Revisiting the Physics of Buckaroo Banzai

serutan writes "Shortly before the release of 'The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension' in 1984, physicist Carl Sneider of U.C. Berkeley wrote a surprisingly interesting essay on the physics behind the movie. Since the essay is not widely available on the web and I could only find it in plain text, I posted a more readable HTML version on my site. Among the more interesting points Sneider makes are that the oscillation overthruster is the result of decades of research instead of the usual laboratory accident, and its development corresponds surprisingly well with the evolution of particle physics from the 1930s to the 80s."

Weird science

Consider this, if you were to disrupt the particle behavior of an object so that its molecular bonds were permeable (since they are mostly made of space in the first place), you'd end up with the particle either collapsing on itself or blown to bits due to repulsive charges of neigbor particles. So Banzai wouldn't be able to fly through a mountain because the mountain would have collapsed upon itself. If he used the oscillator on himself and his ship, he wouldn't be able to recover from the damage.

There's no doubt a lot of fun speculation to be made here, but if you're going to get your science from the web, it's best to stay away from Slashdot.

Re:Weird science

On the other hand, not knowing much about particle physics, I had always assumed that the "science" in Buckaroo Banzai was just so much vapid technobabble.

The fact that phrases like "intermediate vector bosons" tossed around in the movie actually have a connection of any sort at all to the issues being discussed puts BB already a few parsecs ahead of the typical S.F. junk that hollywood puts out.

I'd always thought of BB as a camp fantasy classic. It's refreshing to know that the writers actually knew a little science and applied it, even if the final product was entirely improbable.

Re:Weird science

All the I know, is that The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai (Across the Seventh Dimension), was the worst thing that I ever ever got in charades once. My sister got Jaws!

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No wonder it was hard. You were confusing everyone with the wrong number of dimensions.

Re:Weird science

For what it's worth, if you like it, it's pretty much a direct lift from the classic Doc Savage, "Man of Bronze" pulps of the 30s and 40s. They weren't camp at the time, just from a different era, both in terms of literature and science. This was before physics was considered a major branch of science, so much of the wizz-bang new inventions are through the modern miracle of cutting edge chemistry. The characters were painted in bright, broad strokes, just like Buckaroo's sidekicks. One even carries around a long eared pig. Ethnic stereotypes and slurs weren't considered politically incorrect, and women had only had the ability to vote for ten years, so you have to take some things with an understanding of the era (i.e., if you're offended by such things, don't read 'em).

Fun stuff, and highly recommended if you really like Science Fiction, as you can see where much of it came from. The Philip José Farmer take on the characters later in the century is a different beast (enjoyable, but not what we're talking about). Things like ice bullets and enzymes are the high tech weapons, plus a little dabbling in the (even at the time) classics of SF like hollow world theory. (There was an official Doc Savage movie that was done to be camp and sucked monkey balls).

--
Evan

Re:Weird science

Agreed on the Doc Savage reference. Buckaroo is an updated version of the old pulps - and the novelization of the movie (written by the script writer) is written like a pulp, complete with references to other adventures. FWIW, Evan, someone took the old movie and replaced the "songs" with the original (instrumental) John Philips Sousa tunes, and it makes the movie MUCH more watchable. Still not great, but it holds up a whole lot better this way than I would've imagined.

Here's hoping that Raimi does wind up doing Doc (he recently got the rights to do movies based off of Street & Smith characters).

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If you enjoy pulp adventures, I highly recommend Aaron Allston's "Doc Sidhe" books. Sadly there are only two so far, but I'm eager for more. The first one is available completely free from the Baen Free Library:

http://www.baen.com/library/aallston.htm [baen.com]

Enj

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It really was science with no practical applications then. The sad thing is just as WWI was the fought with chemistry war WWII was the war fought with physics.

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Actually WWII was fought with Quantum Physics.

WWIII is being fought with the media.

I dunno

On slashdot sure I see some morons, but there's usually some people on here so smart I don't understand a thing they said to smack down the moron, and somehow I say that's expertise.

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I believe that that's one of Clarke's Laws. Any sufficiently advanced technobabble is indistinguishable from smack.

Re:I dunno

Mod parent diagonal.

Now excuse me while I go phlib my enjuntificator.

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Now excuse me while I go phlib my enjuntificator.

That's disgusting.

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Only when I run it on untreated sewage

Re:Weird science

Bear in mind that the article was written in the spirit of making the movie more enjoyable for people who are geeky enough to understand something about particle physics. The point was not to prove the feasibility of the oscillation overthruster, but to show that the science thread that runs through Buckaroo Banzai is a cut above standard movie technobabble. Sneider sort of addressed the mountain-collapsing issue by mentioning that the area of effect was small and short-lived, which is why the jet car had to travel 700 mph to keep up with it. It's all in fun.

