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Physics in the Movies
nucal writes "Here's a site rating Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics. A really thorough site with a rating system which ranges from GP (Good Physics) to XP (Obviously physics from an unknown universe)." My vote goes to the helix of M&M's.
Kinda like the book that expained how the physucs of the X-Men might work or how Star Trek would work.
I remember this...
Writers imply. Readers infer.
Windows XP, eXtreme Programming, XPCOM, eXperience Points, "Cross Platform", and now this. It's got to be one of the most overloaded acronyms of all time.
They're what makes the movie interesting. Most people watching movies want to spend 1-2 hours being "out of this world". Having extraordinary physics is one of the ways of achieving this.
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
Each time a Jedi uses the force to move an object, the Jedi doesn't seem to be subject to an equal and opposite reaction (Newton 3rd Law). Therefore conservation of linear momentum isn't conserved in the Star Wars universe. I think this can be bad for the universe.
... is from the Independence Day review:
Once inside the mother RV Goldblum connects his Mac to the alien computer. Fortunately, the alien computer operating system works just fine with the laptop. This proves an important point which Apple enthusiasts have known for years. While the evil empire of Microsoft may dominate the computers of Earth people, more advanced life forms clearly prefer Mac's.
Take that Microsoft!
I have a shitty sig!
[GP] Seven Years in Tibet (1997)
Yeah... I guess it's easy to have a physically correct movie when it has little to no special effects.
Physically speaking "Booty Call" was excellent.
"Oh no, 3 horny women and only 2 condoms...Thank god I read slashdot"
some geeks has a bit too much free time...
its call entertainment.... although it was a damn funny site...
They give the coveted GP == Good Physics award to Seven Years in Tibet...?!?! Like... okay? How about we give other coveted Good Physics awards to Lolita, Joy Luck Club, Pi, True Stories, and Office Space since they were so full of projectile cars, falling, laser beams, and other physical effects that could be modelled poorly???
Then they go and say the Matrix had questionable physics, despite the fact that a key element of the plot is that the physics of the world are simply rules in a computer which Morpheus so eloquently describes: "some can be bent, others broken."
I'm gonna just have to go ahead and disagree with you there.
fifth sigma, inc.
I liked the comment about the sniper rifles and laser sights, mostly because they're wrong. They were correct in stating that the army doesn't use LASER sights for sniper rifles, however, as an army friend was recently telling me, they now use a form of IASER for sights.
The IASER basically paints an infrared dot as opposed to a visible light dot, thus it can't be seen with human eyes. But, If one is looking through the infrared sight of a sniper rifle, it is clear as day. Thus, one gets all the advantages of a laser sight without letting the victim know of his impending death ahead of time.
One thing to note though, is that these sights are only really practical on sniper rifles, as one would have to be wearing infrared goggles for them to work on normal guns.
If you set off some sort of explosion outside the space shuttle for example, would the force of the explosion move through the shuttle?
anyone old enough to remember the very short lived "auto-man" ??
tron like 90' turns.....
Old age and treachery almost always overcome youth and skill.
I lost all respect (and desire to view that site) when I read the matrix review.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I initially got excited when I saw Problems with Windows. Instead of having the image of a glass window come to mind, my first thought wasy "Hey, you're right! I never see a BSOD come up when the hero's geeky, but for some reason windows 9x using, friend does a two minute hack into some other system to get day saving information.".
Somehow the idea of someone running uncut through a glass panel seems quite normal compared to the idea of windows 9x not waiting for the moment when a crash will hurt you the most, and then killing your data.
Everything will be taken away from you.
Much to learn you have about the force.
While we're at it, let's attack cartoons as well.
Don't look at I am Weasel as a sort of funny entertainment anymore, rather think of how many medical and physics rules are broken.
Pfftt.
Movies are there for escapism...
Just like drugs. Hey why not judge the physics of my last bad trip where a truck was floating 4 feet above the ground?
"I used to have that really cool,funny sig
This guys site goes into how red lasers can not be seen in the air.
although I have not seen it, I have heard the new green lasers are visible in lower-light conditions in the air?
anyone seen one?
is this true?
In this film, several crew members of the Enterprise use "magnetic boots" to keep themselves firmly attached to the hull of the Enterprise as they hunt down Borg on the outside of the ship. These "magnetic boots" are strong enough to keep them fastened to the ship, which as we all know is hurtling through space at several thousand kilometers per hour, as it is orbiting Earth, but are weak enough to allow the crew members to safely step along the ship. This is quite inconceivable - not only could such an attractive force not exist, if the crew member did manage to lift his leg, it would be quite difficult to set it back on the ship again (the fast-moving ship thing again, what with inertia and all. To the story editors at Paramount: Inertia still has effect in a vacuum, boys and girls.)
At another point in this sequence, a crew member disengages the maglock, pushes off the craft, then re-engages the lock a few seconds later to send him careening back to the ship. Excuse me? I do believe this is the same maglock that allows the crew members to freely lift their legs off the ship and place them in different places! How could such a weak attractive force pull the boots back to the ship's surface, given the speeds of motion of the bodies involved? And let's not forget about the inertia stuff, which would make performing such a precise maneuver in zero gravity IN an unflexible spacesuit difficult for even expert acrobats.
-Evan
BTW, I was mildly amused by the ego on display in their review of The Matrix:
Somehow, I don't think the creators were aiming to make it a "cerebral thriller". If the maintainers of intuitor.com didn't like The Matrix, that's fine, but they should review the difference between "fails to meet its potential" and "fails to meet your expectations."
That would definately have to be physics from another universe...
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Now what kind of a dumbass analogy is that? You don't need to be shot by six bullets to get injured, one will do just fine. However I (and I'm sure most of you too) have survived 1-meter falls numerous times without injuries. Does that mean if I get shot by one bullet I wont get hurt? Hell no.
Yes a six meter fall will most likely hurt you, but pick a better analogy.
God forbid that I attempt to defend Trek physics, but I'm not sure why you believe that the orbital velocity of any spaceship has much of anything to do with the mechanics of doing an EVA or a hull excursion.
Yes, a ship in orbit around a planet is moving at several thousand miles an hour, with the associated inertia. But guess what? As a fringe benefit of being inside the ship during liftoff and orbital insertion, so are you. Your own body's velocity relative to the planet does not suddenly change as a result of stepping out of an airlock. You'll stay close to the ship until you apply some force to push yourself away from it -- hence the little backpack-mounted gas jets that Shuttle astronauts use for EVAs.
As far as the boots are concerned, they didn't strike me as terribly unrealistic. Put an electromagnet in the sole, and a pressure switch inside the top of the boot that switches the magnet off when you apply enough upward pressure on it with your foot. Et voila.
Orbital EVAs are incredibly tricky things; just not for any of the reasons you describe here.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Nitpicking makes a movie better! Every time I'm watching TV with my friends, and I see a physical error, I pause it with Tivo, and draw out a diagram of how it cannot happen. My friend threatened to shoot me with an Uzi for doing this, but I reminded him that a Mac 10 is what the REAL action heroes use.
