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Physics Goes To Hollywood
pigreco314 writes "What do films like Independence Day, Armageddon and X-Men have in common? The answer is that apart from costing millions of dollars to make, they all feature in a new course called Physics in Films that is being taught to students at the University of Central Florida, according to PhysicsWeb. Costas Efthimiou, the mathematical physicist who teaches the course, believes that non-science students learn more about the fundamentals of physics by studying films and science fiction than they do from more traditional approaches." Among the topics discussed is "the conservation of momentum in Tango and Cash."
But it's just another course trying to entice non-science students to do science. What's the point?
In UK universities in 2003, there were around 35,000 applications made to study Sports Science BSc. To study Materials Science, 37. Just thirty-seven.
Which do you think produces better scientists?
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Can't quite find the previous Slashdot story though this one is close.
But Tango and Cash dangling from electric cables as part of a physics course? This is kinda old news.
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Movie physics site
BBC Link
And would they cover things like the cranking the van up the sand dune in Ice Cold In Alex
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I always thought teaching of phsics with movie would be most efficient by showing the bad examples, so people won't start to think that reality is governed by the same mad-up laws of physics as seen in most action flicks. Lots of bad examples are listed at INSULTINGLY STUPID MOVIE PHYSICS
- A car jumps over something and flies straight into the air, and lands flat (real cars tip forward when they do that)
I agree with the main point that it tips forward while in the air, but that doesn't guarantee how it will land.
That depends on how it was launched.
There are many ways it could land as long as angular momentum is conserved.
When using a ramp, gravity will have spent longer accelerating the front of the car towards the ground than the back simply because the front is unsupported by the ramp for longer. This means the cars front will tip forward as you suggest, but depending on the launch angle and speed (and other factors such as car length and mass) it could land flat if it touched the ground before it had tipped enough. Conversely if might not tip enough and could hit the ground with the back first.
Another example could be a car jumping from a great height. If calculated properly it could complete one or more full "somersaults" in the air before landing flat (of course any normal car would be smashed to pieces in doing so because it would be in the air for so long and reach such a high downward speed)
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics
http://intuitor.com/moviephysics/index.html
Actually, if you use the right chemicals under good circumstances, along with a few careful preprations , this will actually work. The effect will last about 6 hours after which the woman will wake up, not recalling anything at all. Even better, the body will remain warm, supple and won't discolour.
Or so I heard... Ahem.
Hate me!
I only saw previews for The Core, but I gathered that the core of the Earth had stopped spinning, and the good guys had to restart it with nukes.
.3c.)
e ar_bomb_chart.htm, CRC books, Wikipedia, and sites on the internet I forgot about =).
Recall moment of inertia for a sphere, I = 2/5 mr^2. The mass of the Earth's core is 1.932e+24 kg, the radius, 3.488e+6 m. This gives a moment of 9.402e+36 kg m^2. The period of the core's rotation (one sidereal day) is 8.616e+3 s, giving [E= 1/2 Iw^2] rotational kinetic energy of 2.500e+28 J. Note that SI prefixes only go up to 10^24 (unless I'm mistaken).
Now, how many nukes would have to be used to supply this energy? One kiloton TNT is 4.184e+12 J, giving the Earth's core kinetic energy of 5.975e+15 kilotons TNT. Were we to actually use TNT, the diameter of the dynamite required would be 953 kilometers and surface gravity would be 4.5% that of Earth. But I digress.
So, back to nukes, the highest yield nuclear weapon that the US has ever produced (I think) is the triple-stage Mk-41, with up to 25 megatons TNT of explosive yield. 2.4e+11 of these would be required to provide sufficient energy to start the core's motion. To put this in perspective, each Mk-41 being 3.4 m long, the nuclear bombs required would span the average distance between the Earth and the sun five and a half times. (Hey, a lever! Never mind that the outside edge of this ridiculous construction would be moving at
For the Star Trek crowd, the amount of antimatter required is half of [E=mc^2] 2.781e+11 kg. The amount of energy is the same amount that the sun releases [our nice big 4e+26 W bulb] in about an hour. Enough energy to boil all the oceans almost thirty million times over. I knew that the movie premise was absurd, but I had no idea how many orders of magnitude the absurdity was.
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out such trivia as "Where the hell did the law of conservation of angular momentum go?"
