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Physics Goes To Hollywood

Posted by simoniker on from the relax-when-you-study-it dept.

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."

6 of 228 comments (clear)

  1. Sounds fun... by shrykk · · Score: 5, Informative

    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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  2. Useful Links.... by Scrab · · Score: 5, Informative

    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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  3. BBC/OU "Hollywood Science" by alanw · · Score: 4, Informative
    The BBC and the Open University have produced a series Hollywood Science in which Robert Llewellyn (Kryten in Red Dwarf, Scrapheap Challenge/Junkyard Wars) examines the science behind Hollywood movies.
    Can Jackie Chan really bend iron bars? Is Paul Newman's stomach capable of holding 50 eggs? Does that bus really have enough Speed to jump the gap?
  4. Bad examples by canavan · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  5. Re:Course in physics by counter-examples, probably by MartinG · · Score: 3, Informative

    - 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)

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  6. My favorite sci-fi movie calculation... by cr0z01d · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    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 .3c.)

    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/nucle ar_bomb_chart.htm, CRC books, Wikipedia, and sites on the internet I forgot about =).