In my oppinion about the worst movie error was in "Voyage to the bottom of the sea".
In this movie the Van Allen radiation belt above the earth catches fire, slowly roasting the planet. Pretty silly, but that's not the mistake I mean. In a rush to save the planet the nuclear sub Seaview races under the polar ice cap. The Icecap begins to break up from the intense heat and we get to see huge chunks of ice come crashing down on the sub...
Think about that scene a moment. Submarine a hundred or so feet under water. Blocks of ice raining down and hitting the hull. What's wrong with this picture?
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ICE FLOATS!
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
That really pissed me off, it was such a tease. When I saw the explosion and heard no sound, I said to myself "OMG, this is like the first movie since 2001 (the space oddessy) to get this right." I was so excited; it really made me feel like I was in space. Then a second later, boom. *sigh*
I don't know if maybe those were supposed to be electro-magnetic concussive waves or something, but whatever they were, it's impossible for sound to move in space. You wouldn't have heard them. On the other hand, as the site points out, flying debris moves through space quite well without any gravity or air resistance to bother with. I'd love to see a space movie where people were afraid to shoot at each other for fear of their own ships getting torn apart by the debris.
People say that adding sound to the explosions and whatnot makes it more dramatic, but I totally disagree. The silent bits in 2001 were among the most nerve-wracking in any space film. I just don't understand why people insist on going "boom."
c-hack.com |
Quoted directly from this page "Lawrence Krauss, in the book Beyond Star Trek, points out that an object with a quarter of the moon's mass, parked in geostationary orbit would create a tide producing gravity force 25 times higher than the one caused by the moon. This would flood coastal areas and disrupt geological formations resulting in earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, not to mention extreme weather changes.
According to Krauss' calculations these disasters of biblical proportions would only be the beginning. If it took the mother RV an hour to slow down, the energy released by its engines would be about 10 times greater than the entire luminosity of the sun. We'd be fried before the aliens even arrived. In the movie, however, we are somehow miraculously spared from these inconveniences"
So I guess the Death Star needs no giant laser cannon to destroy planets just grab a handicapped spot in front of any planet and watch it rip to shreds.
My favorite bad physics movie, is, of course, the Zapruder film. You gotta love that Magic Bullet!
fizix? that's the crap that you learned in grade school but never really turned out useful in real life. ....."
"If train A was approaching train B at 45 mph on an angle of
really, the average joe blow doesnt give a damn if a movie follows physical rules. Movies are entertainment, who says they should actually conform to reality?
Anyone seen hidden dragon?
How is this impossible? In mission to mars, their capsule was spinning around a central axis. Assuming you build your helix around that center axis, and give each M&M an initial kick to cancel out that rotation, the M&M's would be perfectly still, (rotationally) and the capsule would rotate around 'em, making them look like they were the things doing the rotating.
So uh... I dunno. Maybe I am wrong, but honestly, I don't think I am, and isn't Michael just a wee bit too quick to jump down people's throats?
Why limit this list to physics ?
Movies can turn anything wrong for the sake of the (often bad) story. Climbing ? Look at Vertical Shitmit or Cliffbanger to convince yourself that not only the laws of gravity are being raped, but also common sense.
Due to the amount of computer savvies around here, I won't even talk about computers in movies, which fortunately no longer have big spinning tapes since, ho, a good 5 years ago.
And I'm sure lawyers laugh themselves senseless when they see one of those movie trials, as will do anything from fireman to house painter.
"Don't let the facts get in the way of a good story" may be a good idea, but only if you have a good story in the first place. Anyone can suspend disbelief, but not if you have to turn your entire brains off, as happens way too often with Hollywood. The problem is that most people don't notice any problem with faster than light spaceships, people jumping down the 10 floor of a building or people being hit by 10 big calliber bullet and fighting on.
Now about the page, they talk about exploding cars. I used to agree with what they say, gasoline being fairly safe and all, until two years ago. A moron on a cell phone ran into us while we were stopped in traffic. At about 140 km/h. Our car exploded in a big fireball instantly just like in the movies. I've been thinking about the physics of that ever since: the tank was full, it was very hot (about 40C), but still it was enough to give me a one year suntan. And we ran fast out of the fireball. Bah! enough!
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Unless I'm mistaken, movies are not airplane simulators. Aside from documentaries or movies like "Saving Private Ryan", they are supposed be fictional. They will obviously add little effects like "bullet sparks" to add to the dynamic of the scene, even if they "violate the laws of physics". Really people, get a Life(tm)!
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
If he's going go as far as to call these inaccuracies in movies insulting, then how about this one: gratuitous use of Javascript commands as a replacement for hyperlinks, on a www page!
I suppose I could just turn on Javascript and reload the page, and then click through the fake links. Or I could just post a flame about it instead, and save myself from more of his boring explanations. Yep, this one is an easy call.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
It's not your military. It is the military of people who want to make money selling weapons.
I worked in a Physics laboratory for 5 years. When I see stupid Physics in movies, I lose interest in the plot. Sometimes I just walk out of the theater.
Those who want to protect their investment in a movie would do well to iron out the illogicality of the script first. The illogicality is not just in Physics; someone should do a web site about the illogicality of the Psychology in movies.
M&M's = amazingly aerodynamic!
I was really looking forward to reading this and expected to enjoy a good tongue in cheek look at Hollywood. What a disappointment. It read as though it was written by Rimmer following his mind patch on Red Dwarf. Uninspiring and anal retentive, derisive arrogance without just cause. As much as the author may think himself clever, perhaps he might care to compare his net worth to that of a big budget Hollywood producer and reconsider.
Most sad I thought was the author confusing cinematic technique with scientific ignorance. The reason bullets spark when they hit something in a movie is so you know both that they didn't hit the star of the movie, and you have a sense for how close they came to hitting the star of the movie. Something the sound of ricochets alone does not convey. It's similar to the classic sound of cameras in film, like an old fasioned flash. Almost no cameras make that sound, it's just a technique that cues the audience. A trick so you know without thinking that the flash wasn't lightening, something wrong with the film, or simply something that won't distract people into thinking "what the hell was that?" when they should be paying attention to the story.
Amazingly, he missed the most glaring sci fi physics invention - the tendency for space ships in film to bank like an airplane while making turns. Be that as it may, I'll take an X-Wing Fighter style high speed bank over a lumbering, time intensive, retro thruster burn as a "real" spaceship might be forced to make. Here's to invented physics!!
Oh well, cool idea for a website, I am just disappointed with how it turned out. I would love to see more science fiction executed with pendantic formality, but I won't trade my flights of fancy away entirely for it.
Cheers.
He's complaining about the lack of realism in explosions...
:P
Distance from the explosion would reduce the number of projectiles striking a spaceship. However, impacting pieces would have the same kinetic energy they had right next to the blast. A spacecraft would have to use the time afforded by distance from the explosion to raise its shields or risk annihilation.
Did NASA build something that I don't know about?
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Especially that little short one in Poltergeist. All are welcome, come into the light! All are welcome! NOOOOO! Carol Anne don't go into the light! Geeesh make up your mind will ya?!
