two, never more, never less, a master and a student, always various humaniods, prefering to use droids for their dirty work) and the Jedi are more Katholikos (they accept trainees from many races, they have local temples on every world, they seek knowledge to illuminate the force and are willing to share that knowledge quite readily in comparison). Episodes I-III are about the Jedi primarily- when Anakin was one; Episodes IV-VI are about the Sith.
So in order to be science fiction you can't have mysticism or unknowable truths? Really?
No, in order to be SCIENCE fiction you must have some basis in SCIENCE. The One Big Lie principle should apply. That doesn't mean you can't have mysticism or unknowable truths, it means that your mysticism and unknowable truths should be backed up by some form of pseudo-science. That backing doesn't remove the mysticism or the unknowable truth from the subject, it just provides more evidence for it. A miracle isn't miraculous because it's unexplained- it's miraculous because it was a fortunate coincidence. Explaining it doesn't remove the fortunate part.
Leaving plot devices like the "force" open to interpretation is a good way to give the story depth - making things more rich, interesting and unpredictable.
The mitichloridians doe NOT remove interpretation from the "force"- they just provide ONE possible scientific explaination for how apparently ordinary humans can harness the force.
For me the explanation of what the force "was" was a big letdown, not quite what I had imagined it to be..
I suspect it was for a lot of people- the idea that science and religion are separate is causing a huge amount of problems in society at large in 20th and 21st century America. We've got an incorrect idea of what is a miracle that causes this. If the other definition were more common, we'd be living in a society informed by the magic of science- and things would be much more interesting.
Maybe this is the essence of some of the problems with the newer episodes vs the older. Too much NOT left to the imagination, lots of the old "magic" gone.
I do understand that- but it's because you thought the magic was unknowable, unfathomable: a fantasy instead of a science.
Just my humble opinion of course..
And I'm sure it's also the opinion of many other secularly minded folks around the world.
Ah, yes! Which is why you measure how much energy someone has by checking their mitochondria count.
IF you're looking for scientific proof, then you use the scientific explaination.
The force was a mystic energy field surrounding all life, not just some supernaturally-behaving-but-it-sounds-more-scienti fic organism in people's cells. Yoda's monologue in ESB makes no sense under the new interpretation.
Only if you think that explaining a miracle scientifically destroys the miracle. Yoda's monologue is the RELIGIOUS explaination, the mitochondria is the SCIENTIFIC explaination, and Qui Gon was trying to use the SCIENTIFIC explaination to prove to the council that this was the boy they had been seeking.
Haven't we had enough discussions of evolution vs the Book of Genesis yet for you to recognize two different mythos explaining the same phenomena?
So you're telling me that George Lucas had decided back in the 1970s that the Force was regulated by midichlorians, and he decided to wait two decades before mentioning it?
No, I'm saying that the two descriptions of the force are not exclusive. For any given phenomenon, you have the scientific explaination (Qui Gon and the midiclorians) and the spiritual explaination (Kenobi and Yoda's "encompassing all life"). Knowledge of one does not make the other any less miraculous. Miracles can survive with their scientific explaination intact. It doesn't matter what George Lucas decided when- the two explainations are not exclusive of each other.
Of course not. He made it up later and then insisted that midichlorians was always the way it was, even though it was also dumb.
It isn't also dumb- it's just a scientific explaination for a religious phenomenon. No different than evolution and the Book of Genesis- only idiots claim that they are incompatible with one another.
And Luke Skywalker and the rest of the New Jedi Order have absolutely no idea how midichlorians operate, so they couldn't possibly use the Force? Sh'yeahRIGHT...
No. One can use a car without understanding how the engine works- one can use the force without understanding how the force became a part of humanity.
