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9 Laws of Physics That Don't Apply in Hollywood
Ant writes "Neatorama lists nine laws of physics that don't apply in Hollywood (movies and television/TV shows). In general, Hollywood filmmakers follow the laws of physics because they have no other choice. It's just when they cheat with special effects that people seem to forget how the world really works..."
The "Hollywood special" from a few moths back.
It seems that we have discussed this kind of things so many times. Hollywood are not meant to learn about real world. It is about entertainment.
-- tinyhack.com
I've always enjoyed intuitor dissect movie physics for some of the more popular movies.
http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/
You don't see people's skeleton glow when they are being electrocuted.
That being said:
In most instances that come to mind, the director takes care of this problem by zooming you in on the Volcano, shell explosion, or baseball hit. Once you hear the sound at the source, the director usually cuts away to the actors after the sound has arrived. (As can usually be surmised by the ash and dirt flying at the camera.)
To the human ear, they are effectively simultaneous if the lighting crack is close enough to the observer. Considering how LOUD the director usually chooses to make the thunder, I don't think it's that bad of a summation. How about we start worrying why the actors aren't taking shelter?
This is actually incorrect. Radioactive "things" can emit light through two other methods:
1. They grow physically hot enough to glow red-hot or white-hot.
2. They heavily ionize the air around them, creating pretty streaks and rainbows.
However, the green-glow often seen in movies and cartoons does usually require the presence of phospher.
Or... the kicker could be properly grounded. If the kicker is properly braced against the ground, it's not impossible to send an unbalanced opponent off his feet. The fact that you can pick an opponent up and toss him in a single motion demonstrates that. That's not to say that the exact situation of many fights isn't ridiculous (excuse me, rediculous), but the physics of the situation don't prevent a kicker from delivering a blow hard enough to knock someone off their feet. Perhaps even to the point of sending them flying. (Though it's unlikely that it would be to the point of many kung-fu movies on strings. There's only so much structural capacity in the human body. After that, you start breaking your own bones.)
:-P
Now when they miss their target and don't go flying across the room...
Unless, of course, there is some sort of incline for a takeoff (ever notice how the Duke boys always manage to find that conveniently placed incline?) or the second section is lower than the first, thus allowing for the jump to complete depsite the drop in altitude. (As the camera appeared to make the situation in Speed.)
Smash cuts don't exist in real-life, either. Yet we don't complain about those. Slow motion is an entirely artistic thing, and is not related to the physics of the situation. At all.
Pretty much the rest of his arguments
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
How about the fact that there is no such thing as a perfect vacuum?
Hollywood movies suck so much it seems like they violate this one.
blah blah blah
Time is rarely shown as continuous, forward moving, and in real time.
They are always using edits, skipping stuff and even going backwards and forwards. Really makes it hard to enjoy a film with your sense of reality totally shattered.
If you're going to write an article about the laws of physics, shouldn't you actually understand the laws of physics? "Equal and opposite reaction" doesn't mean that when I kick someone and they go flying in one direction, I must go flying in the opposite direction at the same speed, unless I had no momentum toward them before impact. In which case, umm, it would be kind of hard for me to hit them.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
That one bugged me about a recent Battlestar Galactica, as well. Inside the room, the characters were freezing because the air was leaking away. (Thus cooling the room.) I can accept that. But once they're blasted into space? Not a chance of freezing. No air for cooling == no loss of heat. (Actually, you can still lose it slowly through black-body radiation, but that's another topic.) Human skin is pretty good at holding pressure, so the big things are:
- Don't hold your breath (unnecessary internal pressure)
- Close your eyes (they're more susceptable to decompression)
See the research into the Space Activity Suit for more info.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
radium paint didn't glow because radium did... not in that concentration, or in those colors. the radium was mixed into a heavy coat of standard enamel with a whole bunch of phosphorescent pigments, which glowed.
until they burned out. old WWII radio dial markings from military gear have a lot of brown markings. they are radium paint with the phosphors all burnt out atomically, like a ghost image on a burned-in computer screen or monitor screen on an ATM. still radioactive and dangerous if ingested.
radium, polonium, radiocobalt, and other strong alpha emitters will emit a Czerinkon glow of blue when in the presence of hydrogen or water, which may be what you are thinking of. the blue glow is that of ionized hydrogen from the alpha hits, however, and should be thought of as a form of phosphorescence.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Friction, dude. Try the experiment again on roller skates.