For the love of god! Hasn't anyone here heard of willfull suspension of disbelief? EVERYONE knows that hollywood bends the rules of science. A long time ago hollywood/ foreign studios only made movies that conformed to reality. Do you know what people call most of those movies now? BORING! Don't blame Hollywood because most people nowadays have ADD and consider a movie boring if the protagonist isn't able to unload 1000 rounds from a mac-10 into an army of bad guys with AK's and escape unscathed.
Hey now! Automan totally ruled. I have a whole bunch of it in DiVX too! I remember liking it when I was a kid because it was the first show I ever saw that actually involved computers and, yes, hackers (the REAL kind).
Granted, it's total BS, but it's entertaining.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
Hm. Okay, granted. M&M's are shaped like flying saucers, but they'll stop eventually. What if there was rotational acceleration on the capsule? Like, if they were trying to increase the "gravity" or decrease, and the helix was set up not rotating? I'm starting to get too tired to think properly in 3d. ;p
Actually, real glass is used in the movies at times. Listen to the commentary track on the Criterion Robocop DVD, and during the scene where Robocop is throwing Clarence through all those windows, they mention that the stunt guys insisted on using real glass in that scene.
The site reads like it was written by a 16 year old. Boring as hell.
This reminds me of that scene in stone cold where a bunch of motorcycles were driving up a winding staircase until the got to the top of the building, then one drove out the window, and into a helicoptor that exploded, and the fiery wreck crashed down onto a parked car, which then exploded, and I'm not sure, but it kind of looked like the building behind them exploded too. If this guy says that this scene wasn't realistic, I'm going to cry. Then, I'm going to jump through his window, punch him through a wall, and rape his wife. I'd like to see him prove the physical impossibility of that last one!
I always thought of the explosion sounds in space as being heard from inside the exploding object, not at camera. This accounts for both the synchronicity of the sound and the image, and the fact that there's any sound at all. Not to mention, IT'S A FREAKING MOVIE/TV SHOW, get over yourselves!
good shit =)
This is the site! I've been trying to get slashdot to do a story on hexadecimal, and this is the site hosting the hexadecimal advocacy page.
Only problem is being dead won't particularly protect you from the ravages of vacuum. Your fluids will still boil and make a mess of your innards. Bummer for John...
As for the explosions in space, I'm going to rig my spaceship to add the explosion sound effect when something blows up. Just to piss them off :-)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
is that the beam travels in a straight line, the bullet does not. If the military is using them, then more power to them, but I'd bet they're only doing it at short range. Unless maybe they are the range finders? At any rate, for any appreciable range, you would have to tip the muzzle of the gun up so that the beam would completely miss the target. Unless, of course, they are adjusting the beam alignment in the field, but again this sounds far fetched.
BlackGriffen
These are the people who give nerds a bad name.
Trinity (one of the hackers) jumps five feet off the ground and pauses in mid air before kicking a policeman just below his neck.
I thought the pause was just that, a pause. Not just Trinity pausing in mid-air (uh hello, with that much time, the police officer could have ducked, shot her, emptied a can of mace.) Notice how no one else in the scene moves either. It's just a pause so we can see the cool sweeping camera effect as it circles around the scene. I believe it's called "Bullet-Time" or something.
While the site is an interesting read, I think these guys are a little too eager to point out the flaws in movie physics. I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't go to the movies to see an accurate depiction of reality.
-kidlinux.
the most unbelievable scene i've seen is in my favourite movie "Terminator 2 - Judgment Day". it's in the scene, where the t-1000 is chasing john on the motorbike. the t-800 (arnie) saves john and the big truck smashes in a concrete wall. to explain the explosion of the truck you see the tank leaking and a sparkle from the battery lead ignites it. BUT this truck is surely diesel powered and diesel does not ignite that way!
/. last month: Comic Book Physics (11-05-01)
and Impossible Movie Stunts? (07-05-01). another interesting link is Movie Mistakes.
/. nobody knows, that you're a god!
by the way: i'm from austria and think arnie is the one & only _good_ american!
there were already quite the same threads on
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Yet Another Pointless JavaScript Page...
I find it highly irritating that more and more pages are using JavaScript to load up small windows with no navigation bars for pointless reasons. Why the *()#! do the reviews have to be in small windows?
Given how so many movies have lame physics, I certainly thought that the movie list would be longer... on the other hand that could be a huge task, lol.
:)
Under the Armageddon listing the author says the largest US nuke is 9 meg. I believe the biggest nukes are 10 and 20 meg. A D5 warhead can carry 5 nukes for a total of up to 100 megatons. I saw it on TV, it must be true
My favorite bad physics movie moment:
Golden Eye (James Bond): Bond and an airplane fall into a canyon at near the same time, Bond trails. Bond manages to fall faster than the plane (the plane being more aerodynamic, and having the engine running and prop spinning). At best Bond can only fall at the same speed as the plane (Newton), however the plane has additional thrust due to the spinning prop so there is just no way.
Abdul
Speaking of unrealistic movie details, why do computers in movies always run ridiculously fake operating systems? I can see not wanting to use a specific brand without promotional consideration, but couldn't they at least go with some plausible unnamed *nix?
Basically, the author is an egotist and belittles only movies which he dislikes. This can be easily seen in his Episode I critique where he states "As nerds, we are distraught by being forced to write a bad review of a nerd culture icon. We love you Mr. Lucas and we love the Star Wars series. This is why the last one pains us so greatly. Please kill off Jar Jar Binks and give us some Star Wars physics we can work with. We beg of you!". Obviously, the original Star Wars triology had horrible physics all over the place. However, he had to write a review about how horrible Episode I was because he didn't like Jar-Jar.
Seriously, this guy basically just enjoys critiquing movies. And he likes to exmine physical qualities. And he wants to be justified in not liking the movies he doesn't like, and liking the movies he likes. So he critiques the physics of the movie after having already created an opinion and points out the parts that agree with him. Not too exciting.
Three notes:
1. Good idea, Bad implementation.
2. The only GP movie didn't have a story line that required technology that doesn't exist. Breakthrough technology is usually the result of a change in understanding of physics. Just cause it breaks our current theories doesn't mean its impossible.
3. I think Jar-Jar is annoying too, so I'm unbiased in that respect.
la-di-da...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That's 1 degree of separation!
How many shots been fired from the revolver before a reload. Approximately 2000 and ten. It isn't cool to reload the gun. Lean back and enjoy the absurdity. Don't count.
I'm informing you in this message that your use of decimal is disturbing to geeks. Why did you choose to use decimal? I'd really like to know. We don't even use decimal for many of our basic needs (time especially). Decimal is clearly for dinosarus. I think it likely that you do not know what radices mean, or else you would be using hexadecimal. Read about hexadecimal at intuitor and repost your comment using hexadecimal. You may use "0x" as a prefix or "h" as a suffix for the numbers. Intelligent people despise decimal--so try to show some intelligence. So do you know what hexadecimal is? Reply to this and prove it, otherwise we will assume that you are stupid. Personalized message:
Change what you quote.
