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Revisiting the Physics of Buckaroo Banzai
serutan writes "Shortly before the release of 'The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension' in 1984, physicist Carl Sneider of U.C. Berkeley wrote a surprisingly interesting essay on the physics behind the movie. Since the essay is not widely available on the web and I could only find it in plain text, I posted a more readable HTML version on my site. Among the more interesting points Sneider makes are that the oscillation overthruster is the result of decades of research instead of the usual laboratory accident, and its development corresponds surprisingly well with the evolution of particle physics from the 1930s to the 80s."
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Consider this, if you were to disrupt the particle behavior of an object so that its molecular bonds were permeable (since they are mostly made of space in the first place), you'd end up with the particle either collapsing on itself or blown to bits due to repulsive charges of neigbor particles. So Banzai wouldn't be able to fly through a mountain because the mountain would have collapsed upon itself. If he used the oscillator on himself and his ship, he wouldn't be able to recover from the damage.
There's no doubt a lot of fun speculation to be made here, but if you're going to get your science from the web, it's best to stay away from Slashdot.
I for one would love an oscilating overthruster on my car, it would enable me to drive through traffic jams. My only consern is that if I can pass through solid matter what is to stop me passing throught the crust of the earth? I drive a MR2 Roadster and I don't think the canvas soft top is rated to magma.
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
WHERE ARE WE GOING?!
On slashdot sure I see some morons, but there's usually some people on here so smart I don't understand a thing they said to smack down the moron, and somehow I say that's expertise.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
The web server's the shits! It'll never survive the slashdotting! One more word out of you Big Booty and ... It's Boo Tay Tay Tay!
"No matter where you go, there you are!"
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
He discussed it a long time ago in the far off, but rather close future.
Here is the link -
http://www.rogerborn.com/commentary/a-walk-among-
""These are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others."
Mandatory link to the best quote of the movie.
Philosophy.
> the result of decades of research instead of the usual laboratory accident
/..
Decades of research is the usual method. Favourable laboratory accidents (which are recognized thanks to decades of research) simply make for memorable anecdotes. Which does seem to be about all the general populous's education and curiosity can retain, so yeah I suppose a half-wit might think lab accidents are the usual way forward. It's just a shame to see it on
http://www.ipal.jp/pict/pict03/banzai.jpg
Place your bets now!
ISTFM (I Saw the Fucking Movie)
Since BB was a Adventurer/surgeon/rock musician like most of us, he was easy to identify with.
Curse that headline. I thought this was going to be an article about the inner workings of some extreme version of Buckaroo!.
I was so disappointed when I found out it was about a sci-fi film.
Buck-A-Rooooo!
This is yet another jab at intelligent design that scientists attempt so gingerly. Really why do the miracles of Buckaroo B have to be broken down w/ the unimaginative Scientific Method?
is the use of quadratic neutrinos accelerated through a complex (as real + imaginary) gravity field. One must be carefull to not go faster than the Linden barrier, or the cosmological theta constant, or the bosons vector collapse into photons. It's common sens. It's written in every physic books. __ O.A.C.
Three cheers for B.Bonzai or there would be no oscillation overthruster flag in BZflag.
Kinda' makes ya think,donut?
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Dr. Sneider must have seen an early edit of the film in 1984. The home movie segment wasn't widely available until the recent DVD release.
You never expect irony, do you?
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@iyfwrestling
You never know what it might be connected to.
Not only did Buckaroo's car go wicked fast -- so fast that the on-board camera shook alarmingly -- and was able to drive through a mountain, it had turn signals . And Buckaroo used them . This Half Japanese/Rockstar/Neuro-Surgeon/Particle Physicist/Adventurer sets a good example for all of us!
Now I'm gonna have that closing music stuck in my head all day long.
Doesn't the original writer have copyright over this essay? Is it legal for it to be posted to the web without his authority? I know we don't care so much about copyright on /., but this is a bit rediculous.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Can you post this story between two stories about copyright infringement, and see no irony whatsoever.
Dare I ask whether this person has Dr. Sneider's permission...?
