@Prikshatk: LOL! I was wondering when that would come up. It's really an issue when you consider that "laser" weapons in space should also be completely invisible - no convenient "forest smoke" for them to pass through. But it's hard to make a space battle look exciting when you can't see who's firing their weapons, or what they're shooting at.

As for light sabers, yes real light doesn't stop in mid-air but it also doesn't emerge slowly from a flashlight with a hissing noise when you press the switch. I always assumed the light saber was some kind of narrow force field projected by the handle, not an actual laser/light beam.

Some stuff Hollywood does is based on reality, but usually not. The real issue is that Hollywood establishes visual conventions that people come to regard as the standards against which other art should be judged. Sort of like Microsoft sets software "standards" by doing things a certain way, and then letting other companies copy their approach. Like MS, Hollywood has the lions share of the market, and it gives them the power to define conventions, whether they do so wisely or not.

And art has always had these kinds of conventions. Renaissance paintings had a very highly developed visual language, with symbols having particular meanings. A mouse represented the devil, a dog implied fidelity, a cat infidelity. Silent films had a similar iconography - a checkered tablecloth in a scene indicated that the family was "poor but honest" for example.

You are free to defy these kind of conventions of course, but art is like language in that if you go outside of what people expect, you can impede understanding. Paint the local noblewoman with a cat at her feet, even if she's just a cat lover, and there goes your repeat business. (Unless she suddenly finds herself wildly more popular at court, and commissions you to do a follow-up) :biggrin:

• Jimdoria  ~@>@