Midichlorians are the main reason I detest the Prequels. II has the big Jedi Battle Royale and III has the battle between Anakin/Vader and Obi-Wan and the confrontation between Darth Sidious and Mace Windu and his posse. So there are some redeeming qualities to those two movies. Episode I...well...that's pure crap. As much as I thought that Qui-Gon Jinn had potential as a character, and as much as I like Mace Windu and wished they had more of him in the prequels, there is NOTHING in Episode I worth watching.
Depends on whether you understand the story or not. Is it fantasy, or science fiction?
Ah, so you're on the side of Star Wars as Fantasy, as opposed to Star Wars as Science Fiction. Oddly enough- you've chosen the quandary that Star Wars itself is really about- the light side or the dark side- but which is light and which is dark?
I'm sorry- I don't understand. How exactly are the two explainations incompatible? A well practiced user of the force could "feel" the midiclorians of another and get a rough estimate. The force could be just the frequency the midiclorians are playing on. AND the destruction of the Jedi Order could have created a loss of knowledge and technology- the Empire would certainly want to supress such information.
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I'm to the point that I don't think a politician can get on the ballot without being corrupted. Campaigns are expensive in comparison to the salaries politicians earn- VERY expensive (like it will cost you an average of $500,000 to get a seat that will pay you back, if you're lucky, $60,000 in salary over two years before you have to campaign again). That just invites corruption from the start- before a politician is ever elected he's already been bought by one or more special interests.
Actually, even this article seems a bit strange to me- I always thought Damascus Steel required the sacrifice of a young male slave with proper supplication to the gods to temper the steel (the blood of the slave provided the carbon for the nano tubes) while this seems to be a different process.
My point is that the Force is a phenomenon whose existence can be demonstrated even to those who don't have "faith" in it, the classic example being Vader choking Motti without physically touching him. The fact that there's a demonstrable Force that can be used to do this is sufficient: it means that it's not simply the imagined artifact of a non-scientific religion.
Fine- so tell me, how do you scientifically, OBJECTIVELY, prove that a boy untrained in the force, as YOUNG Anakin was, had power in the force to those who could not feel it?
Adding midichlorians to the picture adds nothing, other than exposing the author for what he is
A Agustinian?
Second-rate, lazy authors do this, sure. And that's the point. For Eps 1 through 3, Lucas was a second-rate, lazy author. If you disagree, please point me to the favorable critical reviews of that work.
Now you're believing CRITICS? Point me to a favorable critical review of anything- those people make a living over panning works they could not duplicate.
Apparently critical thinking is beyond yours, so let's call it even.
Critical thinking is an oxymoron. Critics don't think, they merely criticize.
I'd rather know when my contacts are within .1 mile than within 25 miles. At least 10% of my contacts spend most of their lives within 25 miles.
The Force is an observable, repeatable phenomenon, unlike anything in any religion on Earth.
Apparently you have never heard of the shaolin- or the practice of tai-chi. There are quite a few religions that have such observable, repeatable phenomenon. And not understanding that authors simply change a few letters around in soft science fiction between the science and the pseudoscience, makes me think you would likely not care anyway- theology is beyond your capabilities.
I'm not sure if inspiration is the right word. Rather, I've noticed a connection between Gnosticism and the Sith.
It's been too long since I've seen Episode I. Was it ever mentioned *what* the midicholorians' relationship to the force other than as a rough measure of potential ever was?
Oh please, how do midichlorians make it SCIENCE fiction?
The difference between fantasy and science fiction is having a scientific explaination (or pseudoscientific explaination) for phenomena shown. Hard Science fiction conforms to the One Big Lie rule- all physics and chemistry in the story is related to only one difference from the reality we know. Soft Science fiction such as Star Wars Ep I-III and Star Trek are a bit loser than that- but still provide some form of pseudo-scientific explaination for things. Pure Fantasy like Lord of The Rings, the use of the force in Star Wars Ep IV-VI, and Anderson's Xanth series are a releated, but separate, genre.
That's the exact problem with them: as someone else observed, it's just Star Trek style technobabble, with no real explanatory power.
