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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.
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.
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
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