Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
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.
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?
+
+
+
+
ICE FLOATS!
-
- - 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.
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.