In other words, it's Soft Science Fiction, no different than the technobabble in a Heinlien, or worse yet a Bradbury, novel.
"Watch out Cap'n, the tetrions are going to blow a hole in the dilithium crystal!"
Well, actually, that one is in keeping with certain alternative theories of CURRENT physics (if you read the author's guides provided by Paramount, dilithium crystals are just quartz with a fourth-dimensional protrusion on the crystaline structure, and tetrions are a well known theoretical particle indicated by the math in Einstien's E=MC^2, as particles that can go no slower than the speed of light and thus are traveling backwards in time). Just because you don't have the education required to understand the technobabble doesn't make the technobabble into nonsense- it just means you're too ignorant to understand it. It also doesn't make it any more real- but it does make it a different genre than pure fantasy.
That's not science fiction, it's the cheesiest of space opera.
Actually, space operas are a form of science fiction usually, there's nothing magical in their looser interpretation of science fiction. Unlike Fantasy, where the writer is effectively an omnipotent and omnipresent being who can drop in anything he likes.
Removing midichlorians would only improve the story, and nothing would be lost.
Like I said before- what would be lost would be the difference between a large galaxy-wide religion co-existing with science and a small, insular religion that shuns science. The Sith are fundamentalists, the Jedi start out as moderates, but with the fundamentalists killing off the moderates the moderates become more fundamentalist. Kind of like what happened with Christianity 500 years ago with the Council of Trent, or what is happening with Islam today (only a bit more extreme- there are 10 million fundamentalist Islamics out there, instead of just two, but the effect is the same).
Yeah, I guess when "holding a child's hand" is to receive that honour then I'll finally be able to get over my childhood traumata.
The real question is when will you be able to USE your childhood traumata to become a better person to your children, not when will you be able to "get over it".
I find it very interesting that events that we'd have considered character building 30, 50, even 70 years ago, are considered abuse now. But I don't find it surprising- 70 years ago they were passing the first child-labor laws cutting families off from what had been considered a valid source of income for the 100 years before that, merely because the children were being "exploited".
Oh, yeah- I did get accosted in the store the other day because my 3-year-old didn't want to hold my hand or ride in the shopping cart...he was crying and a clerk thought I was abusing him.
See above- you apparently like SCIENCE in your SCIENCE FICTION.
The midoclorians point really was extremely stupid.
The midiclorians point was the difference between the Jedi Order and the Sith- one includes information and the other hides it. Episodes IV-VI show the common human element that to beat the enemy, one must in some ways become the enemy (just as the KGB replaced the NKVD who replaced the Czarest secret police; or for a more recent example, just as the United States isolated Japanese Americans at the same time the German Nazis were isolating Jews).
I'll tell you what the real problem is. You can clone Jedi blood, do a complete blood exchange and acquire mastery of the Force artificially.
And this is different from Kenobi teaching Solo "the tricks" exactly how?
Explaining Lazarus's resurrection as a temporary coma, or the walking on water as walking on rocks just below the surface indeed DOES take away the miraculous.
No it doesn't. The core of any given miracle is the FORTUNE of the FORTUNATE coincidence. Do you think Mary and Martha cared if Lazarus was dead or just in a temporary coma? No, they just wanted their brother back. Do you think the Apostles cared if Jesus was walking on water or just knew where the rocks were? No- they were happy to be rescued from a potentially dangerous storm. It's a very bad definition of miracle that has taken hold in America; it hides the miracles all around us that happen every single day.
OTOH, finding incontrovertible proof that the stories of the Bible tell about scientifically verifiable true events would turn the Bible into a book of history and add some very large sections of "known unknowns" in physics. Just a fantastically advanced being fooling around with the history of some apes with techniques that seem magical, but aren't. No miracles to see here.
I've got no problem with either of those- because my definition of the word miracle is not so narrow that it requires God break the laws he wrote to accomplish them.
