Damien Howard: Physics in Film

            The movie messed up the twin paradox by basically getting it backwards.  Near the end of the move when Eleanor Arroway finally gets to travel to Vega to meet the mysterious alien race that she got the transmission from, she ends up spending eighteen hours traveling through space in her frame of reference and only a few seconds pass in the observers on Earth frame of reference.  If this were to follow the rules of Special Relativity more time should have passed for the spectators on Earth then for Arroway in the machine.  If the trip only seemed to last a few seconds for the observers on Earth, it would most likely only last some fraction of a second for the passenger in flight.

            A trip for only a fraction of a second wouldn’t give Arroway any time at all to meet the alien race.  So let’s instead assume she was really gone for 18 hours. Let’s say from Earth’s point of view she is gone for a few days.  It’s important to note that I can’t say exactly how long she was gone through specially relativity because the trip was shortened through multiple trips through wormholes.  Since I don’t know how much that would shorten her trip by I’m assuming it lasted a few days by Earth’s perspective.  Instead when she falls into the center of the giant gyroscope that is the alien space travel machine she disappears from view, and everyone onboard the ship knows the device has worked.  In Eleanor’s perspective her trip plays out just as the move depicts it.  However on Earth things are very different.  First people are wondering where she is, and there is speculation as to if she will ever come back.  For all they know she might not come back until after everyone on Earth has died due to time dilation.  Military presence increases dramatically around the second machine as paranoia about more terrorists trying to blow it up now that the rest of the world is aware of its existence.  A few days later she finally comes back, and the whole world is eagerly awaiting her report from the trip.  Again she has to tell her story to representatives of the world, but instead of it being a skeptical inquiry everyone is hanging on her every word as she recounts her story.  Even though the world accepts her story as reality, it does not completely do away with drama after the event.  The second machine was built by Japan and the USA, they claim complete ownership and there are many debates and arguments from the rest of the world over this.  In the end some sort of agreement is made as the machine is given to the UN’s control, with a substantial rental being paid to the USA and Japan.  The movie finally ends showing Dr. Arroway in a highly important job in dealing with communications with the new found race near Vega.  

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Warp drive is a necessity in Start Trek purely due to how far spread out the different planets and stars are throughout the galaxy.  For instance our nearest star, Proxima Centaury, is about 4.4 light years away.  Using today’s shuttles, travel at a speed of 7,743 m/s it would reach Proxima Centaury in about 3,803 years.  So by our standards it would take generations just to get to the closest star.  Even assuming the best possible circumstances of the Enterprise being able to move at close to the speed of light it would take about 4.4 years to reach Proxima Centauri.  That’s just the closest star, to travel around the Galaxy without much trouble like they did on the T.V. show it again would take many generations.  In order to for Star Trek to not have a warp drive and remain accurate to what the physics of the galaxy dictates there would be two possibilities for the show.  One, every few episodes has a new cast as the old ones had all died off by then.  That would be expensive for the producers, inhibit the viewer’s ability to take on some attachment to the characters, and overall just make an awkward show.  Two, you keep the same cast but the vast majority of shows just has them traveling through empty space.  While you might be able to come up with some space soap opera dealing with the characters on the ship, Star Trek’s adventure laden narrative just doesn’t fit well to those circumstances.  It would be dull to those expecting big fights, unique alien worlds, and ship-to-ship combat.

Speaking of ship-to-ship combat, what’s not a physical impossibility but a statistical improbability is the sheer amount of encounters with other ships the crew of the Enterprise seems to have.  If you think about it these ships are traveling through vast amounts of empty space.  That so many encounters would happen in the void of space on a regular basis is pretty much impossible, but again needed in order to add action into the story.

