Kyle Hill Explains the Science of Star Wars at the Wisconsin Science Festival

Kyle Hill poses heroically with Biotech Bucky at the Wisconsin Science Festival / Photo courtesy of WARF

With another major Star Wars film about to hit the theaters this year, sci-fi enthusiasts are abuzz with excitement to watch epic lightsaber battles and hyperspace travel. But are these sci-fi concepts more grounded in science or fiction? That is what science communicator Kyle Hill aims to explore.

A Wisconsin native, Hill graduated from Marquette University with degrees in engineering and science communication. Now he resides in Los Angeles, where he built a career writing and talking about the intersection of science and pop culture through his video series, Because Science.

This past weekend at the Wisconsin Science Festival, hundreds of fans gathered to hear Hill share his ideas on how the sci-fi concepts in the Star Wars movies aren’t that far off from actual science.

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A Cure for 1970s-era Sci-Fi Special Effects: NASA’s Image of the Day Gallery

Earth viewed from spaceI enjoy science fiction (sci-fi) movies and television shows and include the original Star Wars trilogy in my top ten list of favorite movies—certainly Star Wars: A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back but less so the Return of the Jedi simply because I find the ewoks more annoying than cute. This choice in entertainment was probably imprinted upon me at an early age. At age 7, I saw Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope as my first movie in a movie theater, and my brothers and I had piles of Star Wars-related toys. Also, I remember watching reruns of the original Star Trek but only when we could get grainy reception of a distant television station. I watched the original Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who during the Tom Baker years and even Pigs in Space on The Muppet Show. It was the late 1970s and 1980s, and I was surrounded by images of space travel, albeit the poor-quality, often cheesy sci-fi images typical of that era.
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