Sources: http://www.strategic-air-command.com/weapons/nucl
This course started a couple years ago.. It's a 1000 level course which is freshman level. I've met a few people that took it although most of them are film types. Most engineering majors and physics majors at UCF don't bother because it's virtually useless for our degree requirements.
Here's an article from our student newspaper from the fall 2002 semester.
Strangely, the course number listed in the article is for physical science. I don't know off hand what the real number is. Here's the O-P page from the latest online course catalog.
Well, finals ended for me yesterday (with my orbital mechanics final) so I'm going to die for 2 weeks until summer semester starts.
Daniel Davis
Aerospace Engineering major
University of Central Florida - Orlando
Planetes
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promo Ad
"Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer" - Adolf Hitl
Well, you missed the best parts then:
:) The ionosphere that must now be not at only 70 to 400 km but surrounding the entire planet at 0-400 km.
:)
The scene with the shuttle. The whole thing - the radars not working for some reason, the GPS failing and no-one noticing (it must be the pilot's fault.) Maneuvring the shuttle as if it was not a brick but an F16.
Noone in the entire science community outside of the small group of the primary participants noticing the disappearence of the magnetic field and of the secondary data - Aurora Borealis, or the fact the compases don't work any more
Partial failure of the Earth's magnetic field. Not a full failure, but partial, where some of the magnetic field is breached above some places but the rest is still holding around the globe. Solar radiation powerfull enough to burn people's skin BBQ style in 3 seconds. Crazy local weather changes (this is grey area.)
A nuclear reactor small enough to fit in a few cubic meters and powerfull enough to push that 'earth-ship' forward, to power those 'ultra-sonic' lasers. Unexplained propelling system that works under water, under ground and in a pressurized ionized metal cloud. The 'Unobtanium' and the lasers etc. invented by some lonely geek in a desert within only 30 years with minimal funding. An apparatus that allows to see through meters of lead, the machine that displays something like an X-Ray without having sensitive film on the other side of the material that is being looked at. Fully working prototypes, everything necessary for just the occasion.
Constant real-time radio contact with the surface of the earth and stupid communication problems within the ship itself from compartment to compartment (those wires are a bitch to make work well without failing most of the time.)
Building only one manned ship for 50 Billion, not 100 of unmanned ones for 5000 Billion (shouldn't this be the entire world's problem, wouldn't everyone chip in? Only a year left to live for all of us.) The meere notion that any problem can be solved by throwing enough money at it within a very limited time constraint (yeah, this is an IT personnel site, is this the standart way of solving problems at work or what?)
A pressure and heat suit that is definetly under-designed for the intended usage, a suit that looks like it's made of polyester and tin-foil but that can take 5000 atm. (or smth like that) and not even slightly compress. A suite that is designed for half of the temperature that it was used in but still protecting a human inside it just long enough for him to heroically finish the job. This human still able to use his eyes while the lenses in his eye-glasses have cracked under pressure. (what kind of pressure would that be - really tight eye-glasses frames?)
Glyding in the core of the planet at huge speeds allowing to cover the entire core in about half an hour. Magically using 'rods from the reactor' that looked more like heavy water containers, to increase a nuclear bomb's blast from 100Megatonn to 150-200Megatonn.
Coming up with a magical solution to the energy problem by using 'unobtainium' under pressure to power the ship. Getting all of this to work in under an hour. Glyding from inside the planet to the outer mantel without navigation systems and without those magical sonic-lasers.
A hacker who looks and acts like a cartoon character. A hacker who has control over the entire world with just a telephone by beeping into the mic. A hacker who finds a secret gov't project on the internet, hacks into it and stops the music (wouldn't it be much easier for him to stop most of the electrical power-plants that supplied the energy for that gigantic 'laser'). Oh well, maybe I am just jealous
You can't handle the truth.
Oh, and yes, IAAP (I Am A Physicist), so really obvious physics stupidities jump out at me. Like sound effects in space....
There are a few more bad science moments in Armageddon if you browse through the whole list at MovieMistakes.com.
Straczynski wanted to be true (well, mostly true, anyway) to the laws of physics in Babylon 5. When he originally created the show, all scenes taking place in outer space took place in silence. When they did a test showing to interested audiences, there was too much negative reaction -- most notably, a lot of people thought that there had been a problem with the sound production, so Straczynski decided to put the sound back in.
It's still really cool, though, that his design for the Starfuries is now being adapted by NASA for use in the future.