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Bad Movie Physics Hurt Scientific Understanding
eldavojohn writes "A paper published by UCF researchers claims that bad movie physics hurt students' understanding of real world physics. From the article, "Some people really do believe a bus traveling 70 mph can clear a 50-foot gap in a freeway, as depicted in the movie Speed." The professors published this paper out of fear that society will pay the price. One of the authors commented on advancements in the past years "All the luxuries we have today, the modern conveniences, are a result of the science research that went on in the '60s during the space race. It didn't just happen. It took people doing hard science to do it." I commented on the physics of the most recent Die Hard having problems detracting from my enjoyment of the movie but is it really the root of a growing problem of poor science & math among students?"
Learning is learning, entertainment is entertainment. Star trek has way more fundamental problems with physics than Speed or Die Hard. People shouldn't get their science from TV.
I grew up with Ghostbusters and Star Wars but I never once thought that when I grew up I'd be creeping around old libraries with a Nuclear Device as a backback or tickling an Ewok under its chin while flying my spaceship around like it was a jet fighter.
Some people just worry too much and can't face the simple fact that plently of people out there are just plain stupid. Always have been, always will be.
This is why we need "Mind your Head" signs and warnings not to remove game cartridges or turn off the power when saving your game..
That said if showing some kids a 2 minute clip of Superman gets them to sit their ass down through a whole Physics lecture they wouldn't normally have attended then it certainly isn't a bad thing.
The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything. - Oscar Wilde
Is there anything left that someone hasn't claimed is 'hurting the children'?
It does go a long way towards explaining the epidemic of bus jumping accidents.
http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/
American students are non-science jobs because that's what our economy rewards. Dentists don't have to contend with global competition. Apparently the envisioned future is that the Chinese and Mexicans will do all the work while we sit back and "manage" them, e.g. continue glutting ourselves by skimming all the profits off their work. Personally I think we're headed for trouble.
Next you're going to tell me that in The Bourne Ultimatum, Jason Bourne really DIDN'T know that the hydrofoil to Tangier was faster and took the ferry just to get some "personal time" with that hot Nicky! I mean, if we can't trust Hollywood, who can we trust?!
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
It must be the movies. Before movies, everybody had a perfect understanding of physics.
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
I actually use those as lessons in HOW/WHY the physics would REALLY be. Wile E. Coyote is my teaching assistant. Fan blows into sail... pure genius...
I think this idea that no new science is going on is just scare mongering to try get more fat cat grants. There's plenty of research going on in every field. sure we could always use more, but that's up to the individual to get involved.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Why? That would imply that trusting economic policy to the self-interested wisdom of businesspeople would be a bad thing. What are you, some sort of commie?
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
Engineering is the art of compromise.
We just need to ensure that we teach our children critical thinking skills. Never mind movies, in a world with Fox News and entertainment and lifestyle stories that cloak themselves as "news", this is more important than ever if future generations are going to enjoy a standard of living that even approaches what we have now.
Bad movies (pretty much anything that has a commercial nowadays) tend to hurt the understanding of everything!
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Seeing a movie is like watching a cartoon dressed-up like reality: An animation 'skinned' in flesh-and-blood.
The movies use lots of tricks now (mostly CGI) to aim for a transcendent quality in action sequences. At the same time, there is also a trend toward hyper-realist imagery (through CGI) in both video games and movies. I can see how the tight association of this action-transcendence with realist imagery could hamper a student's sense of real physical phenomena.
(50 feet) / (70 mph) = 0.487012987 seconds
0.5 * g * ((0.487012987 s)^2) = 1.16297871 meters
So as long as the receiving end of the freeway happens to be 1.16 m lower than the departing end, YOU'RE OK!
Who cares if the burger-flipper at the local fast food joint believes that a bus can jump a 50-foot span? Sure, it highlights how not-bright a lot of society is but does it really matter if people who do no science at all have a faulty understanding of physics. All I care about is whether or not men-of-science know the truth of it.
Well, that and my bus driver...
I teach physics at a community college, and I actually like to use Coyote and Roadrunner as an illustration of people's Aristotelian preconceptions. When the coyote steps off a cliff, he has to stop moving forward before he can look down and go, "oh, time to fall." This is exactly what Aristotle said had to happen: an object could be doing forced motion or natural motion, but it couldn't do both at the same time. One reason Aristotelianism was accepted for thousands of years was that it does a good job of codifying the incorrect expectations that people tend to have intuitively. If it wasn't for Coyote and Roadrunner, it would be harder for me to teach this!
My sister works at Pixar, and a lot of her work is physics simulations. (She's working on hair and cloth these days.) She says that a lot of the time, they try simulating the right physics first, but then that comes out not looking the way they want, e.g., water splashes realistically, but they want a cartoon splash, not a realistic splash. So they intentionally mung the equations to get the artistic effect they want. Well, why not? Picasso painted people with two eyes on the same side of their face.
The reason people in the US are ignorant about physics isn't because they see movies with incorrect physics in them, it's because K-12 science education in the US is a disaster.
Find free books.
Look, if you think that Speed is realistic, that isn't the movie's fault. That's genetics, the education system, and parenting to blame. Movies are not making people ignorant, they're pandering to peoples ignorance. Movies with realistic technology would be boring to most people. Sure, movies might be amplifying an existing problem, but they're not the root cause here.
CC Licensed Serialized Story and Podcast: Ingenioustries
So... people are going to actually believe the bogus science in Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth? Amazing.
This is similar to people who mis-interpret history by watching movies. For instance, I know people who insist the government actually bombarded NY City during the Civil War during rioting about the war.... because it was depicted in the movie Gangs of New York.
You never saw John Ford fuck up no physics!
And Elvis never did no drugs neither!
... or if the cops got hold of it. Movies plots glorify crime. People in movies should not break laws. They should drive carefully and keep to the speed limits.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
You don't have to be an intellectual to realise that the ticking timer might signify that your game is BEING save rather than it automagically saving it instantly.
You also don't have to be an intellectual to realise that turning off your machine while its doing this might lose your save game altogether.
I don't have a great understanding of solid state physics or engineering but I possess enough common sense to realise the bleeding obvious when it's staring me in the face..
The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything. - Oscar Wilde
I guess maybe I thought more of the 'kids these days' going into school would be pretty easy to NOT believe that you could floor a police cruiser, hit a toll booth, and manage to land the car on a helicopter.
I guess for decades now I've always felt a movie was entertainment, not 'how things work' otherwise I'm pissed and I want my lightsaber and personal shield.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
I think that the bad bad guy looks a bit like Miguel de Icaza
Does a lack of a suspension of disbelief hurt one's chances of getting a date?
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
88mph won't let you time travel. You have to be close to the speed of light like Superman: the Movie.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
I thought I read that tey really did the jump on one take (empty of course) and it did not fare well?
Let me preface this comment with the fact that I am a physicist (astrophysics) and am quite often frustrated by the poor physics shown in movies.
However, I think they're neglecting a very basic fact. Humans have evolved to find Newtonian mechanics intuitive! (especially in translational cases, somewhat less in rotational ones) If someone throws a ball, you can quickly figure out approximately where it is going to land. You have no need to do calculations, because its evolutionarily hardwired into your brain. Watching a movie which doesn't accurately display a free-falling bus is not going to erase that.
It's true that people don't know enough physics to determine the validity of what they see in movies, but they already know enough to get through life. I'd love for everyone to know enough physics to be understand the devices that they use in their lives, but that's probably not a reality in the modern age.
I think what they're encountering is a resistance to learning the formalizations of physics. As soon as you step beyond Newtonian mechanics (really, beyond two-body problems) all that evolutionary intuition is gone. When you get to physics at that stage, you must place it on firm mathematical footing, or you have no hope of understanding: that is hard work.
They are seeing this decline in science understanding, but I think that's an artifact of an overall educational decline, rather than a specific effect of Hollywood movies. Young people are now expecting to be entertained, and while physics is beautiful, at some point it requires you to sit down in a empty room with a pad of paper and a pencil. If anything, it's the "action-packed entertainment" nature of movies, rather than any bad physics that is likely having the detrimental effect. However, if they can entertain these students and have them learn something too, that's fine with me.
We are not only behind in science. We are also illiterate. Most people never read any classic texts. And I will probably make at least one spelling error in this post. The problem is lack of standardized curriculum. Almost every nation that is cited as an example of someone we "really shouldn't be behind but still are" has a standard curriculum in science, math and humanities. We have too much local opposition to it from all-too-powerful teacher's unions. This is not meant to start conservative vs liberal debate (even though I happened to mention teacher's unions). Most of the time in K-12 a program for educating people over a period of 12 years is designed by teachers who can't plan for more than 1 year. They don't have the time or the background to see "the big picture" of where their particular class fits in the overall education. A separate bureaucracy (there, now you can't accuse me of being too conservative) of experts on development could do a much better job of it by designing and tweaking a curriculum for the entire nation. China does it. So does Russia and so does every European country.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Nature has a way of sorting this kinda things out :)
If a person thinks movie physics is the all knowing truth, we can only hope they try to emulate them. For all the rest of us that have a reasonable understand of mathematics and physics, we will just continue to enjoy the show.
"Some people really do believe a bus traveling 70 mph can clear a 50-foot gap in a freeway, as depicted in the movie Speed."
Forget Speed. If you want a real lesson in physics, watch Road Trip. Not only does the Ford Taurus clear the gap based on their calculations it also loses its suspension, and then explodes. Don't forget, they had to recalculate their speed for approach after a loogie launched by 'Stifler' collapsed one side of the broken bridge.
"American students are non-science jobs because that's what our economy rewards. "
Really, Mr "I'm an expert on the economy"? List them and hope and pray I don't come up with a bigger list proving you wrong.
"Apparently the envisioned future is that the Chinese and Mexicans will do all the work while we sit back and "manage" them, e.g. continue glutting ourselves by skimming all the profits off their work."
Yes, all those "Mexican and Chinese" HB1's
"Personally I think we're headed for trouble."
Personally I think you're an idiot. We're headed for trouble but I doubt this crowd has a firm grasp on all the reasons why.
You're going to get tons of people agreeing with your every word and placing you in their friends list, but I'm not going to play their games and be straight with you instead: can you ask your sister to get me a job at Pixar? And will she be my girlfriend? Either will do. Thanks.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the fact that in Speed the bus couldn't go UNDER 70 mph... it could have been traveling much faster. Now I know that still does not make it very believable but is anyone willing to do the math to see what speed and incline are needed to jump a 50 ft gap? What's the average mass of a bus anyways?
1. Women always wear 6-inch high-heels to bed.
2. Men are never impotent.
3. Women never have headaches... or periods.
4. If a woman gets busted masturbating by a strange man, she will not scream with embarrassment, but rather insist he have sex with her.
5. When going down on a woman 10 seconds is more than satisfactory.
6. If you come across a guy and his girlfriend having sex in the bushes, the boyfriend won't bash seven shades of shit out of you if you shove your cock in his girlfriend's mouth.