I'm informing you in this message that your use of decimal is disturbing to geeks. Why did you choose to use decimal? I'd really like to know. We don't even use decimal for many of our basic needs (time especially). Decimal is clearly for dinosarus. I think it likely that you do not know what radices mean, or else you would be using hexadecimal. Read about hexadecimal at intuitor and repost your comment using hexadecimal. You may use "0x" as a prefix or "h" as a suffix for the numbers. Intelligent people despise decimal--so try to show some intelligence. So do you know what hexadecimal is? Reply to this and prove it, otherwise we will assume that you are stupid. Personalized message:
You're wrong. Reply with a repost. Do it soon.
I'm probably posting this way too late for anyone to actually notice, and I'm probably being a pedant for pointing it out, but...
From the article:A load of buckshot hitting a vest can be considered an inelastic collision. This qualifies it as one of the situations which can be analyzed using conservation of momentum.
Momentum is always conserved. An inelastic collision implies that kinetic energy is conserved.
High school physics is fun.
Damn! All this time, going to movies, I thought I was watching documentaries. Turns out, they're not even true! Wow, it's like the people on the screen are, I dunno, acting or something! The horror!
Lighten up. Movies are a form of entertainment. We know all about reality. Don't ruin the fantasy with technicalities. Jackasses.
--Bradley
I'm informing you in this message that your use of decimal is disturbing to geeks. Why did you choose to use decimal? I'd really like to know. We don't even use decimal for many of our basic needs (time especially). Decimal is clearly for dinosarus. I think it likely that you do not know what radices mean, or else you would be using hexadecimal. Read about hexadecimal at intuitor and repost your comment using hexadecimal. You may use "0x" as a prefix or "h" as a suffix for the numbers. Intelligent people despise decimal--so try to show some intelligence. So do you know what hexadecimal is? Reply to this and prove it, otherwise we will assume that you are stupid. Personalized message:
Kilometers? That's for stupid people. Use meters, and HEXADECIMAL.
I think it was in Profiles of the Future that Arthur C. Clarke did a pretty good job of explaining why things, especially living things, are usually limited to being the size that they already are within an order of magnitude or so, but once you suspend that particular bit of disbelief Fantastic Voyage is a pretty good movie.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Geeze I can't believe that no one has mentioned sequels yet.
The worst offender is National Lampoon's vacation series.
We start with a 12 year old boy (guessing) and a slightly younger/older sister.
Then they magically get to be adults basically in the second movie.
Then in Christmas vacation the kid is 12ish again, and the sister is about 17 or 18.
And finally Vegas Vacation.... the kid is once again, older than his sister.
yep and (according to tom clancy) snipers use short impulses of laser to measure the distance to the target and can adjust their equipment exactly. for a good placed shot over a large distance they also measure the wind speed and air pressure and must be careful, that no vein is under their rifle arm.
/. nobody knows, that you're a god.
perhaps some soldier or weapon freak can help solving this problem...
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Since Porno movies typicaly have no special efects (beyond adjusting camera angles to make the man's thing *look* biger, wouldn't they qualify as good phisics ?
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
If I had moderator points, I'd mod you up.
This is exactly what I say to people who have a problem with this movie. (and that's always the reason they have a problem with this movie, clearly they're not terribly imaginative.)
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Alright, here's how the Kessel run works. Ship A is the recipient of various smuggled goods. Ship B is the smuggler's ship, assigned to bring illegal goods to Ship A. Ship A starts in one system (Not Kessel) and begins travelling to another system (Also not Kessel). There is a distance between these two that can be measured in parsecs. Or lightyears. Or miles. Whatever. Ship B takes off from Kessel to rendevous with Ship A. The rating is based upon how far Ship A has travelled between the two points. To say that one has done the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs is meant that Ship B has delivered goods to Ship A before Ship A has travelled 12 parsecs. Star Wars isn't using bad physics, just a bizarre usage of measurement and poor clarity of explanations. Oh yeah, and that whole beef about dodging blaster bolts and laser beams in various movies... the "lasers" aren't really lasers. Nor do they travel at light speed. Most of the time (and I use star wars as an example) the weapons are "blasters" which don't actually fire pure energy, but instead a packet of charged particles, which travel slower than the speed of light. Energy is imparted into a packet of matter and is projected towards the target. The amount of matter doesn't have to be too much, may a few milligrams. Energy packs provide most of the power and are swapped out as per normal magazines. When a weapon runs low on matter, that can be easily refilled much as one would refill a water-gun. So, it would be possible to avoid the blaster bolts the same way you avoid bullets. They can't be dodged, but you can duck behind cover or in the case of the space fighters perform evasive manuvers. However, I won't even try to disagree about the whackedness of the physics of the space fighters. Newton was spinning in his grave that day, I'm sure. ***My apologies for this being one huge paragraph. I seem to be having trouble with my browser...***
14 people say it never jumped the shark:
http://www.jumptheshark.com/a/automan.htm
There was one scene in a movie that entertained me a lot for getting it (the sound in the vacuum) right.
2001 Space Odyssey had a scene when Bowman narrowly escapes from being killed by HAL in the airlock. He chose to go out in the vacuum without a space suit. First there is no sound at all. Then as Bowman shuts the airlock and as the air fills in, we begin to hear the sound of the air filling the air lock. That was so impressive, and the lack of the sound made the scene very suspending.
I applauded 2001 for not having the sound of explosion in the space, too.
But perhaps there were only a handful of people who got hooked up to the movie because of such details.
I think including "2001 - A Space Odyssey" would have completed the review, stating that showing correct physics and making a good movie isn't impossible.
There exists a thin coating of a ferrous metal on the outer skin of the ship to make such EV operations possible.
It would be at most, like 1mm thick. Then the normal hull beneath that.
Best exchange I ever saw on a movie related messageboard some years ago:
"Dude, the Crow 2 is so fake. The guy drives his motorcycle through a concrete highway barrier. No way at that speed on a two wheeled vehicle would he smash through that."
Followup:
"It's a movie about a GUY WHO DIED AND CAME BACK TO LIFE and you're worried about realism?"
** http://www.nkhumanrights.or.kr/ ** Human rights in North Korea. 1 million estimated dead from starvation.
Never mind the monster-truck jumping stunt, the nearly indestructible space shuttles, or blowing up the asteroid in the nick of time. For me the funniest part of Armageddon was the apathetic, cigarette-smoking refueling attendant on the leaky Russian space station, who ends up blowing the thing up with a stray butt. Clearly the low man on the cosmonaut totem pole, and a blast from the Cold War past.
The Drej are made out of energy. At some point someone asks "how do you fight something that's made out of pure energy?"
Apparently by shooting them, hitting them really hard, setting them on fire, just about any old way. They all seemed to work well throughout the movie.
Perhaps the Drej got something tragically backwards somewhere along the line in their dealing with matter? Note that the spaceship controls for the energy spaceships, designed only for Drej use, work perfectly fine for a human, while prison walls designed to contain a human inexplicably fail to work.