I am not a crackpot.
I've got two complaints about #4.
1) The point of the Matrix was to bend the laws of physics. It was rather explicit.
2) The author obviously never watched Bruce Lee in action. If you plant yourself correctly you can send people flying across the room without moving an inch yourself. However, if you're in midair you certainly can't without the mentioned conversion of momentum.
Also concerning #5.
1) If it's a hole with level ends on both sides, it is entirely impossible to jump it on car without a ramp or other device to add a vertical component to velocity. However, in the event of a bridge being raised for a boat, the angle can potentially allow a vehicle to "jump" the gap. Is it likely or feasible? Not particularly, but it is possible.
2) This could have been expanded to include the "Bombs do not drop straight down" category of gravitational violation. A plane flying at high horizontal velocity v over a stationary target is not capable of dropping a bomb without horizontal velocity. Unless it fires the bomb backwards at a relative velocity -v, in which case we can have a semantic argument over whether the bomb is being dropped or fired.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
Fast paced music doesn't really play when something exciting happens. Not everyone in real life looks like a hollywood actor. If people speak in a foreign language, you don't actually see an English language translation at the bottom of the screen. I tend to be pretty easy going on most non-realism since it is just there to tell a story. If the plot relies on a complete failure to grasp some basic fundamental of physics, (e.g. The Day After Tomorrow), I tend to be a lot more critical.
1. They are called Sound Suppressors not "silencers". They do not "silence" the sound just diminish it.
2. They do not really suppress the sound the way movies put it (I am looking at you Mr. Bauer). Motion pictures have produced the common misconception that sound suppressors ("silencers") completely silence the weapon's sound, or reduce it to a quiet whistling sound, which is in most cases very far from the truth. In fact, the emergent noise can still be heard from a fairly large distance. The quiet whistling sound associated with silencers is more attributable to the noise made by air guns 3. (And the most interesting for me) They are good just for a small number of shots (Yeah, again looking at you Mr. Bauer) Very effective suppressors either involve a large total suppressor volume, a moderately large volume plus many baffles, or wipes. It is possible to design a very small and compact suppressor with wipes which effectively silences a pistol; these suppressors have a lifetime of as few as 4-5 shots and typically no more than a few magazines of ammunition. Larger wipeless (baffle only) pistol or rifle suppressors may be nearly as effective for long lifetimes (hundreds or thousands of shots) but are relatively bulky, clumsy, and heavy.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
I am a firm believer in the ability to break the law of gravity.
I was out surfing and paddled into a wave. When I jumped up to my feet, I missed the sweet spot of the wave and ended up on the breaking part instead (ie. not a good location). To this day I swear the wave dropped out from under me followed by the board while I hung there in midair. Misquoting Douglas Adams, "gravity finally looked my way and wondered what the hell I was doing" and down I went. The couple of people who saw it were sure I was surfing a board made by "Acme".
It was a really bizarre physical sensation I have not been able to adequately explain. (or recreate).
--Keith
basically because the western has been out of favor for a long time.
I refer, of course, to the infamous 250-shot revolver.
basically, back in the black and white days, nobody EVER reloaded their guns.
you never saw any recoil, either, but that's because those movies were made when men were MEN and sheep ran scared, and those actors were truly made of steel, riding horses at a full gallop and able to hit a bad guy in the back of the head from 300 yards with a pistol with a four-inch barrel. and their arms never moved when the revolvers and rifles fired.
and the scenery along the trail repeated itself every 60 yards or so, but then we're not going for the top 2,000,327 movie lies here, are we?
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
1 Law of Computers That Doesn't Apply in Hollywood: Computer passwords cannot always be guessed in 3 tries.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The article says that the frequency of middle C is 256 Hz. Sorry, no, it's approximately 261.6Hz. Analysis: the article is quite flat.
