I've been reading "classic science fiction" from the olden days when science fiction came in magazines named things like "BOGGLING STORIES!" or "TALES OF WONDERMENT".
Apparently, back in the 1930's any hack with a tripewriter could make a living churning out some right tosh, so long as there were enough thermionic valves, relays, rockets and incredibly dense young women in highly impractical space-suits.
Apparently-apparently, by the space-year 2147 the state-of-the-art in air travel will be giant aeroplanes that seat three thousand people, travel at over THREE HUNDRED miles every hour and use really really big propellers because apparently we will have forgotten about jets for some reason. Also, they will be used to transport large sums of cash (we must have forgotten about electronic funds transfers too), perhaps as much as half a million dollars at a time!
Sky Pirates will use maaagical knock-out gas that not only seeps through air-tight metal aeroplane hulls, but cures cancer as a side effect (no one finds this particularly impressive because they're idiots), then dock their maaagical invisible aeroplanes to the airliners (magnetically, of course, because magnets are magi-er, science!) and sneak aboard before nicking the cash and leaving stock certificates in the Sky Pirate corporation as payment because they're not thieves or anything.
The heroes who set off to defeat the sky pirate are sickeningly tall (the short one of the pair is "only a couple of inches over six feet tall"), sickeningly handsome, sickeningly wealthy, sickeningly clever and basically generally sickening.
They're so very clever that it takes them about an afternoon to invent a maaagical energy source that works off "the heat vibration of molecules" and a similar magical form of propulsion that also works off "directed molecular action".
They're so clever, they realise that the villain's invisibility screen is one of their own inventions that they had written up for "preposterous inventions quarterly" and had completely forgotten about until juuuuuust now, because heaven forbid that anyone else in the world ever invent anything ever!
Anyway, they defeat the villain and stop him curing random airline passenger's cancers. They send him to a loony bin because obviously he's an amazing genius just like them, only a kleptomaniac or something, and by the next story he's all sane and ready to help them fly to Venus in their molecular-action spaceship where they meet big-breasted blue women with extra thumbs and fight a mile-wide aeroplane powered by A HUNDRED PROPELLERS!!!
I can feel myself getting stupider reading these books. Any day now, I'll try to power my phone with atoms, or vibrate my molecules into invisibility or something.
Back then everything was explained by vibrations... Sorry, capital-v Vibrations! Anti-gravity machine? Etheric vibrations. Perpetual motion device? Molecular vibrations. Disintegration beam? More molecular vibrations, possibly transmitted by etheric vibrations. Spooks, spectres and poltergeists? Psychic Vibrations. Crazy television that lets you see things at a distance despite there not being a camera there? Etheric vibrations, part 2: electric boogaloo. Invisibility? Intangibility? Molecular vibrations *again*. Time travel? Vibrations in the FOURTH DIMENSION!!!
Nowadays, no-one really cares about vibrations as an explanation for stuff. The only things I can think of that still use it are Superstrings (all subatomic particles are different kinds of very small vibrating science-string, maybe), Crystal Healing (if they don't go the Chakra or It's-all-Quantum flim-flam routes), the Beach Boys and Ann Summers.
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