Continuing the idea of warfare the last thing I want to talk about are the actual weapons used in the series.  Be it the phasers or photon torpedoes all the weapons used in Star Trek are light based. Focusing specifically on the photon torpedoes, what they do here that is wrong is that you can see them coming out of the ship and coming towards whom they’re going to hit.  In reality the photon torpedoes shouldn’t be seen because they’re traveling at the speed of light.  Since we only see things as the light gets to our eyes one wouldn’t be able to see the photon torpedo until it actually hit them.  However, it benefits the show in that the viewers would expect to see the photon torpedo fly through the air.  Without that most people would think it’s odd that nothing was seen but an explosion on the other ship.  Finally, the light based weapons make sense due to the amount of time the Enterprise stays out exploring the universe.  If projectile type weapons were used instead they would both have to take a massive amount of storage on the ship and would run out without regular restocking.  Light based weapons allow the crew to venture through space for an indefinite amount of time without worrying about running out of ammo.  

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When I went into this movie I was expecting to see a more or less a documentary about the Manhattan Project with a few things dramatized for some Hollywood appeal. I certainly got the dramatization I expected; however, instead of the general story of the Manhattan Project I was expecting I got more of a story focusing around Oppenheimer. I expected the story to focus on him, but I did not expect it to neglect the other scientist so much. The story instead revolves around the relationship between Dr. Oppenheimer and General Groves with The Manhattan Project as the backdrop that aggravates the conflicts between the two. Other scientists were present but played only minor supporting roles, with the one exception of Michael Merriman. Even though Merriman was one of the more important characters in the movie I got the feeling that he was only but in the movie to add more drama in it. He was the only source of real physical tragedy in the movie, and to further increase the drama the movie even fabricated a nurse love interest to further the tragedy. This only furthered my feelings that he was only seen so prominently in the movie so that the audience could get to know him in order to create some emotional connection. This in turn heightens the tragedy when he finally dies.

Getting back to what I consider the main plot of the movie, the relationship between Dr. Oppenheimer and General Groves. One thing I noticed in the beginning of the movie is that each was determined to control the other. This plays out through the movie with Dr. Oppenheimer demanding things such as better conditions for the scientists, and General Groves demanding Dr. Oppenheimer to stop seeing his mistress (a known communist sympathizer) and heavily pushing Dr. Oppenheimer to solve any problems among the scientists that arise in the militaries favor. In the end General Groves seems to win out in this power struggle as he gets everything he wants, and continuously convinces Dr. Oppenheimer to side with him even when General Groves’ will seems contradictory to what most of the scientists want.

Though the movie focuses on Dr. Oppenheimer General Groves one final idea you can get out of the movie by looking at those two and some of the supporting characters are the differences in how the military operates as opposed to the scientists. The scientists and General Groves were constantly coming to blows (figuratively) over how things worked in the Manhattan Project facility. The military wanted complete secrecy in the project and tried to keep the scientists as isolated as possible from the rest of the world. The scientists were used to the free flow of ideas in the academic community and were very uncomfortable not even being allowed to talk about the project openly amongst each other in public. One of the biggest differences in the way the military operated as compared to the scientist was seen at the end when dealing with morality. To General Groves, how many people the bomb would kill didn’t seem to matter. He had orders to get the bomb and all that mattered was that those orders were fulfilled. To the scientists, the destructive power of the bomb became a real moral dilemma as the project neared completion. They felt responsible for the amount of destruction the bomb they created would cause and many wanted the project stopped or only a demonstration shown to the Japanese instead of bombing them.

