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Sci-Fi Movies and 'Bad Science'
Roland Piquepaille writes "Science fiction movies can be fun, and sometimes boring, when Hollywood producers want to show us a 2 1/2 hour film when 90 minutes would be enough. But what about the 'science' behind them? BBC News says it's pretty bad in 'When sci-fi forgets the science.' For example, the metamorphosis of Bruce Banner into The Hulk, based on work of marine biologist Greg Szulgit from Hiram College, Ohio, about sea cucumbers, is qualified by himself as "really awful"." The Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics website, which we've previously mentioned, is referenced in this article, and is now freshly updated to deal with movies like The Hulk.
Another site collecting this sort of stuff is Bad Astronomy
M@
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I love Stan Lee's work, but let's face it. Just about all of the characters' powers come from the mysterious force of radiation. Well, it's not that mysterious now. In the 50's and 60's, it was a dark power that caused all kinds of mutations. All the A-bomb testing would throughout the world would have strange side effects on humanity, etc. In modern times, people don't fall for this line so easily. that's why in Spiderman and The Hulk, the screenweiters shyed away from radiation. Of course, all they did was replace it with modern day boogymen like genetic engineering and nanotechnology.
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"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
The producer commentary on the 'Back to the Future' admitted to some mildly bad science... Doc Brown's mispronunciation of the word 'Gigawatt'.
He said something to the effect that nerds everywhere wrote in and pointed out this egregious error after the first film was released, but for the sake of continuity they had to keep using the 'jiggawatt' pronunciation for the rest of the films.
Obviously, without air, there would be no sound.
;-)
Actually, you could "hear" the explosion, when the shockwave gets to you, the same time you can hear it on Earth.
You couldn't hear a spaceship passing 10 inches from you if it is coasting, but you might "hear" the exhaust if it is accelerating, or exhausting for some other reason. Of course you need to be in the exhause to hear it, and that could be fatal. (Or not; not all sci-fi spaceships have high-energy exhausts; you could stand in front of a modern ion-drive for a while before suffering ill effects from radiation exposure, I bet; it's pretty parsimonious with the atoms it spends.)
You don't need air, you just need a medium. Doesn't even need to be gaseous, though our ears are designed best for that case. In the case of an explosion or exhaust, the "medium" is provided by the same event you're hearing; in theory it can carry other sounds as well but you're unlikely to care about them.
Silence can still be as wrong as a loud "boom!".
Try again. Flux is a property of inductors. The opposite of capacitors, which are measured in terms of capacitance.
isn't that because we have huge oceans for light to reflect off of, and cast a blue hue through the atmosphere?
No.
In fact, Mars does have blue skies when red dust storms aren't obscuring the view of the atmosphere. See here
Star Trek: Alien species can communicate without even exchanging any sort of dictionary. All ships have exactly the same concept of "up" and "down." It is also assumed that there is an absolute time (even though it is not explicitly stated). The theory of relativity simply does not exist.
Actually, Gene Roddenberry put some serious thought into these topics.
Alien Communication:
Star Fleet personnell are outfitted with a device called the "universal translator". It apparantly works on a sub-conscious level and allows the brain to automatically speak foreign languages. They've done some episodes where the Universal Translators didn't work and saw the results.
Personally I kinda like all the alien languages that you get in "Star Wars". It's a lot funner and makes things a lot richer in the same way that the various languages spoken in "Lord of the Rings" makes things a little more interesting.
Relativity Time:
Star Trek dates things with "Star Dates". The Star Dates take relevatistic effects in effect so that everything evens out.
Relative Travel:
In Star Trek, the ships don't travel faster than lite in normal space. The move to an adjacent space where the laws of physics are slightly more lenient. This allows the starships to leave earth and return without suffering the "twin paradox" effect too badly.
X-Men:
X-Men is a pure fantasy universe (like ALL comic books). Stan Lee is a pure story-teller. The Marvel universe reflects his disinterest with technobobbles. He just say's it works a certain way and it does. The characters, and their interaction, is the important part.
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Just FYI... there was a mistake in the math, it has been corrected, and scientific theory now agrees that bumblebees can fly.
That is not to say, however, that I disagree with your point.
1972's The Man is all about a black man (James Earl Jones) who becomes president (from Pro tempore of the senate) when the President and Vice both die. That's the earliest I know of. (Birth of a Nation the earliest, perhaps?)
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Actually, the intense electromagnetic radiation generated by the nuclear explosion would create enough heat when it hit the surface of the moon 10 feet under it to effectively vaporize a big chunk o' moon. This sudden heating may also generate a sizable shockwave across the surface of the moon. (I'm not quite sure about the shockwave part. But you can bet the heat and light would be something to behold.)
Happy people make bad consumers.
-T
Space, contrary to popular belief, is not a vacuum. It's actually full of stuff, like charged particles and things. Now, granted, a small explosion in space isn't going to encounter significant resistance from the 1 hydrogen atom per cubic centimeter you generally encounter in most of space. However, scale that up by a zillion times: supernovas do have shockwaves. Saying that, "explosions in space have no shockwaves" is a bit broad.
Also, the moon has an atmosphere (a very thin one, and it has to be constantly replenished, but it's there), magnetic fields help trap radiation from a nuke, and the energy from a nuclear bomb doesn't just go nowhere, you know. As another poster pointed out, a nuke detonated 3 meters from the moon is going to carve out a crater.
Since nobody's actually done extensive experiments with explosions in space (gee, why could that be?), nobody really knows what would happen, believe it or not. You might want to read about the Starfish test, which detonated a nuke at 400 km or so, and is just about the only example of a manmade explosion carefully observed in space (rather than at high altitude).
Actually, you picked one of the scenes in that movie that they did right. If you watch when Supes first catches her it is not an abrupt stop. You see the motion of the building behind them start to slow and then briefly stop. They then slowly start to accelerate upward. So in the movie they showed Superman catching the falling Lois with a 'soft' catch.
I leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine her velocity using a mickey mouse watch and the a count of the windows zipping by in the background.
Cheers
Have you read "Stranger in a Strange Land"? "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"? "Friday"? "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls"?
If not, I would highly recommend you do so. Heinlein decidedly did NOT write just for "Cleaver Family Morality' and to say he did is either ignorant or dishonest.
A shockwave is a displacement wave. On the Earth, this is usually a wave of air compressed that is travelling outward from some disturbance (such as a nuclear explosion).
On the Moon, there's no atmosphere to heat and compress. The only travelling outward material would be energy.
If you don't remember, Slashdot had an article about nuking the moon back in 2000. The US didn't do it because, without the atomsphere, there is no shockwave or other impressive bits of an explosion.
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Damn, you beat me to identifying it. FWIW, the trifids were murderous, intelligent plants that evolved on earth. They weren't a big deal to control though, because humans were smarter and faster, and were a common zoo exhibit (but somehow nobody ran across the salt-water thing). The meteor passed by earth, releasing some weird radiation that blinded almost everyone on earth (except the small number who for various reasons never saw the sky during a certain 24 hour period). Versus blind people, the trifids suddenly had the upper hand. All this is from my memories of the book, but I think the movie was pretty faithful, except that in the book, salt water doesn't come into it. The books science is pretty reasonable (once you buy mobile, inteligent, carniverous plants and blindness-inducing comet radiation of course) The book leaves it open whether the few sighted survivors will manage to beat back the Trifids, or if humanity will just be wiped out (which actually seems the most likely outcome). Obviously an ending that wasn't going to fly with Hollywood.
The book was high quality scary sci-fi (for a kid anyway). The movie is camp though and through.
Looking around, it seems that the EM radiation hitting the surface of the moon won't create much heat after all.
Sorry everybody.
Happy people make bad consumers.
Problem Exists between keyboard and Chair.
Most of it was. The velcro shoes. The artificial gravity through centripetal force from a spinning ship. And, as far as I have read, even that moment when he survived being ejected from the pod into the vacuum of space without his helmet by just holding his breath.
I think that particular scene was questioned by quite a few people. I know I did. I had always heard the theory that the inside of our bodies have pressure. Since space does not, the idea is that, without a pressurized space suit, we would explode or at least be killed by exposure to the vacuum. This hypothesis has actually been proven to be false. Here's another link with some discussion of the topic. I used to have a much better link that discussed all of this including some info on a Russian astronaut who recently died in space, but I can't find it.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.