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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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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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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
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?
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.
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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