Slashdot Mirror
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."
mind this studies :)
Trolling using another account since 2005.
And why should we want to? As a physicist I am more annoyed by the people who insist on having correct physics in movies (or books) than the incorrect physics itself.
Hello? It's a movie! Not a documentary or part of a curriculum. At least to me hard sci-fi like R.L. Forward's Dragon's Egg is immensely boring.
The owls are not what they seem
A ship made of Unobtainium (granted, they joke about this in the film), drills to the center of the Earth so it can let off nuclear explosions to restart the outer core spinning, thus restoring the Earth's magnetosphere.
On the way to the outer core, the ship encounters a geode the size of a small moon and giant diamonds, all while ignoring the fact that the upper mantle in effectively solid, and at the pressures and temperature encountered at the depth they're at, a nuclear explosion isn't going to do squat.
The mere fact they send a manned probe down is laughable.
Now I know it's just a movie, and having some geology knowledge, I must admit it was a laugh a minute, but it took it's self far too seriously to be given credit, never mind a character being employed to "hack the internet" and stop all documents with certain keywords moving about.
If it were done in the style of Starship troopers, I'm sure I would have enjoyed it, but as is, bleh.
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
Can't get to the site to rtfa, but I had a similar course from the same University (different prof) over 25 years ago. It was called "The Physics of Science Fiction" and the premise was that we would read various works of popular science fiction (and watch some movies) and consider how the "laws of physics" were either the same or different in their universes.
Wasn't a bad class really. We read Fred Hoyle, Larry Niven, Hal Clement, and some others that I don't remember. It gave a decent introduction to basic phsyics and was fairly popular on campus amongst the nonscience majors. (I took it because the prof was a friend of mine and said I would enjoy it.)
Courses like this are certainly not going to replace traditional lab physics for science majors, but they can do a fine job of making science more interesting to some students who normally don't enjoy it.