Slashdot Mirror
Structural Engineer On the Fallacies of Movie Bridge Destruction (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: Suspension bridges like the Golden Gate Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge are favorite victims for movie makers but are almost always shown to perform in violation of the laws of physics. Structural Engineer Alex Weinberg couldn't stay silent any longer. He covers how bridge collapses in several major films should have looked. The biggest offender? Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises.
Heh. My brother and I grew up watching James Bond movies. And obviously, these movies are entertainment and fantasy, not documentary and physics lectures. We all knew that. We all accepted that. But one day my bother went to see a James Bond movie, and he came home positively spitting nails.
It was the the movie where there is a chase scene on skis, so Bond skis down a mountain, and the bottom of the mountain delivers him to the roof of a chalet, and he skis down the roof, and off the edge, and lands on a picnic table, and skis across the table and then keeps on going. And when I say "picnic table", I don't mean a deserted, snow-covered table. The table was laid with a table-cloth and a picnic and people sitting all around. (I don't recall if Bond came off of it with a dinner roll stuffed in his mouth, like a Loony-Toons character).
Anyway. The problem was that my bother skied. And he knew, from painful, first-hand experience, that if you are skiing down a mountain, and you hit just the tiniest bare spot--just the tiniest patch of dirt or rock--it feels like your ski has been grabbed by a bear trap, and you're lucky if you don't tumble right there. Skiing across a picnic table isn't a skill, or a stunt--it's just flat impossible.
Bond movies are unrealistic, yes, but this one was unrealistic in a way that he couldn't accept. And it killed the movie for him.
ere are a number of explanations for the sound that you hear when a fighter flies near the camera in the documentaries you're watching
The explanation in Babylon 5 was that the fighters are actually making noises in the cockpit when other fighters fly nearby, as an audible cue to the pilot about where in the sphere to look for that other fighter. Real world fighters use all sorts of audible cues, so that the pilot can keep his eyes on the target.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I read to the end, where his explanation for the "worst" one is just plain wrong. He explains "Imagine stringing a clothesline between two buildings and putting some shirts out to dry. Now, cut the line in the middle. In our world, the line loses all its capacity and the shirts all fall to the ground."
But, what he describes is quite different than a suspension bridge. The bridge deck (the equivalent of which is missing in his analogy) will take some compressive force and has some stiffness. If sufficiently robust, the remaining parts of the bridge could remain standing, as two single tower self anchored suspension bridges (or bridle-chord). A real world suspension bridge design would most certainly not be strong enough, but his analogy is flawed.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
It's been a bit of a shock to see that buildings in real disasters tend to fall apart just like some of the cheap and nasty models in some old low budget Japanese disaster movies. Something that initially looked very fake turned out to look just like real footage of earthquake and tsunami destruction.