And finally, the way Cale manages to reconfigure the ship to use Drej energy at the last minute just doesn't make any sense. Hey, next time your car runs our of gas, why not fiddle with it and then toss a pedestrian in? After all, it's all matter, right?
The whole movie would have made a lot more sense if the aliens had been about as invulnerable as originally portrayed (shooting just disrupts them for a minute or something) and the Titan had been designed to use Drej energy. The Drej would have had a damn good reason in that case to be worried about the humans and to decide to premptively blow up the Earth!
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
There's an issue of Adventure Comics (#353) with the legion of the super-heroes where these 2 villains are fighting - one of them has a hand that will dissolve anything it touches, the other has an axe that will cut through anything. The hand-guy dissolves the floor under the axe-guy, who falls through until he uses his axe to slice through gravity, which makes him float back up.
Quality! Wasn't that linked from there a few days back?
A bit off topic, but last weekend I hired Swordfish. I was quite intrigued by the picture on front of the video box. OK, a hot shot hacker probably needs a cable to connect his computer to the Internet, but why does he need dozens?
how about spiderman? if he's now producing web fluid from his wrists, even with the amount he uses in the trailer he'd need forearms like popeye :-)
afterall, it's tiring hearing an M4A1 or M16A2 in a movie sound like an M2 .50 cal machine gun.. an all too common occourance. More movies get physics right than ever get weapon sounds right.
That wasn't the only example. He can't conceive of a machine which can act as a helicopter and a submarine at the same time -- but a hundred years ago people couldn't have conceived of helicopters in the first place. Why should he evaluate everything by present-day technology?
The Phantom Menace review was even worse. There was no real "physics" being objected to, only stuff like "if the force field can stop water, why doesn't it stop humans who are 80% water?" If we don't know how it works, how can we pass judgements on such things? Perhaps it actively detects the presence of humans or biological objects. Perhaps it only stops liquids and not solids. Perhaps any number of other explanations.
Remember Clarke's third law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Conversely, in the movies, anything which looks like magic could be the product of sufficiently advanced technology.
Overall, I'm not impressed.
I found the stuff at the start about physics in general interesting, but the movie reviews themselves left a bit of a sour taste.
I think you're right, he's basically picking at what he feels like rather than taking an honest look at the physics in films. And his criticisms of the time travel in Terminator 2? What was that about, we don't have time travel, we don't even have a leading theory for how time travel might work, they didn't try to techno babble us, so what's the problem?
In my opinion, nitpicking and criticisms should be reserved for the times when films get it wrong when they didn't need to - a bit of research, a consultant or two could have patched their movie without any problems. That's the stuff I find most unforgivable, blasting people for speculating about future physics seems a bit mean.
If the helix is rotating, all the pieces would fly away.
But: who knows it's not the spaceship that rotates, and not the helix? Therefore the camera would rotate around the helix, an it would look exactly as it would rotate.
...because it is impressive.
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
BBC's Open University has a program called "Hollywood Science". Its a shame they only produced a few episodes.
Check it outhere.
You're wrong. Reply with a repost. Do it soon.
Perfect physics. All of Kirsten Dunst's bits swung perfectly in line with gravity, and many bodies were gyrating, all in line with science.
My personal sad fanboy take on the batteries crap was that Morpheus lied to Neo about the reason for keeping the humans around. I mean, it's Keanu. You could have told him that they were kept around because the air movement caused by humanity's collective breathing powered wind generators and he probably wouldn't have blinked.
I have a tendency to read too much into things, but there are hints of deeper, almost gnostic concepts in the movie. The battery nature of humanity could be viewed as a "willpower" battery used by the soulless machines, with "fusion" being a reference to human reproduction powering the continuation of the cycle. But maybe I should just stop smoking crack.
I'm replying to this late and haven't read all of the posts yet, so don't kill me if this has been mentioned already.
Did anyone notice that Spiderman's powers apparently allow him to fall faster than the pull of gravity? Every time Mary Jane is falling from the sky, he somehows accelerates and catches up to her. I don't care that he may be in a more aerodynamic diving form, there's no way he could catch her in such a short distance. It's little physics things like this that so many people miss. The general public's concept of actual physical principles is fairly poor.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
Try watching a bugs bunny cartoon with one of these
people. Or a road runner bit.
I find myself questioning the physics of movies but
then catch myself and realize that it is just a
MOVIE.
This guy belongs in the 'reality police'.
As in get real, that could never hapen.
1.People using other people as bullet shields. Unless it's a small gun or get's stopped by a particularly large piece of bone (the thickness of the actor's skull?) most jacketed bullets will go through the victim and into the guy behind him using him as a shield.
2.Bullets being stopped by tables, car doors or trunks and wodden walls. A 9mm bullet will go through about 9 half inch thick tables and will quite easily penetrate a car door or trunk and hit the people in the car.
3.The cars exploding on impact.
4.Unlimited amunition(tm)
5.The hero's ability to waste all the bad guys with his 9mm Pistol although they're firing at him with assault rifles on full auto.
6.Sound in Space(tm) (brought to you by Microsoft DirectSpace(R))
7.Fancy aerobatics in Space(tm)
8.Drag in Space(tm)
9.Aerodynamic spaceship that can't land on a planet (Alien got this right in the later movies)
10.Amazingly humananoid aliens(tm)
11.Slow, visible lasers.
12.The abundance of artificial gravity in space ships.
"Space: 1999" haas to be at the top of the list for bad TV physics too!
Nuclear waste reaches critical mass and blasts the Moon out of the solar system, then it paasses through systems with life about 23 times/year, LOL!
It seems that movie/tv genetics is different too, since the chicks in space movies annd tv are so much hotter than real astronaut chicks.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
especially the first one (ep 4). Total fairy tale. Knights rushing a castle to save a princess imprisoned by a dark knight. Knights then ride into battle and defeat the dark knight.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
Why, when two spacecraft meet in the middle of space are they always the same way up relative to each other? Surly with no gravity or reference points, it would not be unusual to meet other space craft in space that are upside down etc.
Heros use god mode when they play. That's go to be the only explanation.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
The one that really annoyed me was spidey's web being able to 'stick' to a steel bridge even with a friggin' car full of people hanging from it (and him). Please. Flinging the web around the girder would have been at least a 'little' believable.
Methinks some people need to get some lessons in picking up glass... or at least buy some gloves.
I know this isn't sniper rifles, but our tanks use radar/imaging like this, and automatically correct for trajectory on the fly. All the tank gunner has to do is line up the sites on the target. The round WILL hit the enemy. Very cool stuff.
I am so waiting for someone to do the same thing with computer science.
GROGGS: alive and well and living in
Some character is going to strangle a physicist onscreen, while noting, "What? What? What was that? I can't do what? Huh? What?"
:)
Like how you can jump on missiles in the air, and then they keep going in the same direction without deflection. All attacks must be called out by name, even if they're as simple as pushing a button on a control panel. The best pilots have hair that completely covers one eye. And of course, all the usual Hollywood ones like the guns that never run out of ammo (unless it's a plot point to run out of ammo), and the Stormtrooper Effect (best parodied by the Rambo scene in UHF.)