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When one thinks of the problems with nuclear power the main two things that pop into mind are the dangers to people who live nearby and nuclear waste. I believe that the benefits of nuclear power outweigh these two problems. First, it’s obvious that nuclear power can be very dangerous. The example that immediately comes to mind when talking about this kind of danger is the Chernobyl disaster which contaminated thousands upon thousands of people with nuclear radiation and was the worst disaster of its kind. Disasters like these are always tragic, but we can’t just throw away nuclear power all together because of them. If we were to disregard any product because accidents happen or could happen we would not advance in technology very slowly. What must be done is to make things such as nuclear power as safe as possible for people and learn from all the accidents to improve the safety conditions so the accidents won’t happen again. One advantage nuclear power has in regards to safety is unlike some forms of power (i.e. hydro, wind) the plant can be placed wherever we want it. Because of this nuclear power plants could be placed far away from people. In the worst case disaster this might not be much more than an illusion of safety, but for the more likely smaller problems it would increase the safety for people in the surrounding areas. As for nuclear waste, I view that as a bigger problem. I don’t know exactly how the disposal of such waste could be best handled. However, I do know that one should not view the problem as nuclear power plants emit horrible waste and other types of power plants do not. For example natural gas and coal burning power plants emit large amounts of waste and are capable of contaminating the surrounding areas. So as far as waste disposal goes it is a problem for more than just nuclear power plants. On top of that many conventional power plants are bad for the environment and contribute to global warming. Nuclear power plants however do not have any negative contribution to global warming and are much more environmentally friendly. In all, if a safe effective way of disposing nuclear waste can be found nuclear power plants are much better for the environment than other types of power plants. Finally, nuclear power plants are much cheaper running than more traditional power plants. For me that fact helps to completely nail in the idea that the pros of nuclear power plants outweigh the cons.

I may believe that nuclear power plants are a good investment for a country; however, my view on nuclear weaponry is exactly the opposite. First and foremost I believe we have seen enough of the after effects of nuclear weapons on survivors to be able to say that they are not a humane form of weapon. By that I mean that nuclear weapons cause radiation poisoning to those who survive and can slowly kill them in a horrifying manner, cause lifelong sicknesses if one doesn’t eventually die from it, and even affect the future children of those exposed. The side effects of nuclear radiation poisoning are on the level of some of the worst chemical weapons and then it exceeds these weapons by further harming people who haven’t even been born yet. Because of this I believe that nuclear weaponry is some of the least humane weaponry available to people. It is for this reason that I am hesitant to say that tactical nuclear weapons should be developed. For me the choice as to whether these tactical nuclear weapons should be made is based off of two things. One, what are the side effects on people from these weapons. If the nuclear radiation emitted from them is enough to cause the same type of symptoms on someone that the large scale bombs do then they should not now or ever be developed and used in warfare. Secondly, whether or not they should be used depends on the scale of damage weapons cause. If the radius of damage (including after effect radiation) is not small enough to guarantee that innocent bystanders wouldn’t be harmed then the weapons shouldn’t be developed. It is for this reason that conventionally nuclear weapons are no longer effective in modern warfare. Battles are increasingly being fought in cities where not only the two opposing armies are fighting, but innocent civilians also inhabit these cities during the combat. As it gets harder to separate civilians from combatants in battles, larger scale weaponry becomes less and less effective. The time when one could use a nuclear weapon on only an army is pretty much gone. This is coupled with the fact that most nations today would not tolerate another nation dropping a nuclear weapon on a civilian populated city. There is no way that any nation could get away with as little consequences from other nations as the U.S. did in WWII with our bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Because of these two factors conventional nuclear weaponry in most modern nations only has the effect of being a deterrent for war and little else. Now I say most modern nations as there is always the possibility that a nation with a ruler who cares little for our sense of what’s right and wrong gets there hands on nuclear weaponry. Someone like that would be more likely to use a nuclear weapon. As the process for creating these weapons makes them easier to get and cheaper the likely hood that people more willing to use the weapons get their hands on them increases. Because of this a nuclear holocaust is still a potential danger in today’s world. Examples of what could happen would be an extremist organization getting nuclear weapons and using them, or two countries with despotic leaders shooting nuclear missiles back and forth. We can not know what everyone will do with nuclear weapons all the time.

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The movie “The Day After Tomorrow” portrays a not so distance future where global warming has caused a planet-wide disaster. In short the ice caps melting cause the North Atlantic current to be disrupted, horrible storms are popping up all over the place, the rising sea levels cause floods (apparently this only really effects New York if we go by the movie), and finally giant “reverse hurricanes” suck down cold air from the upper atmosphere instantly freezing anything in their path. These reverse hurricanes eventually all merge into what seems to be one super storm freezing the whole upper hemisphere on the Earth and sending the world into a new ice age.

