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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."
mind this studies :)
Trolling using another account since 2005.
For every slashdotting, there is an equal and opposite failure of the webserver?
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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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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
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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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.
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
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
Since most of the Hollywood movies physics is nothing but pure bullshit, this course could give you the one and only degree of double BS - Bachelor Of Science In Bullshiting!
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.
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
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
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.