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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.
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.
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.
Not that I care to defend ID4 or anything, but a deleted scene on the DVD made the whole Mac thing slightly more palatable. Its been a while since I watched it, but I vaguely remember a scene where one of the scientists mentions taking the ship apart and putting it back together. They had hinted that they were able to sort of emulate the alien computer.
Sorry, I wish I could quote the convo. I just remember watching that scene and saying "huh. No idea why they dropped that scene, it really helped bridge that hole a bit."
"Derp de derp."
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.'"
Maybe I am just a bit neurotic, but I spend lots of time living in the "real world" and am fairly familiar with its physics, and I notice almost every single time they violate physics. This site makes me feel so much better, as it seems that other people notice, too! :)
My favorite "bad physics" moment was in Eraser, where Arnie shoots the pickup truck several times with two rail guns held in each hand, which causes it to fly up and over him. Never mind the physics of the railgun firing in and of itself, in order to lift the truck off of the ground, the momentum must be provided by Arnie himself, transferred by the bullets to the car. So, essentially, Arnie picked a speeding pickup up and threw it over his head. (sigh). This really makes suspension of disbelief hard. Also, I don't remember exactly what they said, but they had the four DNA bases wrong in "Mission To Mars"...the correct abbreviations are A, C, T, and G (U if you are talking about RNA), but they had some wack-ass base instead of G.
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?
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."
I just remember watching that scene and saying "huh. No idea why they dropped that scene, it really helped bridge that hole a bit."
You should try watching the broadcast-TV cut of 'Waterworld' sometime... there were so many added-in, hole-patching scenes that weren't in the theatrical release, I could hardly believe it. They made it a vastly better movie.
One additional nice touch is a scene or two when Dennis Hopper and his brethren react to pictures of grass and trees almost as if they were looking at high-quality pornography.
Oh, and just to keep this post a little on topic, Waterworld had some rip-roaring physics goofs (a primitive bathysphere that travels down to the ocean floor and doesn't implode, anyone?) of its own.
~Philly
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.
Umm, if the ship is not accelerating there'd be no such difficulties with walking on the outside no matter how fast it's going. You'd just need a little tug to keep your feet planted. I'm not sure you're grasping how intertia actually works.
And I'm not sure about the rest of what you're bitching about, but if these boots had something like a simple electromagnet and some trivial controls, I don't see what the problem is.
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.
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
High speed hurts no one, quick acceleration kills people. If you accelerate at 1m/s^2 for quite a few seconds until you're hurdling through space just neigh the speed of light and cut the engines to coast. You will not be squashed flat or some such shit (well there is Lorenz contraction but that is different). If you accelerated from 0 to a million meters per second in a single second the atoms of your body would disassociate an instant before they fused together. Like the old saying goes, it isnt the fall that kills you it is the sudden stop at the end (rapid decceleration).
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Wasn't it something like melts in your mouth, not in your helix in outer space?
Actually, IIRC, I walked out on Mission to Mars when this woman was trying to jetpack over to this guy who was drifting slowly out into space, and let him die because she had used up half! her fuel. She was gaining on him, but of course, objects in motion (in this case, an ignorant astronaut) somehow... stayed... slowing down rapidly in outer space once she cut those jets off.
Sigh. That really annoyed me to the point where I couldn't possibly avoid yelling in a theater, which gets the men in the white coats after you.
"Golblum sits down with his Macintosh lap top and knocks out the code for a virus which when implanted in the mother RV will download itself into all the others causing them to lower their shields..."
Are you man enough to say you were wrong and apologize for not heeding the warning in my sig?
"Derp de derp."
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
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.
Which one did you pick?
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?
"really, the average joe blow doesnt give a damn if a movie follows physical rules...
Wrong. The average Joe likes to present the impression he's smart by pointing out flaws in movies and then acting like it really bothered them. Remember the story on 'transparent concrete' a few months ago? Much to noone's surprise, Star Trek IV's plot about transparent aluminum came up. One guy was like "I couldn't stand that movie because there was no need for them to have windows to see the whales. I mean come on, they have sensors!"
He couldn't stand the movie over a frivolous detail. He tried to use this detail in order to present the appearance that he understands the Star Trek universe better than anybody. I honestly think he expected me to think "Wow, that guy is really paying attention. I wish I could be so observant."
The funny thing is, there's clues in the movie why they needed the windows. I won't bore you guys with it, its not worth it. I just found it funny that this guy thought he was being so observant. It reminds me of the joke "Why do 24-hour convenience stores have locks?"