You said it better than I could- and a clod who doesn't know that the Bible is a spritutal explaination of WHY isn't going to understand the idea of Katholikos Jedi and Gnostic Sith (and the fact that to win you have to accept the tactics of your enemies as your own). It's all beyond such people.
Why would inborn talent be considered elitism? Or don't you believe inborn talent exists?
I didn't "just learn about them in high school"- but I suspect many of the people who comlain about the mitichlordians failed to. Some of the rest just prefer magic fantasy worlds instead of SCIENCE fiction- and the rest apparently didn't get the even more subtle destruction of a Katholikos-style religious order being the prime population control tactic of the Republic (Jedi Temple) and replaced with a secret-knowledge Gnostic order (Sith, Yoda as the Last Jedi).
It turns something vague and mystical that can be learned (remember at one point Ben Kenobi even offers to teach Han Solo the ropes) into something definite and "scientific" that you have to be born with.
You can play basketball too- but you're no Michael Jordan with inborn talent I'd suspect. However, by the time Han Solo is born, the religion has changed: The Sith (Gnostics) are in control and have destroyed the Jedi (Katholikos) order. Gnosticism rules in IV-VI in the same way Katholikos ruled in I-III.
This makes very little sense with, for example, Han Solo's dismissal of the force as "simple tricks and nonsense" if it is a scientifically explained process that can be quantitatively measured.
Oh, I see- you don't understand the true purpose of religion. It's in the Jedi's best interest to have their science and "worldview" of the universe cloaked in myth and legend- it insures that fewer rivals pop up, and also allows them to control the majority, more superstitious population. Religion is really about providing a common morality among diverse peoples for the purpose of governmental control- always has been.
Similarly, the "I find your lack of faith disturbing" scene suggests that even many people in the empire believed the force was superstition (so it's not that the empire just suppressed knowledge of it among the common people over the course of 20 years or so), and that the force was an issue of faith, not just physics.
What you're forgetting is that it was in the Jedi's best interest for it to be BOTH- for the secret of the midichlorians to be somewhat hidden. Several religions do similar things.
As for your "two different mythos explaining the same phenomena," I'm still not convinced that squares with the eastern/gnostic "luminous beings are we, not this crude matter." In IV-VI, we see nothing to suggest a materialistic explanation: it is treated exactly as a religion, based on faith, with many people either believing or disbelieving it. In I-III, we see nothing to suggest a religious aspect. Explanations, when they are given at all, are purely materialistic and scientifically verifiable. The two just don't fit, not in so short a time span, before the information had a chance to die off/be suppressed.
I see something very large to suggest a religious aspect in I-III: The Jedi Temple, the way Jedi are defered to throughout the Republic, the faith placed in the Jedi for providing a common morality and keeping the peace throughout the Republic. This is the role in society religions have always played- whether "eastern/gnostic" or western. The fact that there are more people with a lack of faith in the Force in IV-VI is an artifact of the difference between the Jedi and the Sith- the Sith are more Gnostic (there are always two, never more, never less, a master and a student, always various humaniods, prefering to use droids for their dirty work) and the Jedi are more Katholikos (they accept trainees from many races, they have local temples on every world, they seek knowledge to illuminate the force and are willing to share that knowledge quite readily in comparison). Episodes I-III are about the Jedi primarily- when Anakin was one; Episodes IV-VI are about the Sith.
So in order to be science fiction you can't have mysticism or unknowable truths? Really?
No, in order to be SCIENCE fiction you must have some basis in SCIENCE. The One Big Lie principle should apply. That doesn't mean you can't have mysticism or unknowable truths, it means that your mysticism and unknowable truths should be backed up by some form of pseudo-science. That backing doesn't remove the mysticism or the unknowable truth from the subject, it just provides more evidence for it. A miracle isn't miraculous because it's unexplained- it's miraculous because it was a fortunate coincidence. Explaining it doesn't remove the fortunate part.
