{"id":1335,"date":"2008-02-06T20:17:40","date_gmt":"2008-02-06T19:17:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/archives\/2008\/02\/06\/movie-science\/"},"modified":"2008-02-06T20:17:40","modified_gmt":"2008-02-06T19:17:40","slug":"movie-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/2008\/02\/06\/movie-science\/","title":{"rendered":"Movie Science"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Movie<\/a>Adam Weiner has a great post over at PopSci<\/a> on the scientific innacuracies that plague a lot of mainstream films.<\/p>\n

He discusses the wacky physics of the motorcycle fight<\/a> in Mission Impossible 2<\/a>, the impossibility of Vin Diesel outrunning an avalanche<\/a> in XXX<\/a>\u00a0on a snowboard, the actual physical strain Batman’s<\/a> grappling hook\u00a0would take on him and Vicky Vale<\/a> and that insane bus jump in Speed<\/a>.<\/p>\n

My favourite though is the oft-repeated sin of sounds in space.<\/p>\n

As Adam puts it:<\/p>\n

\n

The most frequent sci-fi physics sin is, without a doubt, the incredible sounds emitted by all those zooming spacecraft, all those exploding planets, all those laser beams whizzing by.<\/p>\n

As every student learns very early on, sound waves need a medium through which to pass in the form of vibrations to be heard. Air, water, the membrane of your eardrum\u2014all are sufficient media to transmit these vibrations.<\/p>\n

And as we all know, the cold vacuum of space is unfortunately devoid of anything substantial enough to serve as a transmissive medium.<\/p>\n

It’s true, however, that those unfortunate enough to have their spacecraft destroyed be in a spaceship while it was exploding would certainly hear quite a racket for a few split seconds from inside, as the sound vibrations passed through the ship itself and into what was left of the cockpit’s pressurized atmosphere as it broke up.<\/p>\n

But once the damage was done, we’d be back to space’s normal, somber silence. But hey, I guess all those sound designers and THX-equipped theaters need to be used for something, right?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The tagline for Alien<\/a> says ‘In space no-one can hear you scream’ – well, that’s because they physically can’t.<\/p>\n

However, if movies did follow science to the letter, wouldn’t a large chunk of the sc-fi canon just be weird silent movie hybrids<\/a>?<\/p>\n

> Check out Adam’s book\u00a0Don’t Try This at Home! The Physics of Hollywood Movies<\/a> at Amazon
\n> 40 Things That Only Happen in the Movies is a different take on the unofficial\u00a0rules of movies<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Adam Weiner has a great post over at PopSci on the scientific innacuracies that plague a lot of mainstream films. He discusses the wacky physics of the motorcycle fight in Mission Impossible 2, the impossibility of Vin Diesel outrunning an avalanche in XXX\u00a0on a snowboard, the actual physical strain Batman’s grappling hook\u00a0would take on him […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,16],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1335"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1335\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}