7. Women always look pleasantly surprised when they open a man's trousers and find a cock there.
8. Women moan uncontrollably when giving a blowjob.
9. All women are noisy cummers.
10. A common and enjoyable sexual practice for a man is to take his half-erect penis and slap it repeatedly on a woman's butt or face.
11. A woman can't wait to get it in the ass.
12. People in the 70's couldn't cum unless there was a wild guitar solo in the background.
13. Men always groan "OH YEAH!" when they cum.
14. Double penetration makes women smile.
15 Assholes are so clean, you could eat out of them.
16. When taking a woman from behind, a man can really excite her by giving her a hard slap on the butt.
17. Nurses always suck patients' cocks.
18. Men always pull out.
19. When your girlfriend busts you getting head from her best friend, she'll only be momentarily pissed off before fucking the both of you.
20. Women smile appreciatively when men splat them in the face with sperm.
21. A man ejaculating on a woman's tits or butt is a satisfying result for all parties concerned.
22. Asian men don't exist.
I hope the next generation fed on an abundance of internet porn doesn't have the same misconceptions.
Ronald Reagan didn't understand why ballistic missiles couldn't return to base. Wouldn't have been so bad if he'd still been an actor, but he was Commander in Chief at the time.
Do the value of physics learned on Star Trek (in particular TNG) outweigh the theoretical physics discussed and movie conventions?
A back-of-the-napkin calculation shows that a ballistic object traveling at 70mph (102ft/s) can stay airborne for 4.5s (if that 70mph is directed at 45 degrees from horizontal), during which time it covers 325 feet. Then it smashes to bits (having just fallen from about 80 feet in the air).
A 50ft gap? Totally unrealistic.
(Usual disclaimers for napkin-arithmetic.)
ask the mythbusters
The last Die Hard is most definitely the worst.
:) or at least playing basketball. Oh, and chicks like basketball players, not nerds.
Spoilers included, so ROT13, use this to read.
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As to the students thinking of science as hard, I don't think the movies are responsible for this. Being smart is apparently not cool anymore, why should it be? You can make much more dough selling SCO Linux subscriptions
You can't handle the truth.
I rather like the idea of the stupid ones removing themselves from the gene pool.
... are far more likely to believe that an airplane crashing into a skyscraper causes the entire structure to collapse.
IMHO Hollywood movies are also a cause for the decline of the American car industry.
Who the hell will still buy a American car when nearly every car crash in a movie results in an explosion of the gasoline tank?
It'd make the jump, but you might want to try dropping a bus 1.16m before making the determination that it'd be okay.
Physics don't matter. In a few years, all fuel will be replaced by Brawndo. (It's got what Buses Crave.)
This is an old debate. Yes, TV and Movies largely rob you of time and money, and take up brain-cycles and memory capacity that could be used more productively for other things. Largely. It's because people choose to watch that kind of movie. We could all be watching intelligent, thought-provoking documentaries and technical films. But we don't. (Exceptions are noted.)
Suspension of disbelief is a wonderful ability. I'm glad I have it, it allows me to be entertained by reading, hearing, and watching works of pure fiction. I'm also glad that I'm smart enough to know the difference between fiction and fact. I got that by asking questions (stimulated in many cases by unrealistic scenes in movies, I'm sure). Not everyone wants to learn, however, and those that don't want to learn are probably irredeemable anyway. And laying the blame for their failures at Hollywood's doorstep is like blaming Goth Music and Violent Video Games for school shootings. It completely misses the point that solid education (or other forms of intervention, usually originating with parents that actually, gasp, pay attention to their children) would obviate the need for babysitting people through basic fact-versus-fancy analyses of obviously unrealistic media.
Some of us are able to handle our mindless entertainment responsibly. Those that can learn, will. Those that can't, will probably massively outnumber us within a generation or two anyway, if they don't already.
Raoul Mitgong: Unhelpful.
Movie and cartoon physics have always been highly suspect. The difference is that until fairly recently, it was blatantly obvious when special effects "cheats" were called into play. This started to fall apart with the advent of the green screen, and ironically went completely to hell with CGI. Why ironically? Because the same computing power used to render can also be used to do the physics properly -- but it generally isn't.
Another irony is that some movies that look cartoonish (Pixar films, for example) have more reasonable physics than movies that are meant to integrate the computer-generated effects seamlessly. Cartoons are one place where suspension of physical law is often accepted in order to support the overall comic effect, though there seems to be a sort of convention of "cartoon physics" as well.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
and put your speakers on mute whenever they show something happening in space. it's realistic, but boring
the point is, who cares if people know there is no sound in space or not. the purpose of movies is to entertain. i want to HEAR R2D2 scream when he gets hit by shrapnel and i want to HEAR romulans decloak with a whoosh. if we can accept the "force" and "vulcan mind melds", we can accept sound in space damnit. it means joe blow doesn't know space is silent? frankly, who cares
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Is where the hell you got a movie ticket for $7.50. In the DC area, I havn't seen that price in ~10 years.
Get Paid to search
"You don't have to be an intellectual to realise that the ticking timer might signify that your game is BEING save rather than it automagically saving it instantly."
Might? Isn't the device designed so that's perfectly clear? Maybe it's reading, or preheating the chips or something?
"You also don't have to be an intellectual to realise that turning off your machine while its doing this might lose your save game altogether."
See above, plus why would one assume it "might" lose your save game? Guess the extra cost saved by going without a soft-switch "might" explain it.
Like I said and the guy who modded me didn't understand. When you do product design you leave very little up to "might". The fact that I have to come back and explain all this just bolsters my original argument.
Well this comment shows the problem right away. This is actually a mass independent problem, as gravity is always accelerating things (on Earth) at ~9.81 m/s^2. The problem is more what the drag on the bus is over the course of the flight. However, since I am not in the mood to calculate Reynolds numbers for flying busses, I will assume inviscid air.
// Initial speed // Distance to travel horizontially
Problem statement: A point particle moving at 70 MPH at some angle must cross a 50 foot gap, and be at the same height when it reaches the other side.
Given:
v0 = 70 mph
x = 50 feet
Assumption: Force-free motion
Constant gravity ( g = 9.81 m/s^2 )
Solution:
v0 = 70 mph = 31.2928 m/s
x = 50 feet = 15.24 m
t = Time of flight
theta = Angle from horizon
x = v0*t*cos(theta)
y = v0*sin(theta)*t - g*t^2
Solve for t t = x/(v0*cos(theta))
Substitude into y equation
y = x*v0/v0*sin(theta)/cos(theta) - g*x^2/v0^2/cos(theta)^2
Set y = 0 and solve
x*sin(theta)/cos(theta) = g*x^2/v0^2/cos(theta)^2
sin(theta)*cos(theta) = g*x/v0^2
g*x/v0^2 = 9.81*15.24/(31.2928)^2 = 0.15267
sin(theta)*cos(theta) = 0.15267 can be solve graphically. The first valid solution is 8.89 degrees.
So yes, a bus (with no friction) can cross a 50 feet gap, if the ramp was at an incline greater than 8.89 degrees.
Yay.
Why wouldn't I believe it? If my calculation is correct, it only requires a 4.4 degree ramp.
Hey prof, refine you understanding of physics and teaching skills, instead of whining about Hollywood movies on a German junk journal. We all whine about Hollywood movies, but get real, when is the last time that somebody offered you a job in real life to crack 1280 bit encryption in 30 seconds while your sensitive organ is being sucked.
hey linux fags! just wanted to stop by and troll your faggot asses some more.
go get fucked by an ex-con.
you are missing a factor of 2 somewhere.
it doesn't have to be so complicated. obviously t = 2 v0 sin(theta) / g
Actually mass does matter because a larger mass will affect the landing and the damage done to the surface(and the bus) when it lands. That definitely factors into this. I'm sorry I didn't explain that. I did take college physics and do realize that objects of different mass fall at the same rate (in a vacuum anyways). And since we're saying this the size of the bus matters if you need to calculate atmospheric effects... freeways aren't in vacuums. That's another thing to consider.
Because, sadly, it's true.
Same problem, different subject. For decades, really, the public's conception of computers has been jacked up by Hollywood. I mean, I know that I, like the rest of you, skateboard through my 3D, holographic mainframe every day (you know, the one that shows a picture of my screaming face when there's a kernel panic), but how many people have an 800 monitor setup like in Swordfish? In fact, when was the last time you saw an interface in a movie that made any goddamn sense at all?
Stephen Baxter's Xeelee stories also explore the FTL == time travel issue. Indeed, warring factions use "FTL foreknowledge" throughout the whole story arc. In particular, the novel Exultant spends a good deal of effort exploring the implications of "real FTL" travel on an interpersonal level.
However, Baxter seems to be a bit inconsistent in how he treats FTL travel in that the time travel aspect appears to be ignored when it would interfere with other plot elements. (Or maybe he is just way smarter than me and I am misreading things...)
Actually, there is no sound in space because sound travels through mechanical waves which require medium which does not exists in space, except maybe in nebulaes that have gas in them, and even then the concentration of gas is very light in order to propagate sound effectively. However, an explosion in space produces lots of electro-magnetic waves. On Earth and in space exploration, radio uses electro-magnetic waves in order to propagate sound and television. In astronomy, for the purpose of observation of intereseting cosmic objects, sometimes electro-magnetic radiation that is not a visible light is converted into visible light in order to be able to visualize it. Many images obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope are modified in this way in order to visualize certain properties that are not visible to human eyes. The point is that sound in space when used to visualize explosions, does not violate any scientific principle because EM radiation is routinely used to propagate sound beyond its natural range (think of walkie-talkies, or short-wave radio). When an object explodes in space, the sound can not travel beyond the explosion area, so it must likewise be propagated by radio.
That bus was going at least 75.
In other news ... poorly constructed sentences undermine students' chances of thinking coherently.
I'm just gonna put the short answer here. Mass matters for the landing... if you remember in the movie they landed and kept on going. The landing is part of the problem so only solving half the problem doesn't help. Why would you neglect air resistance? You rather have to consider that if you're not in a vacuum.
The General Lee can out jump Kitt from Knight Rider anyday! YEEEEEE -HAAAAAAW!
And the center of mass and moments of inertia and torque induced by gravity...
You should probably model the bus as a line segment with two privileged points (that represent the wheels). Torque induced by gravity will be the dominant force until the rear wheels come off the asphalt. Obviously, this will cause the bus to pitch forward (a rotation about the CM). It isn't obvious one way or another whether the bus can actually land or will collide with the highway roof-first, as it depends on the mass distribution.
After all, I am strangely colored.
www.MagicalTransformations.com Just sayin'...
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
The University offers a course titled "the physics of super heroes." I have not taken it, but as I understand it the class is setup to teach non-science majors some physics basics (that they somehow missed in grade school). A lot of people seem to really enjoy it.
They actually did that bus jump. It's real. And, no, they didn't edit out any ramps.