On a related firearms note, they always f*** with the depiction of double action revolvers. When the actor checks to see if it's loaded, they release the catch and swing the cylinder out. They always spin it, and they always dub in the clicking sound of spinning the cylinder of a single action revolver (think cowboy Colt Peacemaker, where the cylinder doesn't swing out). In real life, they don't make any sound when you do that.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
So, like you and the two responses above me, I was really skeptical of this "freezing in space" idea. I even told a student that a reference they had cited was wrong in claiming that you would freeze to death in the Sun's corona, the argument being that you wouldn't freeze for the same reason you wouldn't burn: no particles to transport heat.
But I recently found out, from a colleague over beer, that loss of heat from blackbody radiation is actually much faster than I thought. In the old days, in non-cold places, some people (ancient Egyptions among others) would actually make ice, basically by letting water in a deep, dark place radiate it's heat away. Sure it took hours, and it had to be already pretty cold outside, but considering that the water was also being continually warmed by all the air around it, that's pretty impressive for "only" blackbody radiation.
It's pretty easy to calculate heat loss. According to this, in our 293K atmosphere we lose 95W. In a 2.7K vaccuum this translates to 640W, due to us not getting any energy back from the atmosphere. With an average human body heat capacity of 3470 Joules per Kelvin per Kilo, a 70Kg person will drop to the freezing point from 305K in less than 3 and a half hours.
Ok, so that's pretty slow. Damn those movies suck.
Wrong. As you sit in front of your computer, you exchange heat with your environment in three ways simultaneously: (1) conduction, (2) convection, (3) radiation.
The part you are referring to is heat transfer mechanism (1), conduction, as your body heats cooler air molecules around you. Mechanism (2), as occurs when those heated air molecules rise toward the top of the room making room for cooler ones, also requires air.
However, mechanism (3), the most effective of the three, does not require any medium at all. You, like all baryonic matter, emit electromagnetic radiation with frequencies and intensities as described by blackbody radiation, dependent on temperature. An object twice as hot gives of 16 times as much heat in radiation per unit time.
Normally, when sitting in front of your computer, you are radiating like mad, and so losing heat. However, so are the walls of your apartment. Those walls, being nearly the same temperature as you are, heat you to a large degree, making up for the heat that you are losing to radiation. Hence if, on a cold night, you are walking down a hallway in which one wall has a fireplace behind it, you immediately notice how warm the wall is without coming anywhere near it.
Considering that the "walls" in space are the 2.73K cosmic microwave background radiation, and that a person's temperature is more like 300K, you would radiate 10^8 times more energy than your receive. You'd freeze in a hurry.
Now, if there's a star heating you from one side, this can partially make up the difference. You still get the one-side-super-hot and one-side-super-cold problem, then, like the surface of Earth's moon writ small.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
I think the ammo you're talking about is not jacketed in steel, but cased in steel. And yes, some people believe it to be significant rougher on guns than conventional copper-cased stuff, but not because of the bullet going down the barrel proper, but due to the damage that the steel case may be doing to the chamber during loading and extraction.
.223 Remington chamber, as opposed to the 5.56mm "NATO Chamber" or the compromise "Wylde Chamber").
You used to find this stuff under the "Wolf" brand name, and it was mostly made in Russia and some other ex-WP countries. I think Wolf may be trying to move upmarket and has ditched the steel-cased stuff, recently though.
At any rate, the bullets in that stuff were pretty standard at least that I ever saw, but instead of using a brass case, as is used in most Western countries' ammunition, they went with steel cases, covered in some sort of paint and lacquer (assumedly for rust-proofing). There were a number of issues with it, particularly in close-tolerance weapons. First was just the threat of damage to the chamber because it's a harder metal (although I have doubts about this), more significantly was that if you blasted a bunch of it off rapidly, you could get the gun's chamber hot enough to start melting the lacquer off of the cartridges, and over time, build up a layer of lacquer inside the chamber, that would change its dimensions, and lead to feed problems, particularly if you switched back to other types of ammo.
I know a number of people who got burned by the lacquer-buildup problems, because they had AR-15 style rifles with tight-tolerance chambers (the
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
yeah...or the fact I'm in MOTHERF*CKIN SPACE!