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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."
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.
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.
"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."
That's the point of the article! It's saying that the movie more reasonably potrays advances as the result of protracted endeavour rather than the usual for movies laboratory accident. Next time read more carefully.
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!
He had it easy. Back when I was a musician/physicist/adventurer/crime-fighter, we built our own instruments and our cars were crank starters. We didn't have any of this automatic transmission nonsense, and we reloaded our own bullets, too! This guy would have to struggle to make his own vacuum tubes.
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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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!
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.
I just watched it recently, too. I like that end credits music. I'd like to have that as my ring-tone.
This is one of my all time favorite movies. Stylist wardrobe, excellent cast, fun characters, campy but a true classic.
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.
Though the movie answers with, "Er...I'll tell you later," ISTR that Earl Mac Rauch has said that the watermelon in the vise was part of a program under development at the Banzai Institute to create food that could be air-dropped into a famine area without parachutes or other special equipment: any bush pilot could fly over and drop a load of watermelons, and the starving masses would rejoice, needing only a sharp knife to get through the tough, drop-rated skin. (This idea is somewhat reminiscent of the water spheres in the classic short story "Arena," by Frederic Brown, which are unbreakably held together with increased surface tension until something sharp releases the water.)
Since I read this I can't watch BTiLC without thinking of Buckaroo and crew going deep under Chinatown.
Jonah HEX
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[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
It really was science with no practical applications then. The sad thing is just as WWI was the fought with chemistry war WWII was the war fought with physics.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
Actually WWII was fought with Quantum Physics.
WWIII is being fought with the media.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Argh, the limits of textual communication. Einstein made a huge splash in the scientific community in 1905. My point was that the GGP was incorrect, physics was a major branch of science, as scientists were working studiously to discover the workings of the world/universe at that time. Whether the public had the slightest concept of this is irrelevant.
I'd say physics still isn't in the public consciousness as big science, although "nukulear" physics sure still seems to be, barely. After all, if it's not slapping Joe Sixpack in the face, it doesn't exist.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
The movie was certainly about 10 years ahead of its time.
(I can't stand watching it now, because of the nasty 1980's rock-video hairstyles and costumes. But the dialog was some of the funniest stuff in cinema history - - big boo TAY!)
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
This article reads like a truck.