Re:Weird science

"The point was not to prove the feasibility of the oscillation overthruster, but to show that the science thread that runs through Buckaroo Banzai is a cut above standard movie technobabble."

Right. It's basically an inside joke. Most people think Buckaroo might as well be reversing the polarity of the neutron flow but a few people out there are really going to appreciate the effort put forth in creating the technobabblish scenes. And this sort of inside joke is a lot harder to pull off than throwing Gil Garrard's name into a Family guy episode.

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Consider this, if you were to disrupt the particle behavior of an object so that its molecular bonds were permeable (since they are mostly made of space in the first place), you'd end up with the particle either collapsing on itself or blown to bits due to

Re:Weird science

Actually, as long as you did it for a really short period of time, the main effects would be:

• particles would fall due to gravity (unless this effect also weakened gravity, but current theory wouldn't support that). But it would take a signifigant portion of a second for the particles to move much due to gravity.
• particles vibrating due to brownean motion would possibly continue past each other possibly rearranging crystaline structures

Once you turned the field back off, the forces between the atoms would reappear, and most of the molecules would snap back into place.

If you left the field on a long time, yes you would possibly get a tunnel, as the particles would fall to the bottom of the region at which point their fields would turn back on, and there would possibly be... fusion? an explosion?

Disclaimer: I am not a particle physicist, but I do talk with them in the cafeteria...

Cool car mod

I for one would love an oscilating overthruster on my car, it would enable me to drive through traffic jams. My only consern is that if I can pass through solid matter what is to stop me passing throught the crust of the earth? I drive a MR2 Roadster and I don't think the canvas soft top is rated to magma.

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If you project your intermediate vector bosons accurately, you'll obtain a tunnel through the mountain with solid floor just below the wheels, and a collapsing yet transparent core in front.
Move fast enough, and banzai!, you tunnel through.
It is interest

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traffic jams, 700 miles an hour? Don't think it will work.

Laugh-a while you can, Monkey Boy!

WHERE ARE WE GOING?!

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That's BigbooTAY!

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When?

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Real soon!

(I knew I wasn't the only one with this idea)

Just remember

"No matter where you go, there you are!"

This was already discussed by Londo Molari

He discussed it a long time ago in the far off, but rather close future.

Here is the link -

http://www.rogerborn.com/commentary/a-walk-among-t he-atoms.html [rogerborn.com]

""These are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others."

Best Quote

Mandatory link [uoregon.edu] to the best quote of the movie.

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"Laugh while you can, monkey boy!"

Indeed a timeless line. I sometimes use this on my 9-year-old son (who watched the movie with me), and as often as not, my nickname for him is "monkey boy".

Buckaroo Banzai was easy to identify with

ISTFM (I Saw the Fucking Movie)

Since BB was a Adventurer/surgeon/rock musician like most of us, he was easy to identify with.

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For completion's sake, Buckaroo was a Half Japanese/Rockstar/Neuro-Surgeon/Particle Physicist/Adventurer and part time crime fighter. Like me.

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He had it easy. Back when I was a musician/physicist/adventurer/crime-fighter, we built our own instruments and our cars were crank starters. We didn't have any of this automatic transmission nonsense, and we reloaded our own bullets, too! This guy woul

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The movie was certainly about 10 years ahead of its time.

(I can't stand watching it now, because of the nasty 1980's rock-video hairstyles and costumes. But the dialog was some of the funniest stuff in cinema history - - big boo TAY!)

Buck-A-Roo!

Curse that headline. I thought this was going to be an article about the inner workings of some extreme version of Buckaroo! [firebox.com].

I was so disappointed when I found out it was about a sci-fi film.

Buck-A-Rooooo!

He got to see the director's cut!

"The machine which finally enables Buckaroo Banzai to move through matter is based on decades of research that are shown to the audience through home movies and flashbacks."

Dr. Sneider must have seen an early edit of the film in 1984. The home movie segme

Lesson to be learned

Not only did Buckaroo's car go wicked fast -- so fast that the on-board camera shook alarmingly -- and was able to drive through a mountain, it had turn signals . And Buckaroo used them . This Half Japanese/Rockstar/Neuro-Surgeon/Particle Physicist/Adventurer sets a good example for all of us!

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>Not only did Buckaroo's car go wicked fast

Yeah, but one heat-seeking missile and he's *history*.

Thanks, guy.

Now I'm gonna have that closing music stuck in my head all day long.

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Could be worse.. as is widely known among fans, the music wasn't finished yet when they were filming that scene. On set, the cast had to walk in time to Billy Joel's "Uptown Girl," which happened to have the same tempo.

And now, you've got that stuck in y

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I just watched it recently, too. I like that end credits music. I'd like to have that as my ring-tone.

This is one of my all time favorite movies. Stylist wardrobe, excellent cast, fun characters, campy but a true classic.

Copyright?

Doesn't the original writer have copyright over this essay? Is it legal for it to be posted to the web without his authority? I know we don't care so much about copyright on /., but this is a bit rediculous.

Atoms are mostly empty?

The metaphor that Buckaroo uses is something like tiny marbles in an orbit configuration. So an atom is a tiny cluster of marbles, neutrons and protons in the nucleus, and tiny electron marbles orbiting some distance from the nucleus, and mostly empty spac

Important questions

Why is there a watermelon there?

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Though the movie answers with, "Er...I'll tell you later," ISTR that Earl Mac Rauch has said that the watermelon in the vise was part of a program under development at the Banzai Institute to create food that could be air-dropped into a famine area without

Big Trouble in Little China

http://imdb.com/title/tt0086856/trivia [imdb.com]

# The end of the movie invites the viewer to watch for the upcoming film "Buckaroo Banzai vs. The World Crime League". This was the real title for a sequel that Sherwood Studios planned to make if this film had been successful. Unfortunately, it was a box-office bomb, and Sherwood Studios went bankrupt. After its release on video and cable, however, BB became a cult favorite, much in the same way as Mad Max (1979) (which crawled from obscurity to spawn two sequels). Legal wranglings due to the bankruptcy prevented any other studios from picking up the sequel rights, and even years later MGM had to fight through a pile of red tape simply to get the OK to release it on DVD.

# The script for the proposed sequel Buckaroo Banzai vs. The World Crime League ended up becoming the script for John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China (1986).

Since I read this I can't watch BTiLC without thinking of Buckaroo and crew going deep under Chinatown.
Jonah HEX

Alignment solves everything

I'm quite worried a lot of people will get the wrong idea about this movie, that it's all impossible. Of course the overthruster isn't disintegrating the matter on which it is focused, it is simply enabling a bidirectionally permeable interface to form naturally between two space harmonics.

It has been long known that spacetime has a granular quality, in fact when you get small enough everything is spin networks (you can learn more about it on Wikipedia) which can basically be thought of as a quantum of space. in other words we are all just living on particles strung on lattices (see lattice theory). But since the granularity of spacetime is at a resolution of Planck units, there is obviously an infinity of other universes that can exist between the lines as it were, made of particles strung along a lattice just out of step with our own. If you can gauge the distances correctly along this string-net and apply a constant field to shift the center of gravity of space quanta a little to one side and perfectly coincide with the spin networks on a different lattice, then voila! you can continue motion over that other dimension, which is only confusing because we use the word dimension when clearly it is simply a spacetime superimposed on our own but with a topology ordered along a geometry that is slightly out of step with ours.

This duality over the lattice may seem difficult to stomach but it will be invariably clear to anyone who has gotten used to the television version's compression of the entire x-axis into the tube's smaller aspect ratio (the ultra-cool credits scene). That, and if you can believe a key researcher is named Joan Baez.

This is what the movie is trying to illustrate when the Buckaroo's nemesis gets himself stuck halfway through a wall. That probably happened partly because they were using an inefficient energy carrier (as TFA suggests), bosons not being known in the 30s, but mostly in fact due to insufficient speed, since if you lose momentum while in the interface you would have to push against quite a lot of knots in the spin network to extricate yourself. It is a kind of rigged Hilbert space, with the knots rigged along the lattices like a ship's rigging, and it is all so intertwined you really have to push with a lot of oomph.

Hence the 700 miles per hour rocket. Obviously the characters are pushing through onto another lattice and not disintegrating the matter in front of them, because if they were destroying matter not only would things probably get quite hot, but also gravity would drag down the nose of Buckaroo's craft toward the center of the Earth! And that doesn't happen at all in fact.

We shall soon see how well the movie predicts reality with the next generation of particle accelerators. TFA only makes one terrible mistake, in that they suggest the movie is wrong about magnitudes because Buckaroo is superhumanly able to miniaturize accelerators. In fact just recently research scientist Anatoly Maksimchuk and Donald Umstadter, and another team in Europe, have been able to focus high energies with table-top devices. Certainly as higher energies are reached there will be a manifold of possibilities to study. Just remember, wherever you go, there you are.

Blatant pitch

The oscillation overthruster was incorporated into BZFlag [bzflag.org], a tank-based FPS. It lets your tank 'walk through walls' and lay in wait inside buildings where you can't be shot by normal bullets. For the record, I'm an admin on a few servers, and I play regularly. Oh yeah, the game runs on Linux, BSD, Irix (where I first encountered it), and Windows of course.

Just... just hold on... that's good.

This article reads like a truck.

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That's the point of the article! It's saying that the movie more reasonably potrays advances as the result of protracted endeavour rather than the usual for movies laboratory accident. Next time read more carefully.

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Then again, a long stretch of time- and resource-consuming research usually begins with some guy in the lab saying, "Huh, that's weird..."