Now this scenario of global warming in the movie is horribly unrealistic. In fact, it’s so unrealistic that virtually anything they got right about global warming was swept aside and all but forgotten by me as my attention is grabbed by some giant fictional catastrophe blasting across the movie screen. The only real good information the movie gives on global warming is that it can affect us and the affects have a high chance of being very bad. Now I can say this because I am at least somewhat able to tell the difference between what might be realistic and what obviously only exists in the realm of make-believe. However, this isn’t necessarily true for every moviegoer. Someone who can’t tell the difference between what could happen and what can’t in regards to the movie’s depiction of global warming and come across with a very different view of the movie, and see it as a warning about our possible future if global warming isn’t fixed. Though wrong they may be, if enough people thought that it could very much influence public opinion on the subject of global warming. Now that’s the most extreme case of “I believe everything movies show me” happening, but one doesn’t need to fall under this category to be influenced by the movie. Most moviegoers will probably be able to see at least a few things that don’t seem quite right with the movie, I would hope. But, still they could have their views on global warming influenced just the same by simply bringing them aware of “hey it might be a problem” which is a much more reasonable and probably good response.

So, I guess the question is did this movie and movies like it affect public opinion on global warming? My answer would be that it most likely did, but I can’t really tell to what extent. “The Day After Tomorrow” was a relatively high grossing movie, with a revenue of 542,771,772 dollars. So it’s not like this was a sleeper of a movie; many people saw it. I doubt everyone came running out of the move screaming “global warming we’re all going to die!” but I’m sure it gave people something to think about. Just doing a google search of the movie can help one to see that. You can find many articles about people talking about this movie and how it relates to global warming and how it might affect public opinion from before and after the movie even came out. It’s obvious that people had some sort of expectations from it for talking about global warming. However, when it comes down to it the movie is a disaster movie first and a warning about global warming second. The main purpose here is to entertain.

However, other movies are capable of taking a more informative approach. Take documentaries like “An Inconvenient Truth” that don’t try to entertain but to inform. Or at least to tell people what the creator wants the movie to tell. “An Inconvenient Truth” was put out with the expressed objective to affect public opinion on global warming. While not nearly the blockbuster of “The Day After Tomorrow” what this movie got was a lot of attention from the media. TV news, newspapers, and online sites were all talking about the movie. Even now both those who try to continue to spread awareness of global warming and those who deny it both point out this documentary a lot. In this way one could say it had more success in affecting public opinion than “The Day After Tomorrow” even though only a fraction of the people watched it.

Movies like “The Day After Tomorrow” and “An Inconvenient Truth” surely affect how people think about subjects like global warming.  Whether movies affecting our opinion are a good or bad thing, all depends on the intent of those trying to inform us and most importantly the accuracy of the information given. There is no definitive answer to whether public opinion being influenced by movies is good or bad for all movies. However, the main problem is telling just how much they affect people. One way to try and gauge their affect on us is to see their affect on news and journalism. The writers and reporters of these mediums are giving us information on events they think the ordinary person will find interest in. If a lot of them are reporting on an aspect of a movie then they think people will be very interested in it. Like I talked about above, “An Inconvenient Truth” got tons of this type of attention, and thus I think it most likely had a good deal of sway on people’s opinion. “The Day After Tomorrow” got this type of attention to a lesser degree, so people were probably somewhat influenced by it as well. This is of course all going on the theory that what influences the media influences us all. This certainly isn’t true for everyone, but it’s the closest approximation I can get for a view on how these movies directly influenced the public.

After all these paragraphs my conclusion comes down to one simple idea. People get their information on topics such as global warming from somewhere and form opinions from this information. There are a lot more people watching movies and seeing the news’s reactions to these movies than there are people who get their information from sources like scientific journals.

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Intro:

The Core is a special movie. At least that’s what its mother would tell it. But all the other kids would just call it retarded. The Core is generally known for being a rather generic disaster movie whose only claim to fame is absolutely horrible physics. Those horrible physics is exactly what I’m going to look at. But before we delve into that, a little exposition on the movie in general is in order.