I wish to thank the OP for the timely nature of his post. I had finally begun to forget the nonsense of "Buckaroo Bonzai" when this article caught my eye.
The metaphor that Buckaroo uses is something like tiny marbles in an orbit configuration. So an atom is a tiny cluster of marbles, neutrons and protons in the nucleus, and tiny electron marbles orbiting some distance from the nucleus, and mostly empty space. Even the author uses the metaphor of a bee in a cathedral when describing the nucleus.
But aren't these tiny marbles actually just a sort of bundle of waves? That what we think of as tiny parts of matter that give the hardness to matter not really hard at all, but just a collection repellent forces? That an atom really isn't mostly empty space, but that 'space' is full of the wave functions of the electrons in 'orbit' of the nucleus?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Why is there a watermelon there?
This guy's the limit!
Fair enough, but what would be the implications for the object that gets its virtual photons recombobulated this way?
First thing that comes to mind is that all matter, not just Banzai's rocket car, could move through the target (the mountain in this case). So, the surrounding air would rush into the newly created "empty space" that coincides with the mountain. This would cause a tremendous thunderclap and lots of turbulence. Since the molecules inside the mountain are no longer really solid, they'd get displaced by the inrushing air and spewed all over the place.
Inside an atmosphere, the Oscillation Overthruster would basically be a disintegrator ray.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
"Then again, a long stretch of time- and resource-consuming research usually begins with some guy in the lab saying, "Huh, that's weird..."
Guess that explains how the condom got it's start.
...pulps of the 30s and 40s.The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Since I read this I can't watch BTiLC without thinking of Buckaroo and crew going deep under Chinatown.
Jonah HEX
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
I was forced to watch this movie by my GF's housemate about 2 times a week for months until another housemate and myself hid the tape on him. I think it caused me permanent trauma. I started calling him John Smallberries.
Home is where you hang your hat.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I'll tell you later.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Not only does this film challenge our imagination as moviegoers, it challenges other filmmakers to throw away their sorcery, and base their fantasies on a reasonable portrayal of the way that scientists actually work. Hence after BB all movies about computers also followed these strict guidlines......
I once asked a gal in a bar if I could show her my oscillating overthruster and she slapped me.
What's that watermelon doing there?
- The Amazina Llama
"Ernest 0. Lawrence"
That zero should be the letter "O".
It doesn't suck as much as the movie of The Shadow.
That doesn't really tell you much, though, does it.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
I'm quite worried a lot of people will get the wrong idea about this movie, that it's all impossible. Of course the overthruster isn't disintegrating the matter on which it is focused, it is simply enabling a bidirectionally permeable interface to form naturally between two space harmonics.
It has been long known that spacetime has a granular quality, in fact when you get small enough everything is spin networks (you can learn more about it on Wikipedia) which can basically be thought of as a quantum of space. in other words we are all just living on particles strung on lattices (see lattice theory). But since the granularity of spacetime is at a resolution of Planck units, there is obviously an infinity of other universes that can exist between the lines as it were, made of particles strung along a lattice just out of step with our own. If you can gauge the distances correctly along this string-net and apply a constant field to shift the center of gravity of space quanta a little to one side and perfectly coincide with the spin networks on a different lattice, then voila! you can continue motion over that other dimension, which is only confusing because we use the word dimension when clearly it is simply a spacetime superimposed on our own but with a topology ordered along a geometry that is slightly out of step with ours.
This duality over the lattice may seem difficult to stomach but it will be invariably clear to anyone who has gotten used to the television version's compression of the entire x-axis into the tube's smaller aspect ratio (the ultra-cool credits scene). That, and if you can believe a key researcher is named Joan Baez.
This is what the movie is trying to illustrate when the Buckaroo's nemesis gets himself stuck halfway through a wall. That probably happened partly because they were using an inefficient energy carrier (as TFA suggests), bosons not being known in the 30s, but mostly in fact due to insufficient speed, since if you lose momentum while in the interface you would have to push against quite a lot of knots in the spin network to extricate yourself. It is a kind of rigged Hilbert space, with the knots rigged along the lattices like a ship's rigging, and it is all so intertwined you really have to push with a lot of oomph.