They had to used CGI to edit the landing area shorter, to make it look like it landed closer to the edge than it actually did, because the bus actually jumped farther than it should have. (And they edited out the camera rig it smashed into.)
How? The gap is not level. Yes, it looks that way on film from certain angles if you're not paying attention, but the starting end was a several yards higher than the back end. Everyone sits there and complains about how a bus cannot do a level jump, and fails to notice that it's not a level jump.
About the only physics that stunt played fast and lose with was by weighing down the back somewhat so the bus wouldn't rotate forward, and, thus, still be movable after landing.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Well this is getting complicating... we're gonna need average stiffness of the suspension... the tire pressure... how the people were distributed throughout the bus... Sandra Bullock's cup size... hmmmmmm
I think we will all agree that such links are tenuous at best. For example, we only need to burn out finger to learn that fire hurts. We are capable of realizing cause and effect without any direct experience. Most of us go through our entire lives without putting a baby in he microwave, or shooing our playmate. I certainly believe that kids burned down their houses and mutilated frogs even before Beavis and Butthead. In fact these las two are probably so common they aren't even news.
So what makes science any different. At least in the US I suppose it is a matter of magical thinking. Science is based on cause and effect. It is based on the functional form that the given a set of inputs results in predictable outputs. Scientists are not going to sit there running the same experience, with the same parameters, and expect widely different results. They are not going to pray for better result any more than they most devout person choose to pray for the lights to come rather than flipping the switch.
Certainly such magical thinking is to be expected in children, and children's movies take advantage of that wonderful innocence. As the child grows up, however, the child is suppose to understand cause and effect, gain experience, and therefore movies become increasing based in reality, with a continued healthy dose of imagination that still requires a suspension of belief. It is, however, understood that reality is what one lives, not what is in a book or what is on the screen. The unfortunate truth is that many people never maure out of magical thinking, and in the extreme these people do bad things to themselves and others, and in minor cases they simply never fully comprehend cause and effect, and continue to believe the childhood stories are true, and this has been the unfortunate situation long before movies existed. It likely has gotten no worse. Just look at the people who wished to kill Galileo, for simply stated what he believed his experiments showed was reality. People are stupid and prefer to live in the security of their mythology rather than face the harsh reality. This is even true for smart people, the people who say they are doing something because they believe in it, rather than because they have evidence of the truth, even if the result of the actions are devastating.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
does this mean you cant slow time and dodge bullets like in matrix o.O. i feel deceived... now seriously, i bet that no one who saw speed even remembers that the bus jumped a 50 foot gap. the only ones who pay attention to those details are those who dedicate their lives to finding tiny mistakes in movies and then criticizing them over and over again. and who thinks movies are real? there are movies about aliens, zombies, mummys, giant sea monsters, time traveling machines, sirens and other mythological creatures, and you complain cuz a friggin bus jumped a 50 foot gap??? oh, and for those who cant stand watching a movie with unrealistic and ilogical physics, you should see captain sky and the world of tomorrow. you would suicide after the first 15 minutes.
I was using might in a sarcastic way for your benefit but you seem to have missed that.. You can read it as "will"
The fact you need to include the "might factor" in your product design proves my point exactly. We cater for stupid people. I didn't say we shouldn't. I did in fact say we need to.
The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything. - Oscar Wilde
Hollywood distorts reality all the time for effect. How many times can Arnold or Sylvester (you too Mal) get shot or stabbed and still walk around punching people in the face? People think wild animals are just like in Disney flicks until a wounded deer kicks the shit out of a hunter (you find the video). How often are "based on a true story" events either exaggerated or outright fabricated at the discretion of the writers?
The distortions of history trouble me the most. In my other examples, at least common sense has a chance of eventually discounted what you think you learned from a movie. Historical fabrications don't have any such anti-venom.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I used to do animation tools for physically based animation, and got some idea of the Hollywood view of dynamics.
A basic concept in filmmaking is that the endpoint of a motion is predetermined. Directors think in terms of "here, then here, then there". The path desired is quite likely to be physically unrealistic, and may have to be pieced together from several shots.
A real physics simulator just isn't "directable" enough. What's used in practice is a combination of hand animation, piecing together motion capture, a collection of clever tricks to make real-world objects go where you want them, and lots of cuts to hide discontinuities. The MTV-style "one cut per second" approach to action scenes makes it even easier.
Much the same thing happens in games, except that you have to allow a user with limited control to drive a character with too many degrees of freedom and not enough embedded smarts to manage movement against real-world physics. This is why, in most sports games, you see beautiful motion-captured motion interspersed with strange jerks as motions are blended in ways that are continuous but nonphysical.
In most driving games, the physics is totally unrealistic. The wheel adhesion is huge, the CG is very low (often below the ground) and it's very common to lock roll rate once the vehicle is tilted beyond recovery angle, so that the vehicle rolls all the way over and lands upright. Driving a full sized car through a remote joystick works badly (we tried this with our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle once, then immediately bought a MoMo steering wheel and interfaced it) and game controller joysticks are even worse. So the vehicle model has to be incredibly forgiving.
There is a classic of computational Hollywood physics worth noting. In the Bond movie, "The Man with the Golden Gun" (1974), a car is driven over a ruined arch bridge at high speed, executes a 360 degree roll, and lands on the far side. It really did do that. The dynamics were calculated by the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory (now CALSPAN) and the ramp was constructed to make it happen consistently if the vehicle was driven at the correct speed. But there's a cheat there, too. The car had a fifth, solid wheel underneath which hit a rail on the launch ramp to initiate the roll. It wasn't possible to induce enough roll rate fast enough through the vehicle suspension.
My two favorite science fiction movies happen to have the around the worst physics. The Fifth Element and Independence Day, the former for it's charming intent (and Bruce Wills' bonked-over-the-head scene), and the latter for gigantic explosions done the right way.
Which is testament only to suspension of disbelief. However, I will point out one thing. In The Day the Earth Stood Still, Klaatu refers to variation of parameters in an appropriate way. In the recent Transformers, some character or another (who can remember), a signals analyst, refers to it as "Foiray" analysis.
If that's indicative of a decline in the standing of science, I'm tempted to say it's due to a general decline in appreciation for people who actually know how to do things, and the ascent of people who can sell. But my life experience tells me otherwise, people I actually know generally admire engineer types who can do the mysterious things that make stuff work.
Another thought I had was that possibly it's opportunity-related. Maybe there just aren't as many jobs for wonks any more. Again, my experience is to the contrary, every company in my line of business is chasing the same fairly small pool of people, and that includes the offshore talent.
So I don't know. It could be as simple as the fact that there is so much money to be made in the entertainment business, movies don't have to be good anymore and directors don't have to passionate about their material. Because mispronouncing Fourier tells me that someone surely didn't give a damn.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
So that (maybe) covers the explosions (sort of). What about the phaser noises when we are given the view from the outside of the ship?
:)
Here's a scene I found on YouTube with lots of sound that makes for good TV but awful science.
I can't believe I've been drawn into a conversation about the realism of a space fantasy show.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
A shotgun can't launch a guy backwards 10 feet through a window?
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
They also produce radio waves. If anymore questions, please see this post.
Actually, it couldn't go under 50 mph. They had to bring it up to 70 so they could jump the bridge. I think 70 was the fastest they could get it being that they didn't have much room to accelerate after the onramp, and it was a big beast of a bus travelling uphill, with a bunch of people on it. 70 mph = 112 km/h, which is pretty fast for a city bus. While they can go pretty fast, I wouldn't expect they could go much faster than 150-160 km/h.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
...and a perfectly rigid lead actor.
Look, if you are serious, I think that you are illustrating the problem mentioned in TFA!
Seriously, the space ships woosh all around, banking and turning like airplanes and making wooshing and swishing noises. It makes good TV, but don't think that it's the least bit realistic. That's just as silly as believing that the Speed bus can clear the 50ft section of highway.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Since gravity is constant on earth we would only have to worry about speed, but also angle of liftoff. The optimal angle accounting for air resistance is about 32 degrees (I think).
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Awesome link, I found this one to be especially interesting:
Scaling Problems
It's an old movie gimmick; a misguided scientist, radioactive fallout, pollution, or some other folly of mankind abnormally shrinks or expands someone or some creature. While we must admit to being entertained by such gimmicks, the physics are another matter.
Let's start with the density problem. Ordinary matter is mostly empty space, and so it is conceivable that an object could be shrunk or expanded by somehow adjusting the amount of empty space inside it. Unfortunately, this would leave the weight exactly the same.
Expanded objects or persons would have such low densities that they would be blown away in the wind like big balloons. Tiny people would suddenly exert huge pressures under their little feet since the area of their feet would be miniscule but their weight the same.
For instance, a normal-sized person exerts a pressure of about 2 pounds per square inch with their feet when they are standing on both feet. If their weight stayed the same and they were shrunk by a factor of 100, a six foot tall person would now be about 0.72 inches tall. Their foot pressure, however, would rise by a factor of 10,000 or in other words become 20,000 psi.
Such a person would instantly sink if they stepped on mud. The pressure under their feet would exceed the compressive strength of concrete (typically 3000 to 4000 psi) and would likely mar the surface of sidewalks.
I neglect air resistance 'cause that's what my college physics professor told me to do. I don't think he trusted me around numbers.
The problem (as far as I can understand it, given that I'm not by any stretch of the imagination a physicist) is that unless the bus was airborne for a very small amount of time, it would have been displaced downwards after jumping off of the start of the gap. Therefore, it should have hit the end of the gap as it landed - the movie depicts the bus landing ON the other side of the freeway gap, when there is no way that the bus could possibly have gained height while jumping off a flat road.
To film the movie, they got around this by constructing a ramp which collapsed partially after the front wheels of the bus got over them, pushing the front of the bus into the air, while it's rear end moved forward relatively normally. This is why the bus lands at an angle, front up; this is also why the movie banners all that the dramatic shot of the bus leaping *upwards* into the air.
So: bus leaping over a 50ft gap and landing at the same height that it took off - very unlikely (impossible beyond a certain speed/time limit that I'm just too ignorant to calculate), bus jumping a gap and landing on a surface at a lower height: possible, bus jumping such a gap with a ramp and landing on a surface at the same height: possible. In face, we *know* this last option is possible because that's exactly what they did in the movie: there was no gap in the freeway, but the bus was "jumped" the distance required of it, and the section of bridge between take-off and landing later removed digitally.
Hope that helps.
I have never seen wooshing and swishing starships on Star Trek. In Star Wars there are lots of noises that are produced by ships' engines and internal systems. As far as sounds like those produced by aero-dynamic aircraft due to surface contact with air, or signals at an airport, in my opinion movies and video games that use such sounds in space, are mentally-challenged in relation to sci-fi concepts, no offense. However still, that may or may not be a serious drawback to the movie or the video game as far as enjoying it is concerned.
People who know physics aren't going to be dumbed down by movies; likewise, those who don't know physics aren't going to be enlightened. However, cool applications of physics in movies and elsewhere in popular culture naturally lead to inspired people being swayed toward physics as a profession. Those who aren't curious can safely be ignored: unlike politics, research science does not require the active involvement of the masses to function properly.