Don't even get me started on the Laws of Anime Cooking.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I have two complaints:
First, bullets & sparks:
They say bullets are lead and copper, and won't strike a spark. Cheap bullets may have mild steel cases. These are forbidden at most ranges specifically because of fears of sparking. Bullets also sometimes have steel cores.
Second, Glass and injuries:
I ran through a glass storm door once because I didn't know it was there. It was an interesting experience because it took me a sec to figure out what happened. I just heard a boom, and felt as if I'd been hit. I stopped and was surrounded by tiny cubes of glass I had a few pricks but no bleeding cuts whatsoever. I know, it wasn't plate glass, so it's not the best counterexample.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
I remember in one of those "boy goes back to King Arthur's days", the boy takes his CD player and shines the laser at his opponent. Now that was cheesy
Besides that this is science- _fiction_, I mean if it was in Apollo 13 or something then fine, but Star Wars? The same movie where spacecraft fly like they are in an atmosphere, the same movie with mystical "force" powers, etc.
Anyway, I initially watched that scene and groaned, then I thought this is fiction, but it still didn't feel right, so my defence mechanism cut in, and I watched the rest of the scene with the following theory:
They were seismic charges. When they detonate, they emit an electromagnetic wave or pulse such that they cause localised earthquakes (or maybe multiphased wave, that induces destructive resonance) to anything touched by this wave within the effective range. Objects outside the effective range still vibrate but not dangerously so. eg: you are in a spacecraft, the weak wave hits your craft causing the hull to vibrate, which creates a perculiar sound. (Maybe the sound is caused by your hull vibrating because it is protected by shields, etc). Now assume each space viewpoint is a camera ship.
You now have a wave that creates noise in space, at the speed of light no less. You could even explain the delay by saying it takes time for the created resonance to become destructive.
Anyway, that theory is probably not workable according to the laws of physics, I'm not a physist or an engineer. But it did make that scene more enjoyable to me.
My question is, why would the Enterprise be built out of steel? AFAIK they havn't used steel in airplane construction since WWII. Who knows what space ships would be made out of in three hundred years but I bet that it would not be steel. Wouldn't it be made out of some light-weight alloy or composite material that wouldn't be magnetic?
was when he pointed out how Itchy played Scratchy's rib like a xylophone, but when he struck a particular rib, it made distinctly two notes! That was some really screwed up physics!
I heard someone got fired for that one.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
The Sniper while actively using this Infrared becomes a Sitting Duck and will glow like a campfire to anyone else using the infrared scope.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_U.S._Election_c
Here is an analysis of the explosion of the deathstar. If the gravity changes caused by its present weren't enough, its destruction would certainly finish off the planet.
My server
People say that adding sound to the explosions and whatnot makes it more dramatic, but I totally disagree. The silent bits in 2001 were among the most nerve-wracking in any space film. I just don't understand why people insist on going "boom."
Because Star Wars is not a science fiction setting. It is a fantasy world set in "a galaxy far, far away." The movies have never attempted plausible scientific explanations, except with that stupid midichlorian thing -- and really, they shouldn't have bothered! You have to accept that Star Wars is really a story that takes place on earth, but is transferred to a larger and more exciting looking backdrop. Similarly, all of Shakespeare's plays are really about England, even though most take place in Italy, Denmark, Cyprus, etc. You just have to accept that exploring what things would really be like in that setting is not a goal of Star Wars.
I do a similar exercise with intro chem students with Raiders of the Lost Ark. We calculate the mass of the gold statue Indy tries to replace with the bag of sand, considering the density of gold and the density of sand. Makes for some good discussion, and it gets students THINKING about the equations.
Interested? Check out www.labarchive.net
Star Wars has some strange physics. For example, 'Light Speed' makes a trip to Tatooine seem like a a weekend camping trip.
In Star Wars, they often refer to going light speed, which is patently impossible to do subjectively. You can only asymptotically approach it.
However, they also often refer to "hyperspace," which I would assume in the fine tradition of hypercubes, hyperspheres, and hypertext means "another dimesnion." They could easily go way faster than lightspeed objectively by taking 5th-dimensional shortcuts - that's the whole idea behind wormholes and quantum tunneling.
The charachters got it wrong by calling it "light speed," since they are going far more slowly than lightspeed subjectively and far more quickly objectivly, but they are only charachters. They can be wrong.
PUBLIC SPLIT ON WHETHER BUSH IS A DIVIDER -CNN scrolling banner, 10/15/2004
I know the guy that runs intuitor.com, he "taught" me computer science and statistics in high school. As anyone who read the site can tell, he is very, very nerdy. After 9/11 he spent a whole class going over the physics of the World Trade Center collapse. . . and it was a statistics class. He can't help himself--he's that much of a nerd. If you need more proof of this check out the Forchess section of the website; Forchess is a variant of chess where there are 4 players. He also sells nerdy physics and statistics t-shirts from the website, and he would wear them to school. He was a nice guy though and his daughter wanted me. acwhite@charter.net
I'm not poor. There are several theatres in the same building; sometimes I theatre switch. The money is nothing compared to the time I would otherwise spend being annoyed and bored.
While I do agree with the whole power source delema he brings up about humans being batteries and perpetual motion crap, it was a damn movie and when you go past that crap, it is very creepy. As for the other laws of physics, it is a computer simulation and even Morpheous said that they can be broken. It was a good movie even with the crazy ideas. And another thing, the Oracle was cool. It sucks that she died. There was a lot of potential for part 3.
Now you want a movie with bad physics, try Mission to Mars. Think about it, Woody didn't have to die. If she had stopped before she fired the teather, she could have grabbed him, blow her fuel tanks enough to slow them down, turned around, fired the teather at Remo (I think that was the name), and have been saved. Plus the organ music sucked and computer voice slowing down was pretty stupid. The double Helix MMs while impossible, were true "eye candy". Get it? Eye candy.
Fuck the Bozos.
12 Monkeys (another movie with potential but I hate the hero goes through the movie just to be fuck anyways at the end, aka 12 monkeys, Titanic, Planet of the apes.
I am not positive but wasn't the computer an Apple Macintosh running A/UX? I am fairly positive that I saw and Apple logo on the case. Apple used to make a version on Unix for the Mac, before OS X flipped it around and put a Mac over a Unix kernel (Darwin).
You can find the info on A.UX at http://www.applefritter.com/ui/aux/index.html
What one character tells another character is no basis whatsoever for criticising the realism of a movie. People lie or get things wrong in real life all the time, so why should it be any different in movies?
Maybe Morpheus lied to help motivate Neo. Maybe humans in the movie have an exaggerated, incomplete, or totally false understanding of their role in the Matrix. Why should anyone blindly accept Morpheus' battery explanation as the b-all-and-end-all of what is actually supposed to be going on in the movie?
It's like when all those lawyers got their knickers in a knot over the movie Double Jeopardy (woman convicted of killing husband, only he didn't really die, so now she can kill him with impunity as she's already been convicted of the crime) because the premise was legal hogwash (crimes are specific events, so it would not be the same crime). But the movie never actually got double jeopardy wrong; it was a character who got it wrong. Huge difference.
