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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."
Action movies are notorious for not respecting basic laws of physics. For example:
...etc...
- A guy gets shot by a bullet, gets thrown backward 10 feet.
- A car jumps over something without a launching pad
- A car jumps over something and flies straight into the air, and lands flat (real cars tip forward when they do that)
- A computer hacker does something real quick on a computer because someone's coming, downloads or save something in half a second
- A woman drinks a tainted glass of wine, drops immediately after the first sip
- A red-caped, blue spandexed lunatic hoists busses, entire bridges into the air
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
no... its really not. the guy giving the course theorises that the general public learns more from movies than school classes. he doesn't want more physics students; he meerly wishes the movies to more accurately portray physics, and not have more classic "mission to mars" physics (newton? who was he then?)
Which do you think produces better scientists?
well, even that's debatable ;-) [by the way, i think your numbers are off... my UG uni alone takes about 20 students a year on materials physics]
Since they're currently experiencing a "server failure", I can't comment on the course content as such, but there are vital pieces of physics that simply cannot be taught from watching a movie. You can talk about conservation of energy in a car crash, sure. You can laugh at the physical impossibility of that bit in Hollow Man where the chick opens a door with an electromagnet. You could even try to talk about "time folding over" in Event Horizon.
The fact of the matter is however that physics is made interesting when you actually think about it yourself and realise why it is interesting. If someone makes a movie that makes relativity or quantum physics interesting enough to justify the cost of the movie, then I take my hat off to them.
This just sounds like another course to fill credits.
is essentially due to traditional classroom coaching method which leave little room for imagination.
On the other hand, Physics(or Science) illustrated in movies, could in a few subtle scenes, tickle the itch to followup, run imagination wild, to validate or invalidate flaws or ideas, just for the sake of geekiness.
I only wished that factual subjects can be written like novels, with a page turner storyline...
Hey, that's my password you are typing
"Ohh...I get it. That would make it to easy. My bad."
By that, I mean it would expose Moore to the public at the most basic level as to how much of a nutcase he really is.
Life is not for the lazy.
Why do you call him a mental case?
If you don't like or don't agree with him, then just discredit him or the facts he puts in his movies. Calling him a mental case because you don't like what he has to say is just closed minded.
It's like the media suddenly calling judges 'activist' because they don't agree with what the judges have to say. Judges are there to interpret the law, but when a conservative doesn't like something a judge says, they just label the judge 'liberal' or 'activist' instead of attacking the legal or logical basis for the judge's decision.
When you want to disagree with someone, you don't call them names. You engage them in a debate of critical reasoning.
Calling them names just makes you look childish.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
The site is far from a tome of truth.
Lead does not glow in the visible spectrum and so even a blob of molten lead would not produce visible light.
They even obliquely recognize that whether something glows or not is related to it's temperature. The boiling point of lead is significantly higher than its melting point and should pretty close to yellow.
If you're looking for science, it's best to be very careful where the internet is involved.
To answer your question in general:
What's the point? The point is that we need as many people as possible gaining as much exposure to science education as possible. You don't teach people about things like "scientific method" or the notion that we have theories that are constantly revised under scrutiny, or Occams razor, and 20 years down the line you have a five billion dollar a year "magnetic medicine" industry.
Sadly, as it's not legal for me to wait around the corner and thrash the people coming out of, say, the magnet shop with a broom, it looks like the best we can do is try to educate their children to think for themselves. Here's a prescription: scientific education helps treat and prevent anxiety, gullibility and irrational prejudice.
One god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
Because in a democracy it is the general citizenry who make the ultimate decisions, and because in this democracy much of the citizenry's information comes from the media such as movies. (That BTW itself is a scandal.)
I don't care if the physics is wrong, if it's wrong for a reason. It's the casually-wrong things -- the things clearly wrong because the even the writer doesn't understand -- that really ticks me off.
Remember that people will be making decisions on what to fund and what to prohibit. Do you want them making those decisions based on poor science they've picked up in the movies? How are they supposed to know it's bad scince? Well, one way (simply enough) is to tell them -- which is what these sites and courses do.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
If competative eaters can polish off 50 hotdogs in under 12 minutes, I'm sure our protagonist can do fifty eggs... unless they were OSTRICH eggs.
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
Due to vital maintenance work, some Institute of Physics Web sites are temporarily unavailable."
In physics, the Slashdot Effect is called "vital maintenance work".How quaint.
You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
I thought Armageddon was a pretty good movie up to the point where they took off from earth.
And then it turned to crap.
But of everything that happened after that, the worst, in my opinion, was when they docked with the Space Station to refuel.
Apparently, the director had been told that if you spin the Station, it will create a psuedo-gravity, so you can save money on weightlessness effects.
Unfortunately, that's all the director knew, because everything else about the Space Station scene displays a total ignorance of physics.
First, does the Shuttle dock with the center of the Station, where it is standing still?
No -- the Shuttle latches on to the outside of the spinning ring!
And does the sudden shift in center-of-gravity throw the Space Station off balance?
No, because, fortunately for them, they have two Shuttles that can latch on to opposite sides of the Space Station at exactly the same instant!
So we have two Shuttles approaching the spinning Space Station from opposite directions, on exactly the right trajectory, at exactly the right speed, so they can both latch on in the same fraction of a second, and start spinning around with the Station.
And does the fact that the full mass of the Shuttle, as it spins around the Station, is now being suspended against gravity (in effect), by just its door and a docking clamp, cause the Shuttle to snap in two?
No!
And does the Shuttle attach by its roof, so that the "gravity" will be down to the floor?
No, it attaches by a side door -- but the "gravity" is still down to the floor!!!
And do they have to climb ladders to move toward the center of the Station?
No, walking along straight corriders, sideways to the spinning motion, seems to work just fine.
If you ask me, that scene is a low point in all of sci-fi movie history. Even the old el-cheapo 50s space movies showed more respect for science.
Were there any physics in that were even kinda correct? I seem to recall the space shuttles bobing and weaving like airplanes through a meteor shower. Uh, there's no AIR in outer space, guys, thus flying with your big engines pointed back makes you go faster and faster and FasterAndFASTER until you die, and you can't use your wings as control surfaces to turn.
Ah, and when they were stressfully docking with the spinning(!) "mir", there's this shot where you see the docking hatch extend, and its like the shuttle is "orbiting" mir, even before they make contact.
I'm pretty sure most big meteors aren't shaped like they're designed by an evil asteroid designing picasso. Yep, I'm pretty sure they're usually just oblong balls.
I'm pretty sure that meteor swarms that have travelled cosmic distances aren't constantly having sub meteors bang into eachother like bumpercars. They got all that out of their system 10,000 years ago.
The people that made this movie should be hunted down and shot by their highschool physics instructor.
When's the last time you saw a movie where an explosion in space does not make any noise?
Akira...
http://samtron.cjb.net
This is just like "Math in art", or "History of calculus" courses that fulfil math requirements.
They're still bloody arts courses.
I'm sure this sort of class isn't WORTHLESS, especially for people who wouldn't learn anything from a more technical science class, or a physics student just looking for a few laughs. I just hope it doesn't satisfy the baccalaureate core requirements at that school.
Film students should be required to take classes like this. THAT would make it really meaningful.