Also, remember, "Da masses are as dumb as dumbasses". Nothing will change that, and portraying scientist types as (minor) heroes and not freaky rejects in the media will do much more for promoting science in America (and elsewhere) than checking to see that all media is totally accurate by the laws of the universe (snore). We're probably living in a simulation anyways.
By the way, science is not infallible: http://xkcd.com/298/
Also, I'm not sure we need more scientists with their strange views. A biologist, a physicist and a mathematician were on a trip to Scotland. On their way out of the train, they see a lone black sheep standing on a grassy field. "The sheep in Scotland are black!", exclaims the biologist. "No, silly, at least one sheep in Scotland is black", retorted the physicist. The mathematician sighed, and after a brief pause, explained: "Both of you are wrong. At least one Scottish sheep is black on at least one side."
I read almost all of the Tom Swift series as a kid back in the 1960s, and watched lots of really cheesy SF/F flicks, but they never confused me as to what could happen in the real world.
..bruce..
On the other hand, when my son Jon was about 8 years old (~1990), he turned to me in the middle of a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode on TV and asked, "Is this real?" Still, I think he's been pretty clear ever since then about reality vs. Hollywood.
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
Go click on that YouTube link that I sent... all the wooshing, swishing, and every other conceivable noise associated with a good ol' Hollywood space battle.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The indestructable asian girl gets hit by a truck and still fights like nothing happened. A car is launched at a helicopter and successfully takes it down. The F35 or whatever jet flies between bridges and buildings and powerlines, looks OK, but has nothing to do with Die Hard. John McClane is supposed to be this ordinary cop who saves the day, but instead he is some sort of a superman, jumps out of a car at over 100km/h and just walks away from it, but gets beat up by that asian lady pretty well. The STUPID scene where some natural gas line is diverted to a power-plant and just blows up everything, I don't get it. Kevin Smith as this Warlock hacker sucked. Was it his wet-dream to appear in the same movie with Willis? The villain sucked. He is bleak and just no comparison to Jeremy Irons from the last movie. The plot sucked. The bad guy can do pretty much anything from his computer. Stop an elevator in some private building? Sure why not. Hack into everything, control anything (all the street lights, stock markets, power plants.) Whatever. Why the hell is powerplant control is accessible from the Web anyway? The whole movie is broken into just 3 or 4 long lasting scenes really. It had no pace. McClane flying a helicopter for the first time in his life and being able to do it while the power is down on the entire cost. Shooting the bad guy through his shoulder, ok. Anyway, Willis is old and in this movie it shows. Can't they have some new actors?
So, no more Harry Potter films then?
Don't go to a brothel if you want to buy broth
Forget the bad physics. What about the probabilities?! Don't forget the branch of statistics!! I mean, come on.. What is the probability of bad shit(TM) happening to McClain all the freakin time?? Even worse, what are the probabilities of Bad Shit(TM) happening to McClain exactly as many times as there are Die Hard movies? Either there are some Bad Shit happening to McClain while no one is watching or there are Die Hard movies out there where none of that Bad Shit is happening and McClain is just chillin at home watching TV.
Actually, come to think of it, Bad Shit did happen to his partner Zues. The Motherf*ing snakes on the Motherf*ing plane. But alas, McClain was nowhere to be found.
I know jack about physics, but I have seen Speed.
The bus couldn't go below 50 MPH or the bomb would go off. 80 was the fastest it could go up that freeway ramp.
Comment of the year
Some people actually believe steel framed buildings can collapse symmetrically at near free-fall speeds without the help of explosives. They also believe air pressure from a collapsing floor is capable of ejecting huge steel columns horizontally while pulverizing concrete. In addition, some argue that fires on a few floors is a sufficient cause for a global building collapse (again at free-fall speeds).
This all happened on 9/11. Examine building 7, 1 & 2 for yourself.
I am not a people person. I do not sell stuff. I solve problems. Even if they seem stupid to me. Sometimes it is cools stuff, sometimes it is wow! why didn't I think of that! Often it is "Eh?", whatever...
I've never bought a ringtone, but it is a multi-billion dollar industry. I don't use nail salons, dry-cleaners, or give a hoot about professional sports, but I salute those who make a living in those industries.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
This is one of my pet peeves.
People who only know what they see in movies really have no understanding of firearms.
Hiding behind a car door won't protect you from an AK-47's or M-16's bullets. You can't just find any old ammunition and put it into your revolver. Glock doesn't make porcelain or plastic guns that will pass through metal detectors. There is no such thing as a "cop killer" type of bullets. You can't remove a gun's serial number by simply filing it off. "Ballistics" isn't some sort of magic, it's possible for them to not match a bullet to a gun.
I could go on for an hour, but I'll stop there.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Well, I don't know whether unrealistic hollywood physics are really hurting students' understanding (probably a little... but likely not that much, especially since REAL physics is mostly math calculations, which has little to do with visual observation. However, I do find that unreal physics can detract from a movie. Die Hard 4 jolted me out of my immersion a few times with completely impossible physics, and that's not a good thing. I like to see things that are physically possible, but incredibly difficult for a human to do... right at the edge of plausibility. That's what movies are TRYING to do, anyway. I don't think film makers realise that they're doing it so grossly over-the-top when they do it, though. Sure, use wide angle lenses to make things look far away, do lots of cinematic trickery, but don't break my immersion with things that make me go, "wait... that's not possible!" It's distracting.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
There are actually some very positive side effects of Movie Science.
For instance, both the Columbine killers and the recent London "bombers" had an entirely false belief that propane cooking cylinders would explode like grenades. In reality, the cylinders are purposefully designed to rupture without causing a fragmentary explosion.
The recent London "bombers" even seemed to believe that any car set alight would produce a large explosion. In truth, cars burn all the time, it is very, very rare for any road vehicle of any sort to explode. In fact, none of the London "bombers" schemes had any real potential of a large explosive effect.
For this, I think it's fair to say we can thank good old Movie Science. As long as ignorant villians keep believing what they see on TV, we'll be all the safer for it.
There is some great physics in this Roger Rabbit clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WswD1djENJE
And also this clip from Kung Fu Hustle:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GW1pJMAkaVY
"They don't even really understand how gravity works, and that's the most important force which affects us humans in our daily lives."
Well, not entirely true. I'd say that E&M is actually far more important to our daily experience than gravity, especially in the number of phenomena rooted in it.
"There's now some evidence that there might be other dimensions besides the 4 we're familiar with,"
What evidence? Point to some experiment or observation, please, not theoretical work.
"various particles have been detected (like neutrinos) which previously were only hypothesized."
This is entirely false. Neutrinos have been detected for several decades now, and they've even been used as tools in experiments - just look up some papers on deep inelastic neutrino scattering to see what I mean. No, what's new is that we're pretty sure that they have some mass, though we still only have an upper bound on it. In fact the last new fundamental particle to be discovered was the top quark in the 90s, and that was a couple of decades or so after the last new particle. It's now just down to the Higgs hunt as far as the standard model goes, and every particle physicist is praying that when we do find it there's something about it that doesn't fit in the standard model because otherwise particle physics is likely to die from it's too successful theory.
"150 years ago people thought it was impossible to fly in a machine that was heavier than air."
And those people would have been laymen who didn't know what was going on anyway. All you'd need to do is look at Newton's second law to see that if you could somehow push down on the air with enough force you'd be able to make anything fly. Even Leonardo da Vinci, a couple hundred years earlier than your estimate, knew that.
"There's no telling what other facets about our universe exist which we are unable currently to observe and understand, just like we had no idea how to split or fuse atoms and create enormous amounts of energy 100 years ago."
Actually, we do have a pretty good idea. Just like it turned out that Einstein's relativity was only a small modification of Newton's physics in the known regime, it's a pretty good bet that any new physics will have to reduce to the current theories, approximately, in the areas we have already explored experimentally.
Movies are probably not the root of poor science literacy. But they don't help. People do remember the things they saw in movies. On the one hand, there are many aspects of science that won't fly in a movie. In movies, science labs are beautiful. Real science labs look like a mechanic shop -- spare parts strewn everywhere. Nobody wants to see that in a movie, and nobody is harmed if it's depicted differently. Still, making a movie at least plausible, though...who is hurt by that? You'd think the writers would at least try, though. Isn't that just good writing?
Please try my 5-minute Web-based cognition experiments at http://coglanglab.org
"The fact you need to include the "might factor" in your product design proves my point exactly."
No we have the "might" factor because the world isn't perfect. No amount of intelligence is going to change that.
"We cater for stupid people."
Shame we can't design around the arrogant ones.
Although lack of physics realism in movies is a problem I find that the lack of believable technology is a bigger problem as was the case with Die Hard 4. I know I'm better at knowing what is possible with technology than I am with physics so movies that make the technology seem too convenient (and critical) to the plot are worse to me than those that exaggerate physics. Exaggerating physics to me is almost fun. You can break out of the norm. Who likes playing a game where the gravity is half that of Earth? Maybe if I was a physicists (and smart enough to understand it) I'd feel stronger about movies exaggerating physics rather than technology. I've seen Die Hard 4, Bourne Ultimatum, Transformers, and Ocean's 13. Out of those 4 I'd have to rank Bourne and Transformers as the best movies. No technology was used to the extreme (except for maybe the tracking capabilities of the NSA in the Bourne movie but I didn't mind it because of the great action) in those movies. Ocean's 13 and Die Hard 4 just relied too much on breaking technological bounds and it wasn't even done from a theoretical standpoint (unlike the time travel done in Deja Vu using wormholes). Just my 2 cents.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
I would, but Adobe is retarded and still refuses to release a 64-bit flash player.
Either that or Macromedia had shit developers who fell into using 32-bit specific math.
Embarrassing, but not so bothersome as most people don't make decisions about physics that effect others (yeah, cars, but they generally avoid having to jump 70 feet in the first place). But a similar result, the "CSI Effect," where people believe that the techniques they see on forensics shows are infallible, is more worrisome, because any of that horde may be a peer on your jury listening to a forensics witness.
Totally OT, but your sig is really bothering me. Please change it to "who WAS washing" to fix the glaring discrepancy in your alliteration.
Here's an article touting how watching bad physics is likely teaching our kids they can jump a bridge in a bus, but when it's violence these same people are watching, there are loud and broad claims that there's no way they're internalizing that.
It's not a troll, it's a seed for discussion.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I can't imagine that if people already have a skewed perception of the physics of reality because of movies, they won't have a skewed perception of reality when it comes to violence.
-- Cheers!
Is and always will be paying a price, as long as there is a price to pay; pawns are we.
Bad movie physics isn't a problem at all. We need movies that can spark the imagination of the next generation of scientists, whether they are realistic or not. Those people whose reactions dont extend past "Damn, that car-helicopter collision was BAD ASS!" probably weren't going to cure cancer anyways. It's the ones that say "Huh, I wonder if that's possible..." Rather than trying to shoehorn education into entertainment, perhaps we should focus on providing outlets for those naturally curious individuals. I say this as a scientist who happens to enjoy over-the-top implausible action movies, so I might be biased.