That lucky LUCKY bastard!
Which is probably where they got the idea...
Gordon.
He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.
-- J.R.R. Tolkien
why are they always so close? Space is vast. Visablility is generally unlimited as is the range of both missle and beam weapons. Both communication and space battles would surely occur over distances far exceeding ordinary visual range.
"Obtuse Anger is that which is greater than Right Anger" - Lewis Carroll
Geeez. It's difficult to be surrounded by people less knowledgeable than me *grin*.
Anyone who goes to a movie with a woman either has the wrong woman, or doesn't know what to do with her.
I know how Physics works. You have made the incorrect assumption that I don't know how women work. Actually, I know far more about them than about Physics.
you can observe that on some video of a policeman (wearing a vest) being shot 3 times.. you can get it on the internet.. and no.. he wasn't blown away.. you can hardly notice the effect
We did the zero-g fire in Red Planet We did some research into what it would really do; and ordered the NASA videos of their tests with zero-g fire. Unfortunately, the real thing is somewhat boring, in the best case you get an undulating spherical blob. In most cases, though, the fire goes out on its own pretty fast due to the lack of convection (unless the thing burning has its own oxygen supply, as was the case on MIR when one of the oxygen-generating 'candles' caught on fire.)
We tried to do our best to make it interesting and not stray too far from reality. We were vindicated when the LA Times got the Physics department at CalTech to review the movie. They said that everything in the movie was completely wrong, except for the zero-g fire which they thought was pretty cool.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
While reading this article I vividly remember the Wing Commander movie.
In this movie the space ships were similar to submarines in space, they actually used some kind of sonar which picked up sound. As the space ship, or space submarine if you will, tried to avoid confrontation with another ship it hid in an asteroid field, and everyone on board the ship was ordered to stay quiet and all machines were turned off so that the ship in pursuit wasn't able to pick up any sound from it.
Well I'm gonna blow a hole in your minds.
Phasers *are* visible - Phasers != Lasers. Phasers have a particle beam of ions/plasma fired at the enemy ship, these emit an omnidirectional glow (sci-fi movies are correct). This pulsating light will hit the observer-ship's hull (light has a weight of 1g/m^2) making it vibrate. Vibrating membrane becomes sound in the observer ship's atmosphere, which is picked up by the microphone on the observer ship. Try it - fire a pulsating laser at a microphone, it WILL make a noise. Using lasers only you don't need shields, just a mirrored surface on your ship. Plus the fact that these ion beams might need a toroidal electromagnetic field to constrict them, this changing electromagnetic field indices movement (thus sound) in the ferrous/superconducting components of the super-sensitive microphone thus sound
Sparking bulletsArmour piercing bullets on Stargate SG-1 are coated with teflon, plus military issue bullets can be made of depleted uranium. Does this spark?
Flaming Cars - Ford Pinto ***BOYCOTT FORD, RIAA***. This is why the (RI|MP)AA will win - was Ford forced out of business? Nope.
Mac 10 - I don't dispute this.
This happened to my friend, when he was 7 he ran through a porche sliding door - problem, the door was closed, the glass had just been cleaned. After he ran through for a second his impression was left in the glass, a hole shaped like him, then the glass fell apart. He was completely uninjured.A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
A/UX does not run on PPC machines.
On a related note. The relationship between A/UX and System 7 was similar to that of OSX and classic. System 7 ran as a process in A/UX. It was also possible to run System 7 on Macintosh Application Environment (MAE) on HPUX and Solaris. I wish Apple had kept A/UX and MAE up all along instead of dropping A/UX with the PPC, onlyto bring it back now.
1. Large, loft-style apartments in New York City are well within the price range of most people - whether they are employed or not.
2. At least one of a pair of identical twins is born evil.
3. Should you decide to defuse a bomb, don't worry which wire to cut. You will always choose the right one.
4. Most laptop computers are powerful enough to override the communications system of any invading alien society.
5. It does not matter if you are heavily outnumbered in a fight involving martial arts; your enemies will wait patiently to attack you one by one dancing around in a threatening manner until you have knocked out their predecessors.
6. When you turn out the light to go to bed, everything in your bedroom will still be clearly visible, just slightly bluish.
7. If you are a blonde and pretty, it is possible to become a world expert on nuclear fission at the age of 22.
8. Honest and hardworking policemen are traditionally gunned down three days before their retirement.
9. Rather than wasting bullets, megalomaniacs prefer to kill their archenemies using complicated machinery involving fuses, pulley systems, deadly gasses, lasers, and man eating sharks, which will allow their captives at least 20 minutes to escape.
10. All beds have special L-shaped cover sheets that reach the armpit level on a woman, but only to the waist level on the man lying beside her.
11. All grocery shopping bags contain at least one stick of French bread.
12. It's easy for anyone to land a plane, provided there is someone in the control tower to talk you down.
13. Once applied, lipstick will never rub off - even while scuba diving.
14. You're very likely to survive any battle in any war unless you make the mistake of showing someone a picture of your sweetheart back home.
15. Should you wish to pass yourself off as a German or Russian officer, it will not be necessary to speak the language. A German or Russian accent will do.
16. The Eiffel Tower can be seen from any window in Paris.
17. A man will show no pain while taking the most ferocious beating, but will wince when a woman tries to clean his wounds.
18. If a large pane of glass is visible, someone will be thrown through it before long.
19. If staying in a haunted house, women should investigate any strange noise in their most revealing underwear.
20. Word processors never display a cursor on the screen but will always say: "Enter password now."
21. Even when driving down a perfectly straight road, it is necessary to turn the steering wheel vigorously from left to right every few moments.
22. All bombs are fitted with electronic timing devices with large red readout's so you know exactly when they're going to go off.
23. A detective can only solve a case once he has been suspended from duty.
24. If you decide to start dancing in the street, everyone you meet will know all the steps.
25. Police departments give their officers personality tests to make sure they are deliberately assigned a partner who is the total opposite.
26. When they are alone, all foreign military officers prefer to speak to each other in English.
Thought for the day:
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY:
When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ball-point pens would not work in 0 gravity. To combat this problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 billion developing a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, underwater, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to over 300C.
The Russians used a pencil
People, I love sci-fi just as much as the next nerd, geek, trekie, or what ever; but come on. If some one made a movie that really adhered to ever law of physics what would you have, one bad sci-fi movie. This is what we call SUSPENSION OF DISBELIFE. Major things like maybe tweak me in movies like Sigourney Weaver holding on as the atmosphere in her spaceship is rushing out into the vacuum of space with an alien holding on. I know that it would look that way, and the entire atmosphere would be gone in less then a second. Think about it, regardless of some of us knowing it wouldn't happen that way wasn't it a cool scene?
Would star wars look cool if there where no laser beams? Don't you think the fact that tidal forces and volcanic eruptions caused by a mother ship in earth orbit add just a little too much complexity to ID4? I mean as if they were not dealing with enough stuff. Deal with it and just keep going out and watching the movies, they just for fun. If you really have to have accuracy tune into TLC or Discovery, not HBO.
