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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.
Next they will be telling us that X-Wing fights can't really bank in space and don't make that "rrrrrrrrrrrrrraaaaaararrarrr" noise.
Pretty much everything in every movie is not realistic. Why should blowing up bridges be any different.
Go see movie. Suspend your disbelief. Enjoy it. Go home. Get on with the rest of your life instead of sitting around with nerds over analyzing everything.
If you have a few minutes to waste, or are passionate about suspension bridge structural integrity, well worth a read.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Can physics professors enjoy Road Runner cartoons, or do the blatant violations of physics drive them nuts?
I know one who attempted to codify the cartoons rules, such as "a being doesn't actually fall until they realize they are (inadvertently) suspended in the air." She said, "If you are going to make a fake world, at least be consistent in it."
Maybe one expects cartoons to be goofy, whereas action and drama movies attempt to look real, and that's what sets subject experts off.
I know some real crime analysts, and CSI drives them crazy.
Table-ized A.I.
http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/~ka...
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
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.
However, in a suspension bridge with a suspended roadway, the chains or cables support the weight of the bridge, and so do not hang freely. In most cases the roadway is flat, so when the weight of the cable is negligible compared with the weight being supported, the force exerted is uniform with respect to horizontal distance, and the result is a parabola...
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
Very fun movie to watch, but wow the bad physics. TFA mentions the Golden Gate Bridge standing in the background with the center span broken. Compared to all the other physics goofs, I didn't even notice that one.
- Oil tanker swung like a baseball bat (it would buckle and snap in half just lifting it by one end).
- Helicopters carrying gigantic armored robots (a C-5 Galaxy can carry a single M1A2 Abrams tank).
- EMP-type event not affecting one robot because it's nuclear powered.
- Nuclear reactor causing a nuclear explosion (they can't do that, their fuel isn't even the right type to attain uncontrolled criticality).
- Giant monsters with exoskeletons (they would collapse under own weight). I let this one pass because of the Godzilla tradition, including the streets and buildings.
Always happy to share our vast quantity of experiences.
Have gnu, will travel.
I'm with you on all of those.
For those that might be wondering about the oil tanker(and such). Consider how strong, proportionally, insects are compared to humans. This scaling continues. It's relatively easy to make a toy helicopter that can fall from several times it's height, ram it's blades into objects, and such and still come out without damage. A helicopter big enough for people? No way.
Things like oil tankers are carefully balanced and strong where they need to be strong for their designed purpose. A tanker is designed to carry it's weight while supported on all sides by water.
It's also why Superman's hands should tear through vehicles like paper instead of lifting them, much of the time. You don't jack up so much as 1/4 of a car without using specific points that are capable of holding the structure.
I don't read AC A human right
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.
I wish both of you would just fuck off and stop shitting up Slashdot.
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