It's not just physics. Every area of study has this same problem. Doctors will cringe bullshit medical diagnoses and the like. Psychologists will point out bad/incorrect advice. Business students will laugh at how basic most movie's ideas on the economy are. Computer nerds giggle whenever movies show some guy hacking into the super-secure server in under 10 seconds. All movies bullshit and trivialise, if you can't enjoy a movie because of it, then that's really your own shitty attitude. I imagine most people don't watch House M.D. for medical advice, or Sawfish to learn how to hack, or Trading Places for business advice.
What's the difference between fiction and non-fiction?
According to "A paper published by UCF researchers", nothing.
I offer in repeat here every bit of evidence presented in the paper to support their assertions:
" ".
Plenty of cool looking equations to show they know what they're mathing about, and plenty of criticism to show they can talk about what they're talking about, but 100% pure grade A certified data free. They don't even TRY to justify their claims, they just make them, bash movies, and conclude they're right.
Where the hell did they learn their science from, the movies?
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Anyone who watched The latest Mission Impossible movie is already stupid, and therefore at no risk of becoming more confused by it's implausible physics.
"Some people really do believe a bus traveling 70 mph can clear a 50-foot gap in a freeway, as depicted in the movie Speed." Has any one considered that maybe someone who believes that isn't bright enough to be a student at any school, maybe even too dumb to work at McDonalds. That should be a question in all drivers exam. Anyone who says, yep it's possible is banned from ever driving anything other then a tricycle :)
"Are you vaguely alluding to anything in particular, or just hoping to present your own intelligence as superior at the expense of everyone else?"
Funny. Isn't that what slashdot is usually guilty of?
"Assuming it's the former, I'm dying to read the truths you grasp so firmly."
I'm sure you are. My main point however is that slashdot always brings out their pet prejudices and acts like it's the most important thing ever, and if it was eliminated everything suddenly would be all right.
Quote "150 years ago people thought it was impossible to fly in a machine that was heavier than air. " /quote
Actually , no, people ALREADY knew it was possible to fly with machine/animals heavier than air (Montgolfier/hot balloon are far older than the 19th century, and bird are clearly heavier than air). What was thougth to be impossible was to build a machine with a motor which could enable CONTROLLED flight. But a serie of advance end of 19th century ended that, particulary on the motor side. The wright brother seized the occasion and using SCIENCE and AVAILABLE ENGINEERING made the first flight human-controlled airplane.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I for one welcome our new physics impaired movie watching overlords
And people are complaining student getting their information from wikipedia. I'll take a wikipedia physics article over a movie "demonstration" any day of the week.
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't
The Speed movie is quite unfortunate. Month or two and again the poor movie is the root cause of some present day disaster.
I'm instead old fashioned. In a time where everything that we are, needs to have some external source we can blame for our faults, I say: well, many people are simply stupid. Plain old stupid. This is why they believed Speed in the first place.
Hooollywood has been happily re-writing history since the year dot, so why not re-write the laws of physics at the same time ?
.. and almost won .. until the _good_ guys came along and fought against overwhelming numbers of bloodthirsty nazis, to save the world. .. where the bloodthirsty Russians sent spys out to enslave the entire world, and drop nukes on all the _good_ people for no sane reason.
Lets see what I have learned about history and current affairs from TV:
- At the beginning of history, the bloodthirsty Egyptians ruled the world, and cruelly mistreated all the _good_ people, who they kept as slaves for no particular reason.
- Then the Romans took over, and they were even worse slave drivers than the Egyptians. The bloodthirsty Romans were particularly nasty to the _good_ people, and fed them to lions for no discernable reason.
- After the Romans came the dark ages, Where the _good_ people rode white horses, and bravely fought against overwhelming numbers of bloodthirsty Turks.
- Then there was a lot of sailing and stuff, and the _good_ people came to settle in America.
- In the 1800's the _good_ people rode horses, and fought bravely against overwhelming numbers of bloodthirsty savages (Native American Indians)
- Later on, Germany declared war on the whole world for no good reason
- Later on, the Vietnamese attacked us in South East Asia for no reason, and the _good_ guys fought bravely and triumphed against overwhelming numbers of bloodthirsty communists. After we left, we found out that the Vietnamese had lied to us, and so retired heroes have to keep going back there to bust POWs out of bamboo cages. (which continues to this day)
- There was some sort of 'Cold War' after the Vietname thing
- Now the news tells me that we are under unprovoked attack in the middle east, and the _good_ guys are fighting bravely against overwhelming numbers of bloodthirsty terrorists, bent on destroying our freedoms for no discernable reason.
But I feel safe, because :
- the NCIS can track all the emails of our bloodthirsty enemies.
- We have an endless supply of special heroes who will come out of retirement and save us if things get too tough.
- We have access to all sorts of technically impossible tools to help us win this one, but they are kept secret for obvious reasons.
I hope the next generation fed on an abundance of internet porn doesn't have the same misconceptions.
I have met more women who think these items are true and therefore try to emulate the movies. And as each year a new batch of 18 year olds come along, more and more of this becomes true. Definitely not all of it.
Well, let's correct my statement. Numbers 7 and 8 a number of women do as they believe it heightens the experience for a guy. 15 appears to be true for those really into receiving analingus, they try to make it more appealing for their partner. 16 has been true as long as you judge the woman correctly, some like a light pat, while others want a hard smack. 21 seems to be more true each year. On number 20, I will only say that more people are trying this and seem to like it depending on the situation and location.
I have many female friends from all walks of life. I also work in a female oriented "adult novelty" store, commonly referred to as an adult toy store. I have openly discussed sex with females since I was fifteen, I am now thirty. People have always been able to open up to me. Using a margin of lying of 50%, I still see an increase in at least the items I mentioned.
Now your experience may vary, but porn has definitely led into the acceptance of some of these behaviors. Oh and in relation to 19, a few of my friends is like that in certain situations. At least after a group leave a bar together, if one of their friends goes down on their husband/boyfriend, they typically will join in. If they had tried to hide it then she would have starting beating both of them. Plus I have a friends who have left their husbands/boyfriends due to them trying to get a threeway by getting caught with another woman.
Use of Antibiotics is responsible for creating resistant bacteria strains that are extremely hard to combat. Hospitals get regularly freaked out when people catch a cold while in being admitted; that's because it's highly likely the agent causing the illness is resistant against the multitude of drugs used in the hospital.
Well, while you might not actually hear something traveling through space, you could - for example - hear the explosion within the vessel being hit or nearly hit (the stress of the shockwave perpetrating through the ship itself) or possibly depending on location the sound of weapons being fired from a ship.
Still, overall I've always been rather fond of firefly for giving it a good go. My favorite scene is where Jane has a gun bubbled in a breather-bag so that it actually has the oxygen to ignite the gunpowder, etc. Of course, most sci-fi's don't have actual contemporary guns in space, but it was fun to see that somebody said "oops, that wouldn't fire in space without air" and came up with a solution.
Yeah, the summary was kind of dumb on that point. Of course a bus can cross a 50 foot gap. That bus in Speed really did cross that gap. They used a real bus, and jumped it over a piece of incomplete elevated freeway.
The problem is that the nose of the bus would smash rather badly since the bus is not a point particle. The solved that in Speed by having a little ramp that gave the nose a boost and then fell flat in time for the back wheels to go over it. You can see in the movie that the nose of the bus jumps up just as it goes over the edge.
A lot of people seem to get their history from films too, so all the piss poor US adaptations that mangle history are also a problem. The US have to be involved or where the deciding factor in numerous situations where they didnt even get a sniff in reality.
.... oh yeah and Kevin Costner as robin hood ;-)
Enigma anyone.
or that steal historically important phrases, eg the thin red line...
Ok, I'm willing to let pure fantasy go. eg, there was some film about a yankee in the court of king arthur
It sure can if he is stumbling backwards and falls down the stairs after a shot to the chest...umm..I mean...so my friend tells me
Creative Demolition
How many SF movies have you seen where "it" (i.e. an individual) evolved, or the creatures evolved within the few hours/days covered by the show? Evolution is a good examle of a horrible trend. And then you have the X-Men, "the next step in human evolution" etc. At least people are just ignorant of physics--they actively know and believe things that are false when it comes to evolution. Movies are make-believe (as are comic books, etc) and I'd guess they've always worked against real-life knowledge by being more entertaining and fun than, well, reality. Do you think movies like The Day After Tomorrow really help public knowledge of environmental concerns? Movies always suck when it comes to science.
"Some people really do believe a bus traveling 70 mph can clear a 50-foot gap in a freeway, as depicted in the movie Speed."
I saw a TV special on the making of SPEED. They DID actually have the bus jump that gap. They cleared it of all people and the stunt driver is actually driving from a rollcage-type thing on top of the roof. (That's how the bus was driven the entire movie actually, not from the inside).
I don't know if the bus was going 70 MPH or if the gap was really 50', but it did jump something.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
I guess there two sides to every conversation. When I watch a movie or TV show, I realize I'm supposed to suspend belief... When the bionic man reaches up and pulls an overturned car down to right it... he should catapult his arm into low earth orbit ripping it completely free from the soft meaty shoulder to which it's attached. Obviously this doesn't happen and Newton is ignored with extreme prejudice. When Van Helsing swings down and snatches the heroin up from a multi-story stunt (thanks to our good friend CGI) there is no profound trauma, no dislocated shoulders or broken ribs... only escape from the undead... the undead should be the hint (the only place you find the undead in the real world is D.C.)
So I think it's only fair to park your "Critical Thinking Brain" at the lobby door when you go to watch a movie... that said, you should remember to pick back up on the way out. For those of you who don't own one, this is why we're having this conversation in the first place... your job is to go out and get one.
People who can't tell that "Looney Toons" are not an accurate depictions of physics, should probably be forced to wear nurf suits, not be allowed to move faster than a brisk walk, and be prevented from procreation as a protection to the intellectual viability of our posterity. I'm sorry, no lack of legal knowlege will prevent you from falling off a cliff at 32 ft/sec.^2.
Along those lines, people who participate in projects like "Jack-Ass the Movie", or attempt to defy the fundamental laws of physics, only to become horrible lessons in absolute inevitability of those very laws, should be protected from their own stupidity. In fact we should all be protected from their stupidity. One more fine reason to elect a president and a legislative body with with a collective IQ larger than bowling ball's.
Of course, then you'll never get a chance to see "Jack-Ass the Nation", but I believe the up side merits the risk.
Like many here on Slashdot, I work with computers. That doesn't mean I hated the movie Hackers. It had a young Angelina Jolie in it!!! The soundtrack wasn't bad either.
Cause Bill Gates made everyone thing you can do everything by just clicking, clicking, clicking, without understanding anything!
SCIREV.NET - fanfics,reviews & more
A lot of people do live a sad static life.
