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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.
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
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.
Star Wars has some strange physics. For example, 'Light Speed' makes a trip to Tatooine seem like a a weekend camping trip.
Just to tweak the people who take SW too seriously (they read the books, and the books tried to patch up obvious flaws in the script...), I came up with a theory that the Star Wars galaxy is scaled down to about 1/3rd of a lightyear wide. (Remember the galaxy in MiB?)
You'd think they'd be receptive to this idea, afterall it explains a lot of strange physics in the movies. (Like people falling from 30 feet without injury...) It even gives motivation for the Force to 'surround all life forms'. Nope, it created contraversy.
You see, SW fanatics think that the Empire could wipe out the Federation in Star Trek. If a Star Destroyer is virtually microscopic, it cannot possibly fight the Enterprise.
Amusing, isn't it?
"Derp de derp."
If you set off some sort of explosion outside the space shuttle for example, would the force of the explosion move through the shuttle?
7 Years In Tibet had a very accurate representation of the physics of a pendulum, as well as bullets that didn't spark. His complaint with the Matrix wasn't about the physics within the Matrix, it was primarily about the humans-as-batteries nonsense.
"I made the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs"
How's that for Star Wars and bad science?
There is in one of the non-canon books somewhere an attempt to explain that line by saying that hyperspace is about well you can shave distance off a trip and therefore Han's statement in A New Hope is not pointless. I prefer to think that Lucas doesn't know what he is talking about.
Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.
In reality you will not be able to hear the laser guns firing on another ship or the screech of its engines as it files by, and you will not be able to hear the death star explode. This is of course because space is a vacuum and sound does not travel through it.
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.
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.
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 ?
"That would definately have to be physics from another universe..."
In the beginning of the movie, I thought the stunts were just badly performed. In true MSTian fashion, I blurted out "Good thing their stunt doubles are trained in the ways of the force." Several people in front of me chuckled at that comment. Heh.
"Derp de derp."
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.
actually, Han Solo clearly gives a hint on SW Physics in 2 points:
1) "...Jump to hyperspace..." There not traveling "light speed" there travelling in an alternate space.
2)Kessel Run in 1.2 parsec. Everybody assume its a mistake, I never believed its a mistake. I also believed Kessel Run was some "flat space" distance, say 10 parsecs, but the challenge was to complete it by traveling the shortest distance in real space. so by traveling in hyperspace, you can travel a shorter distance then in "real space"
Imagine bending space, ot a worm hole.
I came up with that in 1977, when everybody was boohooih the parsec "mistake".
Now, perhaps Hyperspace is an alternate universe that is smaller, so you punch into the alternate universe, travel some distance, then come back to this univers and you may have travelled 3 time the ditance.
NO, I am not a star wars fanboy, but I used to be. Fortunatly, getting beat up with several movie release to video, each a little better then before, then realesing the stinker as ep 1, I'm not much of a fan anymore.The fact that I have yet to see ep2 astonishes some of my long time fans.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"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."
Hey bud, I totally agree with your point about Rimmerian arrogance, but the geek side of me wanted to argue this spaceship banking bit...
I'll use the Enterprise from STNG as an example. That ship (particularly the saucer section...) can generate a great deal of lateral thrust, presumably to hold a position close over a planet. It stands to reason that this thrust is much stronger than thrust from any other direction on the ship. I can imagine the ship banking to take advantage of the lateral thrust so that it can peform a 180 quicker.
I'm not trying to deflate your point, I think you're right. I just have a hot-button with that particular issue because I don't see too many people actually thinking about how a ship like that might need to bank. Rather, they'd use a generic "There's no air in space, so an airplane could be pushed in any direction" rule of physics to say: "Ah, I found a flaw and can explain it, so I'm smarter than the people who don't care about the issue."
Using a little more imagination, they could figure out a plausible solution. But there's no benfit to that. "Man, that just wouldn't work" sounds a hell of a lot cooler than my explanation for why it might work. (I could tell by the expression on my gf's face... heh)
"Derp de derp."
In 2001, Kubrick uses the "no sound in a vacuum" fact to amazing effect. The 2 scenes that stand out in my mind are when Dave picks up the body using the pod's claws (you really get the sense of weightlessness from the silence) and again a few minutes later when Dave comes in through the emergency airlock: the explosion, him thrashing about, etc are all silent until the airlock finally closes, at which point you get the rush of air and the tension can ebb away.
OK, so some people think 2001 is *way* too boring and slow to count as entertainment. But for me it shows that if you want the sound of an explosion, put the camera somewhere where it can be heard, don't just cheat and dub the effect on afterwards! I want to feel like I'm *in* the film, not just watching it...
- Oliver
The right to bear arms is only slightly less stupid than the right to arm bears...
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.
Another way to put it is that some movies are fantastic by their very depiction and style, and that violations of physics - or psychology, or history - are acceptable and even expected parts of those genres. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is part of two well established traditions in film and literature: the Hong Kong action movie and the pre-industrial fantasy. Perhaps the problem with Hollywood bad physics is that Hollywood films otherwise make an appeal to realism - we'd object less (on a reflexive level) if that initial appeal to realism was never made.
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
That's great, but I think we've all seen this list before.
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.
This is another moldy oldy, and what's more, it's wrong:
NASA never asked Paul C. Fisher to produce a pen. When the astronauts began to fly, like the Russians, they used pencils, but the leads sometimes broke and became a hazard by floating in the [capsule's] atmosphere where there was no gravity. They could float into an eye or nose or cause a short in an electrical device. In addition, both the lead and the wood of the pencil could burn rapidly in the pure oxygen atmosphere. Paul Fisher realized the astronauts needed a safer and more dependable writing instrument, so in July 1965 he developed the pressurized ball pen, with its ink enclosed in a sealed, pressurized ink cartridge. Fisher sent the first samples to Dr. Robert Gilruth, Director of the Houston Space Center. The pens were all metal except for the ink, which had a flash point above 200C. The sample Space Pens were thoroughly tested by NASA. They passed all the tests and have been used ever since on all manned space flights, American and Russian. All research and developement costs were paid by Paul Fisher. No development costs have ever been charged to the government.
-a
How to rationalize theft.