Leaving plot devices like the "force" open to interpretation is a good way to give the story depth - making things more rich, interesting and unpredictable.
The mitichloridians doe NOT remove interpretation from the "force"- they just provide ONE possible scientific explaination for how apparently ordinary humans can harness the force.
For me the explanation of what the force "was" was a big letdown, not quite what I had imagined it to be..
I suspect it was for a lot of people- the idea that science and religion are separate is causing a huge amount of problems in society at large in 20th and 21st century America. We've got an incorrect idea of what is a miracle that causes this. If the other definition were more common, we'd be living in a society informed by the magic of science- and things would be much more interesting.
Maybe this is the essence of some of the problems with the newer episodes vs the older. Too much NOT left to the imagination, lots of the old "magic" gone.
I do understand that- but it's because you thought the magic was unknowable, unfathomable: a fantasy instead of a science.
Just my humble opinion of course..
And I'm sure it's also the opinion of many other secularly minded folks around the world.
Ah, yes! Which is why you measure how much energy someone has by checking their mitochondria count.
i fic organism in people's cells. Yoda's monologue in ESB makes no sense under the new interpretation.
IF you're looking for scientific proof, then you use the scientific explaination.
The force was a mystic energy field surrounding all life, not just some supernaturally-behaving-but-it-sounds-more-scient
Only if you think that explaining a miracle scientifically destroys the miracle. Yoda's monologue is the RELIGIOUS explaination, the mitochondria is the SCIENTIFIC explaination, and Qui Gon was trying to use the SCIENTIFIC explaination to prove to the council that this was the boy they had been seeking.
Haven't we had enough discussions of evolution vs the Book of Genesis yet for you to recognize two different mythos explaining the same phenomena?
So you're telling me that George Lucas had decided back in the 1970s that the Force was regulated by midichlorians, and he decided to wait two decades before mentioning it?
No, I'm saying that the two descriptions of the force are not exclusive. For any given phenomenon, you have the scientific explaination (Qui Gon and the midiclorians) and the spiritual explaination (Kenobi and Yoda's "encompassing all life"). Knowledge of one does not make the other any less miraculous. Miracles can survive with their scientific explaination intact. It doesn't matter what George Lucas decided when- the two explainations are not exclusive of each other.
Of course not. He made it up later and then insisted that midichlorians was always the way it was, even though it was also dumb.
It isn't also dumb- it's just a scientific explaination for a religious phenomenon. No different than evolution and the Book of Genesis- only idiots claim that they are incompatible with one another.
And Luke Skywalker and the rest of the New Jedi Order have absolutely no idea how midichlorians operate, so they couldn't possibly use the Force? Sh'yeahRIGHT...
No. One can use a car without understanding how the engine works- one can use the force without understanding how the force became a part of humanity.
Midichlorians are the main reason I detest the Prequels. II has the big Jedi Battle Royale and III has the battle between Anakin/Vader and Obi-Wan and the confrontation between Darth Sidious and Mace Windu and his posse. So there are some redeeming qualities to those two movies. Episode I...well...that's pure crap. As much as I thought that Qui-Gon Jinn had potential as a character, and as much as I like Mace Windu and wished they had more of him in the prequels, there is NOTHING in Episode I worth watching.
Depends on whether you understand the story or not. Is it fantasy, or science fiction?
Ah, so you're on the side of Star Wars as Fantasy, as opposed to Star Wars as Science Fiction. Oddly enough- you've chosen the quandary that Star Wars itself is really about- the light side or the dark side- but which is light and which is dark?
All their base are belong to us. Or at least, belong to the corps.....
I'm sorry- I don't understand. How exactly are the two explainations incompatible? A well practiced user of the force could "feel" the midiclorians of another and get a rough estimate. The force could be just the frequency the midiclorians are playing on. AND the destruction of the Jedi Order could have created a loss of knowledge and technology- the Empire would certainly want to supress such information.