But besides that, people are conditioned by what they see over and over again. Back in the stone age, we constantly came in contact with physics in our everyday lives in ways that were much more vibrant. Everyone made their living interacting with the outdoors. Today, we have much more experience with often badly simulated (faked) physics in movies and video games. And yes, I have seen that this has taken a toll. I saw a couple of kids who couldn't figure out how to get the maximum bounce out of a trampoline. I actually had to tell them. I saw a grade school girl (about 4th grade) who couldn't figure out how to get her bicycle over the lip of a driveway. She actually stood there on her bike and asked her mom to help her. And the number of people who are deficient in the intuitive geometry they need for driving! (Creeping towards the inside of the lane or even over the edge on a turn. Unable to make a left turn without cutting across the right lane of the street they're turning onto. Unable to parallel park.)
I think this is also connected to the scads of people who are unable to reason critically. We're all becoming a mob disconnected from actual reality, hypnotized by Hollywood's version of it. (How convenient for our elitist masters in our broken democracy!)
"All the luxuries we have today, the modern conveniences, are a result of the science research that went on in the '60s during the space race"
Either someebody needs hit that person with a cluebat, or someone completely arbitrarily defined 'modern'.
A lot of research (nuclear technology, for instance) was done because of WW I and II. Also, the industrial revolution played a key role in introducing modern conveniences enjoyed by the average family nowadays (cars, washing machines, etc). It is also easy to overlook electricity, vaccination against disease and clean drinking water, and pretend they are not modern conveniences- even though a lot of people have not yet had the privilege to gain access to them.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
So THAT'S what I did wrong on that bus driver exam.
It makes so much more sense now.
Indeed.
The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything. - Oscar Wilde
Well at least The Uranus Experiment: Part 2 got the physics in space right. The physics of an astronaut/alien orgy in zero g!
1,2,4,7,9,11,14,15,16,19, and 21 are plausible if not common. 3 is irrelevant if your open minded and don't have a bitch for a wife/GF. Sex is an amazing pain killer.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
50*0,3048m = 15,24m
(70 miles*1609,344m*h)/(h*mile*3600s) = 31,3 m/s
time t bus needs to cross gap: t = 15,24m/(31,3 m/s) = 0,49s
distance y bus moves downwards in this timespan: y = 0.5*g*t^2 = 1,18m
Last time i checked, there wasn't a bus with tires having a radius larger or equal to 1,2m.
Really? And for those who don't understand solid state physics, or engineering why should one not turn off the power or remove the cartridge? Apparently the intellectual crowd thinks that everyone should have their degree of understanding and if they don't then they label them "stupid". Is it any wonder most people roll their eyes and just ignore you.
not sure why this is modded downMovies, in fact pop-*, are/is made for the masses. Not physics majors, not total dullards. The hero wins despite unbelievable circumstances and against impossible odds.
Don't blame the storylines. If movies are anything to do with "the root of a growing problem of poor science & math among students" it is that the screen - despite being with us for 50 years - retains some magical appeal that says "this is real". If that is a problem, it is one of a deeper cultural significance.
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the fact that in Speed the bus couldn't go UNDER 70 mph
I'm not. Why not? Because that "fact" isn't a fact. Actually, the bus could not go under 50 mph, and the speedometer clearly reads close to 70 before that particular jump. No, I'm not defending the movie's physics. I will say, however, that it was excellent in the 'make your date jump and give her an excuse to grab your arm' department. But then, I usually go to the movies thinking more about the date than the physics in the movie, which makes me an abberation here on slashdot.
http://xkcd.com/386/
spelling error intentional; hello, grammar nazis.
http://xkcd.com/386/
I usually try to go by instinct (or "common sense") to get some idea of whether something is possible or what the result of something would be. This instinct is shaped by what I've seen, which my memory aggregates into some kind of system that can be used to make predictions.
However, when I watch a movie, it looks real enough to fool this memory. So as long as something is not obviously "unreal" (say, magic), it might enter this system. So by watching many repetitions of events that could not actually happen like this, but are made to look extremely real, we could be messing with our instinctive sense of "realism".
This isn't going to stop me from watching movies, of course.
One of the worst movies for science must be Mission to Mars. The woman looking at a short double helix on a computer screen and saying "It looks like human DNA!", got me crying. There are countless other insulting things in this movie (calling nucleotides chromosomes or freely rotating candies in space). Do not watch it!
The worst thing is that this movie is in many ways based on science. Brian de Palma is an idiot.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
Mmmm... but would a farmer of 100 years ago have a better understanding of levers and pulleys than a farmer today? Perhaps a better parallel to consider. Probably a farmer of a hundred years ago had a better understanding of physics than a shop girl or a newspaper boy of the time... but then all three probably had a poorer understanding of a lot of other things that an average person takes for granted today: the relevant knowledge that means its easier for a person to get by. Could be argued that knowing about levers and pulleys today is less important than understanding how to make a washing machine work, using modern banking facilities, or accessing the internet. Heck, I like messing around with my classic (1965) car but I'd not know what to do with the black box computer that controls my girlfriend's car...no levers or pulleys in there...
I saw this movie about a bus that had to SPEED around a city, keeping its SPEED over fifty, and if its SPEED dropped, it would explode! I think it was called "The Bus That Couldn't Slow Down." -- Homer Simpson
If at first you don't succeed, call it version 1.0.
According to physics of the black-and-white pre-apollo era I can fist-fight with space mobsters in my shiny rocket on the moon and my hat will never fall off my head no matter how often I get knocked down.
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
...and a perfectly rigid lead actor.
Keanu Reeves, the lead actor, being made of lead, should then add a non-trivial amount of mass to the equation. Man, I love English.OK, disclaimer, I'm a budding English prof. But it seems a real rush to judgement to me to limit the utility of literature the way you do, to just examples or practice for creating further art. Firstly, there's research that shows that the sort of thinking demanded by interpreting art and literature is not only conducive to but necessary for more utilitarian or "rational" thought processes (Damasio's Descartes' Error is a good start). So it's useful developmentally. But there's truth too in the old liberal humanist saw that there are themes which are, if not universal, at least broadly applicapable to our lives. Your uncle may not kill your father for the throne, but you probably will suffer teen angst or find yourself at odds with society in some other way. Your contention that "most of life is boring" is the sort of sad belief or experience that can be altered by learning to appreciation the slower pace of the fine arts. It is not so easy in our society to learn to contemplate a sunset or the slow transformation of a flower or a lawn or patterns of frost on a window. Study of the arts inculcates such skills and predilictions. As a capping disclaimer, yes, I am a budding lit prof, poetry no less, but my bachelor's is in geomorphology, and my initial profession was in photography and computer programming for planetariums. So I didn't necessarily come to my current positions easily. YMMV, but at least be aware that your sweeping generalizations are, well, sweeping generalizations that likely spring from your attitudes and experiences, as well as possibly from your aptitudes. So be careful about laying down universal laws for humanity. Joy and satisfaction is where you LEARN to find it.
I watched Deja Vu a few weeks back (not by choice) and was astounded by the flagrant middle finger shown to anyone with a basic knowledge of science and computing. For those who haven't seen it, the main premise of the movie is that the government somehow has access to live, real-time hi-res video footage of anyone, anywhere. It started out realistically enough where we had a Google Earth-esque zoom from space into a city, but then the view turned to street level, then went through a window, into a house, inside a bathroom etc. This was explained as 'satellites'. I almost couldn't continue watching just because of the leap of imagination required to believe this.
My younger sister (16) who watched it with me and has no interest in science didn't see what was wrong and had no problem watching the movie. I guess for most kids out there they've become desensitized to technology and science in movies and when it defies the laws of physics, it just goes over their heads since that's what they see in the movies. Whether they can separate fact from fiction though is still to be observed.
Watch the Enterprise turn in any Next Generation episode. Every time, it uses a banked turn. This only makes sense if your turning force comes from lift, which doesn't make any sense in space. A space ship would pirouette on the spot or, if under power, turn in an arc, but it wouldn't roll as it yawed.
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I must say that I found the Miami Vice movie pretty good. Not because of the story or acting, but because the physics wasn't ridiculous. When things were shot, they did not explode but just made the sound of an object being hit by a bullet, and people did not fly away when shot. This certainly made the action feel more real and thrilling to me.
About eight miles south of Yuma Arizona, there is a town in Mexico that is filled with dentists, A lot of US citizens travel there to save about 60% on their dental work.
Love the google sponsored link: "Learn How Quantum Physics Can Transform Your Life & Attract True Happiness and Purpose." With even the self-help industry becoming scientifically minded what are these professors fussing about? It's time for them to cash in on ramp-jumping buses.
There is sound in space. http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mystery_mond ay_030922.html
Another probe had a microphone that heard the dull roar of the solar wind.
When something explodes it usually gives off large amounts of gas. Of course if you're a reasonable distance from the explosion, it's like lightning and thunder, you'll see the explosion first, then get hit by the blast. I seem to recall 2010: Odyssey Two getting this right when Jupiter ignites.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
I started off quite annoyed watching Transformers as I couldn't rationalise cars turning into 60-foot high robots. Where did the extra material come from?
Then I realised I was watching a film about gigantic robots trying to recover an alien object and just sat back and enjoyed the ride.
As much as it's amusing to see the likes of Die Hard 4, Swordfish, etc completely trivialising the mundane efforts involved in hacking, etc you have to realise that it's just not possible to make the reality of these things entertaining.
The Matrix Revolutions is the closest thing I've seen to reality, with Trinity using nmap to show open ports on a power station network she wanted to hack, and I'm sure that was lost on 99% of the audience who saw the film.
Who cares if some mouth-breathing morons believe movie physics. These people will soon proceed to de-select themselves, in the Darwinian sense, in attempts to recreate their favourite movie scenes.
So I know both of the authors of this article, and I knew them when they were planning to make this course and afterwards: When they were planning it, the idea was to increase attendance in physics courses as attendance numbers = state granted funding. I guess Costas has become a bit cynical now that he got his extra cash. Here are my thoughts on it: (1) That journal is a PoS, i.e. their findings are meaningless or so worthless they are irrelevant. (2) Costas sucks as a professor, he's too arrogant. (3) Llewellyn rocks, he probably had his name added because he came up with idea of the course. (4) The people in the course are not the brightest sparks. The course is a level below their general physical science course, which is less than or equal to a high school physics course (algebra based). Most of the people in it are communication majors, or hospitality majors just trying to fill a core requisite, of course they aren't going to know physics!
I remember when I used FreeTranslation.com to help me translate an article about the hospitalization of Fidel I castrate.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
The people that "believe a bus traveling 70 mph can clear a 50-foot gap in a freeway" are probably not the ones that are going to be trying to solve complex physics problems. Unless they are designing the next mars rover or need to commandeer a runaway bus, I don't see this as a major problem.
"Pretty much what I was thinking. ANYONE jumping a bus after watching Speed deserves the death they get."
