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.

Comments

Gigawatts

[UsonianAutomatic]

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.

Re:Gee

[willtsmith]

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.