An article after my own heart…
Three films that would make Einstein blush
Film characters disappear into thin air, travel through time, and know how to fly. They’re all scientific impossibilities, but since they take place on the silver screen, we suspend our disbelief and go along for the ride.
But one scientist has had enough and is calling on filmmakers to temper their creativity by obeying the rules of science.
At a recent meeting of American scientists, physicist Professor Sidney Perkowitz suggested a new rule: every film should be allowed just one major suspension of belief for the sake of the story.
In other words, films shouldn’t repeatedly violate scientific laws. And they definitely should avoid internal inconsistencies – breaking scientific rules established in earlier scenes.
Hear hear.
The article lists “The Core” as the worst “science” film, and I can’t argue. It’s bad on a level that “Battlefield Earth” had to work really hard to attain. TheSpace Shuttle off course by hundreds of miles, and nobody notices. The Earth’s core stops spinning (go ahead and work out the angular momentum of a ball of nickel-iron “the size of Mars” rotating once a day). An electromagnetic pulse casues pacemakers to malfunction… killing their owners *instantly.* A slight wobble in the Earth’s magnetic field causes birds to go *insane.* A “hole” in the magnetosphereallows “microwaves from the sun” though like a fricken’ phaser blast, melting the steel of the Golden Gate Bridge in seconds. The idea that you can restart a ball of nickel-iron “the size of Mars” rotating by setting off a few dozen megatons of nukes next to it. That “unobtanium” will turn heat into electricity. That you can blast a ten-foot diameter tunnel into solid rock, a hundred feet deep, using lasers and *not* evaporate the observers standing just a few dozen feet away. Thin “spacesuits” that allow people to wander around in 9000 degree temperatures at millions of atmospheres pressure.
Gah.
9 Responses to ““deliberately wrong just to irritate the scientists””
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I don’t know about blush. Piss himself laughing? Break all the bones in his hands from punching the directors,writers, and producers of such dreck in their heads? I could see that. Blushing? Not so much.
And I agree with the point, far too many people are all screwed up because of what they see in movies and on TV. People have “suspended disbelieve” and not turned it back on after the show.
It’s just movies. I go over the same ground when talking about American history. Movies are made so the movie-makers can get rich, not to educate or even to amuse.
I feel the same way about the “Lost” series on TV. I saw
the movie “Memphis Belle” some years back and how anyone
could survive an airliner crash after the airliner itself breaks
up into three pieces and falls to earth is beyond me. I feel
using common sense that there would be any possibility
of this and especially watching the scene of the B-17 going
into a violent spin after the tail being chopped off by a
german fighter plane is I what I think is more realistic to me
which is what Hollywood is known to do and something else
I want to bring up is that a Antonov An-225 does not have
a rear loading ramp so to those of you who saw”2012″ too
there is another mistake as well.
At least the movie makers are honestly about spinning together a bunch of lies and asking we to beleive them. (Legacy media, I’m looking at you)
Jim
The Core really sucked, but birds have gotten screwed up due to magnetic anomalies: http://jeb.biologists.org/cgi/reprint/86/1/349.pdf
Shifts in the local magnetic fields just prior to earthquakes are also suspected to cause strange animal behavior that has sometimes been noticed just before a quake.
Mike!?!?! Don’t get me started about the fantasy crap that passes for American and world history anymore. I could end up breaking the bones in MY hands from punching the revisionist a$$holes in their heads.
I think revisionist history is a good thing. What happens is that kid have to take two semesters of history courses in the first two years of college. The stupid kids, or the weak ones, show themselves by complaining to the teachers of those classes. Typically, they say “This can’t be right because I was taught something else in high schools.” We tell them that high school history is training and propaganda, and they go off in a huff and never take more history. The result is that the history department doesn’t have to worry about politically correct kiddies trying to change things (they have to worry about politically correct faculty trying to sell their agenda; faculty can be denied tenure). I have no idea what those kids finally do, but I suspect they wind up in social work school or political science.
“high school history is training and propaganda”
In what way?
The subtle interplay of cause and effect are ignored for the socially-correct lesson to be taught. The worst of all is the American Civil War: the way it’s taught is that the North invaded the South to free the slaves. This is lesson that was taught in the early 70s and is taught today. Another common alternative reality is that the Vietnam War was maintained in order to keep the American economy operating. There’s always the tale about how the American Indians were ecologically perfect.
I got out of this racket — American political and social history — a few years ago, and I will never go back. I visit this website because it’s about technology, and we tend not to get into the same sort of self-righteous fussing when talking about how something mechanical really works. As Scott has said elsewhere, it’s not the engineers who cause social problems.