I am sorry - I had to respond to this, because people who honor physics and its importance in the world would have to be smarter than to link Hollywood Movies and a thorough understanding of Physics. If they are not, than I am afraid for our future. If their time is wasted picking apart Die Hard, Speed, and every other Sci-Fi action flick, then who knows what other diversions are using up valuable resources. Hey, guess what, TIE Fighters really wouldn't be able to make that "roaring" sound in Space. Gosh, a lot of people are going to be upset when they take their first tour in Space and realize that it's pretty quiet.
And you wonder why we haven't cured Cancer, or found a way to limit our dependency on oil, or found a way to reverse the severe climate changes in our environment?
Obviously, it is easy to divert attention from what is important, no matter what your level of intelligence.
it probably could clear the gap. If we assume that the bus' suspension can handle a 6 inch drop, then the bus must cover the 50 feet in 0.177 sec. That equates to 193 MPH. If you allow for a 1 foot drop, then the speed requirement drops to 136 MPH. At 70 MPH, the bus' suspension would have to accomodate a drop of 3.8 feet - hardly plausible.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
The sky is falling again, eh? Let's face it, if Hackers had shown a bunch of Melvin's sitting around eating hot pockets and drinking Mountain Dews banging away on their keyboards in relative silence would it have sold? No. But that's how real hackers work.
I first noticed this with the third Die Hard film. While the Die Hard and Lethal Weapon movies were known for their extremely implausible stunts and situations, it got COMPLETELY out of hand by the third installment (and I hear the new one is even worse). At one point, Bruce Willis and Samuel Jackson jump from a bridge onto a ship, fall AT LEAST 50-75 feet, land on a steel deck, then just get up and "shake it off." The car jumps in Smokey and the Bandit and Dukes of Hazard were laughable enough, but at least those would have just busted the *car* up.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It's a good thing too--I'd hate to be wearing my "communicator watch" everywhere a la Dick Tracy. I looked stupid enough back when I had the calculator watch. :)
You are half right, the bus did make a 50 ft jump, however the freeway was actually complete, the gap was edited in.
I recently saw an elderly lady and a young man standing on the side walk, violently jump back from the scene of an accident between a dumptruck and a 16 wheeler. I asked them why they were reacting the way they were, and they said they were afraid the gas tank on the truck was going to explode.
I said, quite bluntly, "that only happens in movies". Then, I was challenged if I was "some sort of expert". I said no, I am not an expert, but I do have a knowledge of physics, and explosions like that only happen rarely.
http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/
Rubin: "If we hit this thing at 50 miles per hour, our trajectory will clear ten feet, easy."
Kyle: "No way. Absolutely not."
Rubin: "Kyle, we'll go 60 just to be certain."
Kyle: "We're goin' back. This is impossible. No, no."
Josh: "Are you sure?"
Rubin: "Of course I'm sure. With physics I'm always sure. Yes."
Jaws, The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Aliens, The Sixth Sense, Spiderman 1/2, X-Men 1/2 to name a few.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying. - Woody Allen
...movies that suggested that sparklers on the back of your rocket could get you there.
I think we'll be OK.
Evil is the money of root.
I watched the making of that stunt (on laserdisc of all things!), and IIRC they built a ramp that was more like a 30* incline. You can tell in the movie b/c the bus suddenly pitches up like a motherfucker for no apparent reason, I mean they don't build highway ramps like that. Always thought that was ridiculous looking myself, ah the 90's. Oh and the gap was completely digital. Pussies.
You can't take the sky from me...
While I generally agree with the majority here and that entertainment need not be accurate in regards the physics, there is another example that proves the essential point the poster is trying to make.
In the 1970's there was a lot of concern about advertisements for automobiles in that they would show cars racing around doing highly dangerous and mostly impossible things. In those days there was something called "truth in advertising." The fear was that if kids watched too many of these fantasy ads that glorified the dangerous and mostly impossible feats of driving prowess, that what would happen is we would get a whole generation of extremely bad drivers whose only concern was doing that perfect high-speed drift around a corner, or seeing if they could push it to 150K on that short trip to the corner store. Committees were formed, communities rallied and large parts of the population lobbied for restrictions on these irresponsible advertisements.
Of course the power of the corporation won out and the "truth in advertising" people are now just a marketing arm of the same corporations with no bite and no say in anything. Amazingly, a generation later, the streets are filled with speeders bad drivers and accident rates are "through the roof" (no pun intended), even when adjusted by the increase in population. Violations that were rare or unheard of in the 70's like running red lights and speeding, are now so common that the police forces can't even attempt to stop anyone from doing it, they have become the norm.
Of course I am generalising here and being really "breezy" with my argument as I have to get back to work and don't have the time to reference all this stuff, but a good argument can be made for this sort of effect IMO.
Peoples attitudes, ideas and understanding of their world is quite obviously affected by the media they consume, especially when in this day and age more people will see things like Die Hard than ever crack a book, let alone a science text. Go down to Alabama, stop at the first trailer park and show them Die Hard. Then ask them if they think it is possible to stand on the wing of a moving jet airplane.
I don't know, but I thought borat had some good Physics lessons in it. I know I will never wrestle with a nude fat man (or any man for that matter) for fear of having his junk in my face. Lesson learned!
You just described Geordi's Visor. (Or is that VISOR? Never can remember.)
There was an episode in which we got to see what it would look like.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Yeah, I forgot that. It's really immaterial though -- it doesn't really matter to the physics if there's pavement underneath the bus flying through the air or not.
Not only does it perhaps hurt people's understanding of physics, but it makes for bad special effects. We all have a lot of experience with weight and motion, so when something is physically impossible, it just looks "wrong" and makes it harder to maintain suspension of disbelief. Movie directors often seem to think, "It's all fantasy, none of this is possible anyway, so why does it matter?" But a rule long understood by science fiction writers is that the bigger the impossibility you ask the reader to swallow, the greater the care you must take to make other things as realistic as possible.
Some of the most jarring (and common) special effects that I've seen are:
A person is hit, and flies horizontally across a room to slam into a wall, with no suggestion of an arc. This is a smaller, and more familiar case of the "bus jumping the gap." No matter how hard you are hit, your trajectory will not be horizontal.
The strong villain picks up a victim by the throat, and holds him off the ground at arms length. This is again a more familiar case of the error cited with the Green Goblin holding the cable. Unless your feet are glued to the floor, or you are immensely heavy, it is not physically possible to hold another human off the ground at arms length, because the center of gravity will be beyond your forward leg--i.e. you will topple over.
Still, there is some evidence of progress. In the second Spider-man movie, I was impressed by how believable Doctor Octopus's movement was. The animators clearly paid attention to his base and attachments when he was "walking" with his arms or lifting heavy objects. And I read that in the third Spider-man movie, they checked Spider-man's leaps and swings with a physics model. That doesn't mean that they didn't cheat for dramatic effect, but they tried to stay close enough to physical reality to avoid jarring impossibilities.
Your technobabble sounds exactly right for Trek.
It's exactly the kind of thing that they'd do. I've heard rumors that the scripts of Trek shows actually included TECHNO -- as in, you'd have a line that said, literally, "Well can't you [TECHNO] to get through their shields?" "We can't, because of [TECHNO]."
Then they'd get whoever their scientific eggheads were -- probably pseudoscientific marketers, but whatever -- to come up with some good sounding TECHNO to fill in the script.
Think about it...
"Space fleets of the future outfit their crews with [TECHNO]. These use [TECHNO] to produce the sounds, which, as everyone knows, does something good (insert more [TECHNO] here)."
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
If you would also RTFA, you would see that the point is that science understanding is exceptionally poor in the US schools, and that this professor teaches a remedial science class at the college level. He tried teaching it "straight" but the students found it too hard, and boring, so he teaches it using movies as examples (mostly wrong ones, such as superman causing the earth to rotate backwards) so he can teach the right science (in the superman case, angular momentum), and it's been a very popular class for the past 5 years.
"What's the average mass of a bus anyways?"
Why would you need to know this?
A buss and a baseball "fly" about the same. The way to figure it out is to first figure out how long at 70MPH the buss would take to travle the length of the gap. Say it takes one second.
Now how far do objects on earth fall in one second?
You don't need a degree in physics for this. This is covered in High School Physics classes
Now back to why you need to know the mass of the buss. The typical high school physic exercise always says "neglecting air resistance" but that's not realistic. If you want to compute the deceleration of the buss as if flys through the air you need to know the force of the drag due to air resistance and the mas of the buss. But for a short one second flight I think you could neglect this effect.
Here's just a snippet, you really should read the entire thing:
It is, of course, television that has allowed Idiot America to run riot within the modern politics and all forms of public discourse. It is not that there is less information on television than there once was. (That there is less news is another question entirely.) In fact, there is so much information that fact is now defined as something that so many people believe that television notices it, and truth is measured by how fervently they believe it.
"You don't need to be credible on television," explains Keith Olbermann, the erudite host of his own show on MSNBC. "You don't need to be authoritative. You don't need to be informed. You don't need to be honest. All these things that we used to associate with what we do are no longer factors.
Idiot America is a bad place for crazy notions. Its indolent tolerance of them causes the classic American crank to drift slowly and dangerously into the mainstream, wherein the crank loses all of his charm and the country loses another piece of its mind. The best thing about American crackpots used to be that they would stand proudly aloof from a country that, by their peculiar lights, had gone mad. Not today. Today, they all have book deals, TV shows, and cases pending in federal court.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
It isn't the teachers or the schools fault that students aren't learning science... or parents... IT IS HOLLYWOOD'S FAULT!!!!
Can we sue the movie makers for little johnny failing his physics test? Like those fat kids who sued McDonalds?
This is why people kill themselves, like the lady who tried to jump the gap when the Bay Bridge collapsed in the 1989 Bay Area earthquake. She backed up and made a run for it.
I'm not sure when this was written, but nowadays we have things like babelfish and google's language tools and Amikai (not a misspelling) that do instant translation fairly well.
Not well enough for Star Trek, and it never will. You don't even hear other people talking in their language -- only what the translation of what they say is. That's improbable enough, but there's another bigger problem -- the complete lack of lag and the ability to interrupt people mid-sentence.
If you interrupt someone in the middle of a sentence in different language, you may get completely different information. For example, in English you want to say something like "That man bought the watch I wore to work every day." Let's say that you were interrupted mid-sentence. Your listener would get the fact that "that man bought the watch..." Your listener would know that the watch was bought but not that you wore it to work every day.
Now let's say you were speaking Japanese instead. Due to a significant difference in word order, the sentence is best rendered as "[Every day] [to work] [wore] [watch] [that man] [bought]." If you were interrupted mid-sentence, your listener would only know that the watch was worn to work everyday and not that it was bought.
This is because Japanese uses Subject-Object-Verb order instead of English's usual Subject-Verb-Object order and places all modifiers (including phrases and clauses) before the word they modify. Other languages present similar difficulties. Spanish places all modifiers after the word they modify (while English places adjectives & adverbs usually before and prepositions and clauses afterwards). Classical Arabic puts the verb first. Latin & Russian can have seemingly almost arbitrary word order.