John
Uhmm. I agree with most of this, but he is taking a few leaps and bounds with the "falls" one. Yes, you hit with the same momentum as a .45 cal bullet, but a 1 meter fall will not hurt like a .45 cal bullet will. Why? Because there is much more of you to dissipate it. Ok, so, he says this, but a 6 meter fall, is not like being shot six times, and a 1000 meter fall would almost certainly have you hitting your terminal velocity, so this doesn't scale terribly well.
In 2001, Kubrick uses the "no sound in a vacuum" fact to amazing effect.
A better example of this is a B-movie called "Moontrap", with Walter Koenig and Bruce Campbell..
The fight scenes on the moon are amazing; gunfire all around, and all you can hear is Koenig's panicked breathing..
I'm not sure I quite understand Chardish physics yet, but I think one of the basics may be that space is permeated by an ether, so that when you step outside a spaceship travelling at some speed relative to the ether, the ether wind immediately blows you away.
The part I haven't quite figured out yet is why, when we send a spaceship out of the Earth's atmosphere, it isn't blown away by the ether wind caused by the Earth's motion through space around the sun, and by the sun's rotation around the galactic core, etc.
Or is it that there's a strange inertia effect in which you retain the inertia from the next-to-last environment you were in?
In "Star Wars Episode I: A New Hope", the heroes mistake the Death Star for a moon, suggesting that it is about 0.2-2x the size of Earth's moon (for argument's sake). However, no statements are made about the mass of the Death Star!
In Return of the Jedi, we get a brief view of what the inside of the DS looks like. Its centre is a huge hollow chamber containing "the main reactor"*. I would argue that the mass of the DS is quite small for its size, simply because 1)constructing a solid object that size would be a staggering undertaking even by Imperial standards, and 2) there's no need for it to be "solid" - even if the habitable area only extends a couple of hundred feet below the surface, there's still bucketloads of room for untold legions of Stormtroopers, Imperial Navy troops, droids, TIE fighters, Wookiee laborers, Twi'lek pleasure girls, and all their life support and maintenance machinery to reside in spacious comfort!
So why is the DS so big? Well, the station is essentially a spacegoing platform housing an incredibly powerful energy weapon, and an incredibly powerful hyperdrive. That "main reactor" is probably pumping out some serious wattage. Perhaps the station is a large sphere to maintain the habitable area at a safe distance from the reactor to protect the crew from whatever radiation is being produced there.
* just because the tunnel the Millenium Falcon flies down to reach the reactor is jammed with pipes and conduits, doesn't mean the whole station interior is like this. This may just be a "service tunnel" surrounded by empty space.
Freedom: "I won't!"
Arnie returns yet again, now as the improved T-3000, to go back even further in time, to destroy a bunch of large asteroids and comets and whatnot that would eventually crash into each other to form the Earth, because Skynet realised it was going really badly and decided it had had enough of it all.
Read More...
(or something like that)
Be careful! New moon tonight.
There was some film where they had built a space ship that was powered by a singularity or summat that allowed it to create worm-holes, in order to reach arbitrarily distant points in space. I think the film was Event Horizon but I'm not certain. After using it a bit, nasty stuff started happening, and the ship became possessed and killing the crew, or something like that.
That wasn't the bad science, we can have a bit of suspension of disbelief, which makes it sound mostly OK. But the selling point of the ship had been that because it could travel between points that were extremely far apart in next-to-no-time, that it was travelling faster than light.
Obviously, if it's doing it by going through worm holes, it is linking bits of space (or is it spacetime? God, I dunno) together, and only travelling at the speed that it goes through the worm-hole at. Whilst they were wrong there, that's not the lame bit, which was that the evil possessed-ship stuff all happened because "That's what happens when you break the laws of Physics".
I could have screamed when I heard that one.
Be careful! New moon tonight.
" I am reminded of what J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5, said about the sounds of explosions in space in B5. He said to think of it as music. In the real world, there's no music in the blackness of space, playing dramatically as ships go by, but even physicists don't get upset when they hear music in space in the movies."
:)).
The little physicist in me was happy to observe that whenever we see an explosion from a cockpit or other "real" point of view in the B5 universe, the explosions and such are silent. Only when we are 3rd person omniscient do we hear the explosions in the music (JMS' reason reminds me of the 1812 overture; it also has timed explosions
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Follow the helix of mnms link. WTF is that asrticle poll? Why haven't I seen it before?
...the scientific prowess of nerds. But they do amply demonstrate nerds' legendary lack of social skills. And Timothy is out there leading the pack with that old canard about the helix of M&Ms.
What he assumes (despite considerable evidence to the contrary) is that the entire ship was in weightlessness. In fact, as clearly shown in Mission to Mars, the only part of the ship which had very low gravity (allowing the M&M trick to be possible) was the central axis.
Since even the central axis was rotating, any zero-g DNA model not only COULD be rotating, it would HAVE TO BE rotating. Now, admittedly it did not look like this model was oriented along the axis of the ship. But there was nothing in the scene which would have precluded such an orientation.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
But otherwise, it really bugs me. And there are so many examples! The last Star Wars (Revenge of the clowns), when Anakim is playing with this beast in the grass field... it simply does not feel right (the laws on momentum are not respected) - and that kind of error is so common in CG scenes.
Considering the fact that some CG scenes are 'right'... this is clearly not a problem with the physics engines. I infer that the problem is behind the CG keyboard, and with the final editors. 'Wrong' scenes (at the physical feeling level) should never get passed post-production. Maybe there is a role missing here in the overall cinema process. There is the person in charge of continuity in the team - there should be someone in charge of common (physical) sense.
Anyway' I'll play this role in the screenplay I am writing... ;-)
Just my two cents!
Does it cover how many bullets it really takes to kill someone? I've never actually seen someone get shot in real life, but in the movies it seems really ridiculous. It seems like the amount of times someone needs to shoot you before you die is directly related to how stupid you are, or, more accurately, inversely related to how intelligent you look. Not only that, but there seems to be a good guy bonus and a bad guy penalty. That doesn't count for the boss bad guy, though, he always takes a couple of clips. Have you ever noticed that the regular bad guys always go down in one bullet, but the good guy can get shot as many times as he needs to? A really stupid looking good guy, like Arnold (don't get me wrong, I like the big oaf), is practically invulnerable!
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
in real physics, all you need to do in order to anihilate a biosphere (if on surface) is to take an abject the size of a shuttle, accelerate it to .95C and collide the planet.
this cannot be stopped (when you see the object, it is actually much closer) and will raize the temperature of atmosphere by several hundred degrees.
read the SF book "flying to valhalla" (awful book, good physics).
Working for necessity's mother.
The guy is trying to emulate Phil Plait's Bad Astrononomy (http://www.badastronomy.com) but does a poor job, because the guy is hung up on the plots. He touches on physics here and there, but mostly complains about "realism." Movies are escapism. If you want funny, less review, more real science, stick with Phil. And aside from the occasional "I liked thei movie", Phil doesn't get hung up on the plots and "realism" issues.
He takes it into consideration. It is silly even so.