I am sure it was such an ego bloating experience for him to say "I noticed something you dimwits didn't." I don't think he realized how overly-fascinated he was with a movie that's known to repel attractive women.
"Derp de derp."
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
Presumably it was wearing "magnetic boots" as well.
...yet they're still rendered helpless by a solid uppercut to the jaw.
No need. It's traveling at the same velocity as the ship. Place it against the hull and it'll stay there for a least a while, until vibrations, space debris, or the ship making a small course correction serves to push it away.
"Magnetic boots" are only necessary if you want to walk: an action that, in zero G, will serve to propel you away from the thing you're trying to walk on.
That said, putting the phaser "down" was pretty silly: they could just as easily have left it hanging in midair, and expected to find it within a few inches of its original position when they came back to it. That would have cost more sfx money though...
Maybe they mistakenly assimilated Mike Tyson?
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
"Magnetic boots" are only necessary if you want to walk" or if you want to prevent being moved buy an outside force. I'd had to sneeze, then find myself floating away.
Yes, I know the sneeze would be inside my helmet(hopefully!) but my mussel contracting my cause me to puch of a little bit from the hull, and It might be hard to turn around.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
Heaven forbid for me to lend support to an arnie movie, however, the truck flying throught the air is not a problem because it was hit by something travlling nearly speed of light. That much energy would be more then enough to cause a truck to get aitborn. Unfortubnatly, and object the size of a pea travelling nearly the speed of ight would also cause the atmospher to explode...All of it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
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.
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...
---
on
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
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.
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.
It was interesting alright, but that movie also put you through seemingly 10 minutes of just the guy breathing. I know it was suspenseful and all, but the effect was likely 10x better in the theater than late night on cable tv. Heh.
"Derp de derp."
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, remember?
Now, if Arnie had fired both railguns simultaneously, in opposite directions... :-)
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
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.
No, it doesn't. A planet is just another magnet like any other, only bigger. They could have used any magnetic material(probably iron/ferrous, but in the 24th century,who knows) to coat the surface. Then they would just need electromagnets built into their boots, which would consist of a big coil that they energise when they want it to stick.
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
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?
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
Correct me if I am wrong, but you are discussing a work of fiction, which means it doesn't have to make sense/follow logic/conform to our physics models. The whole point of the original story and link was for fun and information....
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
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.
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
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; }
It wasn't a very good book -- one of Kevin Anderson's (says it all really), can't remember which one.
I do think the idea that the Kessel Run is a variable-distance route is an interesting one; Han is bragging, basically, that he knows shortcuts from Kessel to Coruscant (or wherever) that no one else does. It's a fairly clean save for a dialogue screwup...
/Brian
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.
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
You walk out of a movie halfway through, after paying nine bucks, because some details are wrong?
And you think physics mistakes are stupid?
Come on, give it up, that's
Yes, it was. A couple months ago I had the pleasure of seeing 2001 in a theater with a 70mm print. It was amazing. No, the movie didn't make any more sense in the theater, but it really showcased Kubrick's skill as a filmmaker. That "10 minutes of just some guy breathing" was intense. Breathing. Breathing. Pod moves in. Breathing stops. Body drifts off, flailing about. No breathing. Body stops flailing about. If there had been dramatic music or other sound effects the impact of the scene would have been lost.
Clarke knows his stuff about science. Kubrick knows his stuff about filmmaking. But that movie was made for the theater, and it does not translate well to the small screen!
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
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'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.
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.
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?
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
I went through a glass door when I was eight. I was lucky because I only had 10 stitches, 2 in the palm of my hand, 3 in my ankle and 5 on the top of my thigh.
I remember sitting on the floor looking into my leg at the red spongey stuff (muscle) - another few millimetres and my femoral artery would have been cut, and I would very probably have died.
I always smile at the 'guy survives going through a sheet of glass with no injury' crap.
Most of the time you will be hurt.
Badly.
I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
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.
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!"
" 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
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
He takes it into consideration. It is silly even so.
Check the Waterworld goofs page on the IMDB (no link, I'm in a lazy mood, sorry)... there is nowhere near enough polar ice to cover the entire Earth in water to the depth portrayed, even it every last bit of it melted. And if even the existing polar ice were to melt, the salt water in the oceans would be so diluted you could drink it with no problem.
Incidentally, the city they used as the underwater ruins is recognizable as Denver, so they sort of imply that the Earth is covered significantly higher than one mile above present-day sea level.
~Philly