Another complexity is the necessary context in a language. Many Japanese sentences would be considered sentence fragments in English. It's perfectly acceptable to simply use a verb without a subject or an object and to let the context (hopefully) explain what you're talking about. In English, you might say, "I bought it," but in Japanese you could just say "Bought." The ambiguity of the language can make translation exceptionally difficult, especially when a speaker has knowledge that a listener does not and is making no special effort to clarify. (This is more common in watching movies than in conversation, though.)
A Star Trek-style universal translator would have to be able to look into the future to see the entire context of a sentence to know how to render it properly or be able to read the minds of participants. This is technologically unlikely, and it doesn't seem supported by the other technology used in the setting.
Thus, it's pretty much wand-waving magic-tech meant to make the plots go smoother. Don't expect to see it anytime before we see replicators and the power supply systems required to transmit the energy needed to spontaneously create multiple GRAMS of matter (each of gram of which is roughly equivalent to the energy released in the bomb dropped on Hiroshima) meant to wave away supply problems or before we see magical inertia-canceling technology meant to wave away realistic depictions of acceleration.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Of course, if movie's were realistic, we'd be seeing headlines like:
Good Movie Physics Hurt Movie Enjoyment
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This is a lot of hogwash. I'm an engineer. I grew up watching Star Trek. It sparked my interest in science. Many scientists and engineers would tell you they loved Star Trek when they were kids and if it wasn't there, they might not have become what they are. It's good to discuss the inaccuracies in SF because it prompts the imagination to think about how things really work.
Nit-picking your solution:
y = v0*sin(theta)*t - g*t^2
Should be y = v0*sin(theta)*t - (1/2) * g*t^2
Here's a question? What is the minimum speed you need to clear a 50-foot gap?
Answer:
Launch at 45 degrees. i.e. vx = vy
vx * t = 15.24 m
t is the time in seconds to travel 50 feet.
vy - g * (t/2) = 0. At t/2 seconds, it reaches the apex. vy(t/2) = 0
Solving... v = 27 miles per hour.
So yes, this is one person who believes a bus traveling 70 mph can clear a 50-foot gap.
Obviously you won't maintain the speed without a landing ramp, but that wasn't part of the requirements...
"Follow me" the wise man said, but he walked behind.
Movies have corrupted my understanding of science. I have no idea how a lightsaber or warp core really works.
Here's the simulation software used to plan that jump, back in 1974. Versions are still available and in use.
Kinda like saying: I found a number we didn't even know existed!
Please?
Even if you disallow getting buoyancy through air as "not heavier than air" I rest my CASE : bird are NOT lighter than air, and as far I can tell birds were known to fly before the 19th century. I am pretty sure also we can find example of parachute or wing-like contraption test way before the wright brother. So NO, what was known to be impossible was not flight, it was controlled flight with the engine available. And before the advance in engineering and motor before the 19th century, yes, de-facto controlled flight was impossible. The wright brother amassed known science on flight, and the motor advancement, saw a breakthrough and went for it. I will not lessen what they did. But it is wrong to say as the GP that "flight was thougth to be impossible". It was not. Bird are witness.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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If they get under 50, the bomb goes off and Keanu dies.
People trhought that BEFORE the movie as well.
But, yes, TV does influence how people think about science, and pertty much anything else.
for example, trial lawyers talk about the 'CSI effect'. Where juror expected CSI level evidence.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
if movies that lie about physics mess up a person's ability to understand physics, then I should definitely never have gotten my BS in physics...but I did. And I watched enough Bugs Bunny and Road Runner cartoons to retard a roomful of Nobel laureates. Its more likely that being stupid impairs your ability to do physics.
Fatuous acceptance of shallow study results impairs you ability to do damn near anything.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Freddy vs. Jason, Duh!
Most kids don't regard the determination of chemical bonds as "fun" -- but that's fundamental to the field of chemistry.
Most kids (including me, when I was one, and still to this day) couldn't care less what Shakespeare wrote -- and what he wrote is frankly irrelevant to anybody who does something useful for a living (scientists, engineers, doctors),
So you think knowledge of chemistry is important, even though only a tiny, tiny percentage of the population will ever use it or even encounter it outside a classroom.
But you think the study of culture and art, as in Shakespeare, is useless -- because most people won't ever need it?
And that actors, writers, and other artists and performers aren't doing anything useful?
That's some twisted thinking, man.
And then you go on to say that "most of life is boring". Stop for a minute, please, and consider how much more boring life would be without the creative types -- those you brush off as merely "playing" -- producing all the various artforms that give civilization depth.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
I'm a high school Physics teacher, and I use movies to help my students with the concepts discussed in class. For example, we calculate the angle and velocity needed for that bus in "Speed" to clear the 50 foot gap...we determine that the church that Michael Keaton and Kim Basinger fall from in "Batman" has to be over a mile tall based on the time it took them to fall...we guesstimate the mass of a T-1000 based on the "fact" that a shotgun sends him flying backwards.
It's not all bad Physics though. Babylon 5 does a great job with demonstrating conservation of momentum with their fighters. Futurama has several scenes that also deal with momentum in an accurate way.
Anybody out there know of any other exceptionally good (or horrendously awful) examples? I'm always looking for more, and the kids can't get enough!
Here is the full paper: http://xxx.soton.ac.uk/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0707/070 7.1167v1.pdf
The Speed jump was fake? Next I suppose they'll try to tell us that you can't really fly into the sun with a spaceship the size of Manhattan either. Phooey!
THIS is what is exactly wrong with North America. Why the fuck should education be entertaining? It certainly is a bonus if what you're learning is interesting, but for 95% of everything that you NEED to know, it's boring. SUCK IT UP. Do you think learning about how to fill out an income tax return is entertaining? No, but you need to hunker down and just fucking do it without complaining. So many North Americans don't have what it takes to do the downright dirty work that is both unappealing and boring because "it's not fun, boo hoo!"
The reality is that you need to learn to get ahead, under any circumstances. You need to work your ass off. If you don't, you will work at McDonald's or maybe a comic book store, because hey, that's fun and entertaining, right?
Since when is learning about Fast Fourier Transforms or the internals of Mergesort entertaining? It's not, and the expectation that education should be fun is what is killing kids. Educational video games? Talk about unrealistic expectations that you as parents put into your kids' heads. You need to say, "Yes, I know it's boring, but you need to learn this, so go learn your timestables."
Now get off my lawn you pesky kids!
The gap was real, an under construction bridge in Jacksonville, FL, if I recall. They filmed the jump scene on a solid road, no bridge.
The bus jumped the large ramp, went about 30-40 feet for the flying shot, and crashed down onto the road and utterly destroyed its suspension. The axles broke completely off on impact.
"True Lies," if I recall correctly, was a particularly egregious offender."
Probably my least favorite movie of all time. When Tom Arnold's performance is the best part of the picture, you're in deep trouble.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
No, kid, most of YOUR life is boring. Had you made different choices in life, braver choices, and refused to play it safe and bland at every turn, you might have the memories and regrets that will sustain you through old age.
Of course, it's still not too late. Guys like you typically have their midlife crisis in 3... 2... 1...
Oh, BTW, if you had read the Shakespeare, you might have gained the insight you so sorely lack.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Not even from Bill Nye?
I only remember one episode in which the entire bridge could see it, and Insurrection, in which only the audience could see it.
But I believe the idea was the same, and anyway, Insurrection gave him entirely artificial eyes instead of a visor.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
AFAIK Charles Stross is the only SF writer who has ever done much writing in a milieu where FTL is equivalent to time travel
Don't forget Bob Forward (e.g. Timemaster). Can't forget a book where the protoganist goes back in time for a threesome with himself and his wife.
When most of the country still thinks jet fuel can make skyscrapers explode from top down? http://governmentterror.com/ JUMBO JETS CAN NOT DEMOLISH SKYSCRAPERS
This is nothing new. For years people have been making space movies and shows where you can hear sounds in space. And while it is all largely done for dramatic (and melo-dramatic effect) it ends up sucking in comparison to Firefly, which I won't say is scientifically factual in entirety but they at least tried (especially by not having any sound in the outside-space perspective scenes. But obviously, Star Trek has tunneled more holes in physics than than most of the sci-fi and non-sci-fi movies out there. For years I have gotten on the inaccuracies of physics in all movies. Space movies seem to be the biggest perpetrators but we can't forget the action flicks. But when you boil it all down, is it actually physics/science that is the only victim here? NO! It's an assault on common sense. Now I am a fan of Die Hard, but any idiot that takes these movies seriously is exactly that, an idiot. John McClain may as well be able to take out the entire Army Rangers division and then some.
It's not just movies with bad physics, it's a lack of interaction with the real world in general. People don't work with their hands like they used to and get an innate sense of how the world works. Kids don't go outside and throw the ball around nearly as much as they did. A movie set on Earth where every time someone takes a step they bounce five feet up in the air would be laughed out of the theater even if it was Shakespeare. That's because we all walk or see walking everyday. As an embedded software engineer I can tell you despite all the specs, designs, and coding practices, you can't really predict how a device works until you spend hours in the lab debugging the code. And doing this for one bug makes it a lot easier to debug an entirely different bug. You just get a feel for it. There's a reason fledgling surgeons spend as much time in the operating room under supervision as they ever did in the classroom. Even a lot of theoretical physicists will tell their students to spend some time in the lab.
The study (or the part that was online) didn't mention how they controlled for the standardized test scores. Kids are bombing standardized tests like crazy. It could be that the tests are getting harder, or students are taking more of them, or we are testing kids who were never tested before (like special ed students). Any of these could cause the scores to go down w/ out meaning that more students know less about science. It could also be that science teachers are trained as well as they once were. Also, are movies any less realistic than they used to be? Old Buck Rogers? The Day the Earth Stood Still? Looks like a bunch of old fogies whining about those darned kids and their darned rock and roll music.
The other important factor would be the curvature of the ramp and the suspension setup on the bus. As any snowboarder or freerider will tell you, this makes a huge difference on the initial launch angle.
I have no problem with un-realistic science in Star Trek, as it is set in a FICTIONAL world! It is a little harder with movies set in LA and jumping buses. I do think the general public gets a misunderstanding of physics.
What is even more disturbing than physics, is the absurd use of computer technology in movies! A lot of people actually believe that stuff!
I also want to comment that people, especially children learn a lot about the world from watching television. Currently, they are learning a lot of BS, and gaining misunderstandings about how physical sciences work. (That isn't even going into misunderstandings about human relationships.)
On a tangential note, while thinking of children, Sesame Street is an example of education and entertainment. Are children confused by the mixture of learning and make believe? Maybe a little. There was a segment of Sesame Street where two puppets were trying to spell DOG, and sound it out. When they finished, a barking D-O-G (not a dog, but the letters D, O and G) came across the screen. Most children know, or figure out quickly, that letters don't do this.
I'm guessing this guy's head would explode if he watched just one episode of Blues Clues.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife