Sci-Fi Movies and 'Bad Science' 958
Roland Piquepaille writes "Science fiction movies can be fun, and sometimes boring, when Hollywood producers want to show us a 2 1/2 hour film when 90 minutes would be enough. But what about the 'science' behind them? BBC News says it's pretty bad in 'When sci-fi forgets the science.' For example, the metamorphosis of Bruce Banner into The Hulk, based on work of marine biologist Greg Szulgit from Hiram College, Ohio, about sea cucumbers, is qualified by himself as "really awful"." The Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics website, which we've previously mentioned, is referenced in this article, and is now freshly updated to deal with movies like The Hulk.
Bad Astronomy (Score:5, Informative)
M@
Marvel comics (Score:4, Informative)
badastronomy (Score:5, Informative)
Always informative and often hilarious... check it out!
Gigawatts (Score:5, Informative)
He said something to the effect that nerds everywhere wrote in and pointed out this egregious error after the first film was released, but for the sake of continuity they had to keep using the 'jiggawatt' pronunciation for the rest of the films.
Re:In Space No One Can Hear You Scream (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, you could "hear" the explosion, when the shockwave gets to you, the same time you can hear it on Earth.
You couldn't hear a spaceship passing 10 inches from you if it is coasting, but you might "hear" the exhaust if it is accelerating, or exhausting for some other reason. Of course you need to be in the exhause to hear it, and that could be fatal. (Or not; not all sci-fi spaceships have high-energy exhausts; you could stand in front of a modern ion-drive for a while before suffering ill effects from radiation exposure, I bet; it's pretty parsimonious with the atoms it spends.)
You don't need air, you just need a medium. Doesn't even need to be gaseous, though our ears are designed best for that case. In the case of an explosion or exhaust, the "medium" is provided by the same event you're hearing; in theory it can carry other sounds as well but you're unlikely to care about them.
Silence can still be as wrong as a loud "boom!".
Re:wait a minute... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Gigawatts (Score:3, Informative)
-JS
Re:Half the time, it would be easy to fix! (Score:3, Informative)
No. [uiuc.edu]
In fact, Mars does have blue skies when red dust storms aren't obscuring the view of the atmosphere. See here [mars-news.de]
Re:Gee (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, Gene Roddenberry put some serious thought into these topics.
Alien Communication:
Star Fleet personnell are outfitted with a device called the "universal translator". It apparantly works on a sub-conscious level and allows the brain to automatically speak foreign languages. They've done some episodes where the Universal Translators didn't work and saw the results.
Personally I kinda like all the alien languages that you get in "Star Wars". It's a lot funner and makes things a lot richer in the same way that the various languages spoken in "Lord of the Rings" makes things a little more interesting.
Relativity Time:
Star Trek dates things with "Star Dates". The Star Dates take relevatistic effects in effect so that everything evens out.
Relative Travel:
In Star Trek, the ships don't travel faster than lite in normal space. The move to an adjacent space where the laws of physics are slightly more lenient. This allows the starships to leave earth and return without suffering the "twin paradox" effect too badly.
X-Men:
X-Men is a pure fantasy universe (like ALL comic books). Stan Lee is a pure story-teller. The Marvel universe reflects his disinterest with technobobbles. He just say's it works a certain way and it does. The characters, and their interaction, is the important part.
Re:Bumblebee Movies At Risk? (Score:3, Informative)
Just FYI... there was a mistake in the math, it has been corrected, and scientific theory now agrees that bumblebees can fly.
That is not to say, however, that I disagree with your point.
Re:2001 -- totally overrated (Score:4, Informative)
Re:In Space No One Can Hear You Scream (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the intense electromagnetic radiation generated by the nuclear explosion would create enough heat when it hit the surface of the moon 10 feet under it to effectively vaporize a big chunk o' moon. This sudden heating may also generate a sizable shockwave across the surface of the moon. (I'm not quite sure about the shockwave part. But you can bet the heat and light would be something to behold.)
Re:In Space No One Can Hear You Scream (Score:3, Informative)
-T
Re:In Space No One Can Hear You Scream (Score:3, Informative)
Also, the moon has an atmosphere (a very thin one, and it has to be constantly replenished, but it's there), magnetic fields help trap radiation from a nuke, and the energy from a nuclear bomb doesn't just go nowhere, you know. As another poster pointed out, a nuke detonated 3 meters from the moon is going to carve out a crater.
Since nobody's actually done extensive experiments with explosions in space (gee, why could that be?), nobody really knows what would happen, believe it or not. You might want to read about the Starfish test, which detonated a nuke at 400 km or so, and is just about the only example of a manmade explosion carefully observed in space (rather than at high altitude).
Re:You mean like "Superman"??? (Score:1, Informative)
I leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine her velocity using a mickey mouse watch and the a count of the windows zipping by in the background.
Cheers
Re:Gigawatts (Score:2, Informative)
not really. In most european languages you have a
e.g.: french/freedom: "gelatine, genre" - "gauche, gout" phonetic : jh vs gclear distinction between the "light" vowels i
and e, and the "dark" vowels a,o,u.
German: "Bach, wucht" - "weich, licht" (phonetic notation unknown)
spanish: "publicacion" k vs th
the free spain example holds for pretty much all latin
derived languages, the german example
should hold for germany and scandinavia. it
works for many consonants (or consonant "compunds"
like "ch"), not only g,ch,c. i admit not being too
good with old greek, but it would be consistent
with the other examples to say ji-gga.
that being said, i've learnt to say giga,
because in my native tongue, "g" is never pronounced as "jh".
Heinlein? Cleaver family morality? (Score:2, Informative)
Have you read "Stranger in a Strange Land"? "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"? "Friday"? "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls"?
If not, I would highly recommend you do so. Heinlein decidedly did NOT write just for "Cleaver Family Morality' and to say he did is either ignorant or dishonest.
Re:Gigawatts (Score:3, Informative)
Nope; greek started losing that "hard g" (i.e., the back voiced stop) a couple thousand years ago. If you pick up a book on modern Greek, you'll find that gamma no longer represents that sound at all. It's either a
In any case, Greek pronunciation is hardly relevant to English. We have lots of borrowings from Greek, true, but they are generally so thoroughly mangled that a native speaker of Greek wouldn't recognize them at all. And if you could transport a speaker of classical Greek to today (or send back a recording of English), he also wouldn't recognize any of our words of Greek origin. Much of our pronunciation comes from someone transliterating a Greek work into Roman letters, then people who know no Greek attempting to pronounce it using English spelling rules. The result often has few or no phonemes in common with the original Greek.
But it does supply a lot of opportunity for people to flame each other on the basis of no knowledge of Greek (or other lender languages) at all. That can be fun.
Stop a moment and consider. (Score:2, Informative)
On the Moon, there's no atmosphere to heat and compress. The only travelling outward material would be energy.
If you don't remember, Slashdot had an article about nuking the moon [slashdot.org] back in 2000. The US didn't do it because, without the atomsphere, there is no shockwave or other impressive bits of an explosion.
Re:Signs (Score:2, Informative)
The book was high quality scary sci-fi (for a kid anyway). The movie is camp though and through.
Mea culpa (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry everybody.
Re:ok, i'll bite... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:2001 space odyssey (Score:3, Informative)
I think that particular scene was questioned by quite a few people. I know I did. I had always heard the theory that the inside of our bodies have pressure. Since space does not, the idea is that, without a pressurized space suit, we would explode or at least be killed by exposure to the vacuum. This hypothesis has actually been proven to be false [nasa.gov]. Here's another link [yahoo.com] with some discussion of the topic. I used to have a much better link that discussed all of this including some info on a Russian astronaut who recently died in space, but I can't find it.
Re:Gigawatts (Score:4, Informative)
But anyway, it was typically 'jigga' all the way. I have been to several RF and optics conferences where many of the speakers still talk about bandwidths and frequencies in "jiggahertz". It's pretty cool to hear it pronounced like that.
It seems the hard-g pronunciation was picked up through by computer users, as spread through literature (magazines, hard disk ads, etc). It seems natural to pronounce it with a hard 'G'. whereas the 'jigga' folks were most likely RF engineers learning the vernacular from their peers.
Maybe some '1337 computer folks will start measuring their disk sizes in 'jigga-bytes' and the like, bringing back in the old-school pronunciation.
Oh, and FWIW, I was reading some article about lightning a few years ago, and it said that bolts of lightning typically emit a few GW of power. I was psyched that some of the BttF writers did their homework.