Hence the 700 miles per hour rocket. Obviously the characters are pushing through onto another lattice and not disintegrating the matter in front of them, because if they were destroying matter not only would things probably get quite hot, but also gravity would drag down the nose of Buckaroo's craft toward the center of the Earth! And that doesn't happen at all in fact.
We shall soon see how well the movie predicts reality with the next generation of particle accelerators. TFA only makes one terrible mistake, in that they suggest the movie is wrong about magnitudes because Buckaroo is superhumanly able to miniaturize accelerators. In fact just recently research scientist Anatoly Maksimchuk and Donald Umstadter, and another team in Europe, have been able to focus high energies with table-top devices. Certainly as higher energies are reached there will be a manifold of possibilities to study. Just remember, wherever you go, there you are.
The oscillation overthruster was incorporated into BZFlag, a tank-based FPS. It lets your tank 'walk through walls' and lay in wait inside buildings where you can't be shot by normal bullets. For the record, I'm an admin on a few servers, and I play regularly. Oh yeah, the game runs on Linux, BSD, Irix (where I first encountered it), and Windows of course.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
-1 Offtopic huh?
FTS:
Yup, really offtopic. Its the title of the link to the god damned article (GDA). And just about the most absurd thing I've ever heard.
Slashdot reader: If my post is -1 Offtopic, then the summary is offtopic, but the summary defines the topic, so how can it be offtopic?
Slashdot moderator: I modded the post offtopic, yet the post addresses the summary which defines the topic... does not compute, does not compute... You are not of the body, I am Landrew. You are Offtopic, You are Offtoopic, Youuu aarreee nooottt offf theee boooodddyyy, Yooouuu aarreeee ooffff ttooppiiiccccc..... BOOM!
I actually went to one of his presentations at Berkeley. He would give a talk about the science behind the movie, show the movie, and then have a discussion after. It really made the movie for me. Otherwise BB would have just landed on the pile of cheesy '80s B - scifi like Hell Comes to Frog Town.
'Widely available' is a term without meaning on the web, either it's available - or its not. One copy is all it takes.
At least someone has the BALLS to FACE FACTS!
I have a "Happy Music" playlist on my iPod that I listen to once or twice a week. That song is on it, which means that I probably haven't gone more than 4 days without hearing it in about 2 years. All of Michael Boddicker's music is fantastic and well ahead of its time, but the opening and closing themes are really something special.
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
Additionally, the watermelons are engineered to be nutritionally complete.
:-)
Now, if you want the other reason why it was there, watch the DVD with the commentary track. There was a lot of conflict going on over the movie, and they threw it in to see if the studio was even bothering to watch the dailies anymore. It turned out that they weren't.
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
BTiLC is a fantastic movie and shares much of the same charm that makes BB special, but as others have mentioned the claim that Big Trouble was intended to be the sequel is incorrect.
Incidentally, if you can still find the Ernie Cline script for the sequel anywhere it's definitely worth a read. I was lucky enough to download a copy many years ago before it got pulled from his site, and it would make for a damn fine movie.
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
It thrills me more than it probably should just to see that question posted, 22 or so years after the movie came out, and see so many people quickly respond. BB has been in my top 10 all-time favorite movies since I saw it in the theater as a kid, and I'm delighted to see that it still has a strong following.
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
Installing an oscillation overthruster and a flux capacitor in the same jet car... Now I can drive though a mountain and get back BEFORE I'VE EVEN LEFT!
If "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" and "it was beauty that killed the beast" then "please stop staring at me".
This article reads like a truck.
I also love that the truck dieseled (ran on) when he shut it off. Thanks to the incredibly cool MSG for pointing that out to me.
Perhaps I didn't notice it at the time because it was a common bug in US made gasoline engines of the era.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
Why was the watermelon there? Where is the sequel? Was Jamie Lee Curtis in the film? Was Big Trouble In Little China originally written as sequel for Buckaroo Banzai? All these questions and more are covered in the Buckaroo Banzai FAQ located at http://www.figmentfly.com/bb/bbindex.shtml. Sean
An interesting read. Thanks for the link.
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