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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.
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.
It must be the movies. Before movies, everybody had a perfect understanding of physics.
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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.
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.
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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.
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Reminds me of a firearms instructor who'd compiled a videotape, no doubt illegal in spite of Fair Use, consisting of terrible movie moments in the context of firearms safety. "True Lies," if I recall correctly, was a particularly egregious offender.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
That bus was going at least 75.
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?
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.
A shotgun can't launch a guy backwards 10 feet through a window?
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
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.
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.
"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.