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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.
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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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.
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).
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.