In the beginning of the movie multiple people around a city die instantaneously. So the U.S. government / military takes note of that and asks two local scientists (Serge and Dr. Keyes) what’s going on. After inspecting one of the several dozen dead bodies Serge immediately decides that they died of pacemaker failure and that it was not from a weapon. Very realistic, right? The military is of course satisfied with the word of a couple scientists and goes on with their business; however, Dr. Keyes seems worried that something bad has happened and immediately decides to check if the core of the Earth stopped spinning causing a disruption in the Earth’s magnetic field. Guess what, he’s right…no matter how implausible that seems. So in normal disaster movie fashion a team of generic stereotypes is banded together consisting of the military guy Cmdr. Iverson, the girl Maj. Childs (guaranteed to live as she is the girl), the eccentric guy Dr. Brazzleton, the villain/jackass Dr. Zimsky, the hero’s friend Serge (guaranteed to die for a dramatic moment and to spur on the hero), and finally the hero Dr. Keyes (also guaranteed to live). They then take a “scientific” ship (note: scientific = magical here) to the center of the Earth and restart it while disastrous effects from the degeneration of the Earth’s magnetic field intensify on the surface. The crew then proceeds to slowly die off in a predictable fashion and yet somehow the survivors manage to triumph in the very end like all generic disaster movies. Now that we have a basic grasp of the movie, let’s head into the bad physics.

A Note on Virgil: While its operation doesn’t make much sense, it’s not so much a direct physics blunder as a tool the movie needs to move forward. So I will be assuming it works for the movie’s sake. They can have their unobtainium, super powered sonic laser cutter thing, and their super vision to see through rocks.

Bad Physics List:

1) Waves in Rocks

This is the first instance of bad physics in the movie that I can remember. Dr. Keyes is giving a demonstration about how sound waves travel through rock. The only message this scene was meant to get across was probably “hey viewers he’s a scientist!” Well at one point in his little talk I remember him saying something about how waves lose frequency when traveling through the rock. This is wrong, wavelength and velocity can change when waves change mediums but frequency remains the same.

2) Pacemaker Pandemonium

This isn’t necessarily bad physics as it is bad biology. If a person’s pacemaker is to stop working that is very bad, however it is not instantaneous death as shown in the movie. It’s also interesting how the stopping of the Earth’s core only managed to affect a few dozen people in a single city and not any other pacemaker owners around the world.

3) Stupid Birds

So now that the birds have lost the ability to use their internal compasses and start slamming into stationary and moving objects of all kinds. Of course these are mainly used for long distance so I’m not sure why these birds didn’t just use their eyes. Maybe it was a flock of severely retarded birds and their blunders had nothing to do with the real disaster in the movie. However, even ignoring all that a bit of bad physics does happen here. Have you ever seen a bird fly into a window or hit one with your car? Well let me tell you, window/car wins bird loses. In the movie however it seems to be a tie as a bird manages to break the window of the car, which is a rather unlikely circumstance.

4) Lightning Bombs

A little later in the movie another disaster appears in the form of super storms letting off tons and tons of lightning. This lightning does things such as gouging up the ground where it strikes and making buildings explode after striking them multiple times. One, lightning never creates huge gouges in the ground. Two, I don’t care how many times lightning will strike a building; the building will not spontaneously explode from the lightning alone.

5) Magnetic Field Meltdown

Now we get to the explanation of what is going causing all these disasters, and what is probably the worst physics in the entire movie. So what’s going on here is that the stopping of the rotation of the Earth’s core has caused the Earth’s magnetic field to slowly start dissipating. Without the Earth’s magnetic field deadly microwave radiation will get through to the Earth killing us all. There is nothing at all about that last sentence that makes any sense at all. One, the Earth’s magnetic field does not stop microwave radiation in any way. Two, the Sun does not give off nearly enough microwave radiation to make it harmful in any way. Three, microwave radiation isn’t harmful in the first place. You aren’t dying every time you use a cell phone.

6) Microwaving a Bridge, They Forgot to set the Popcorn Timer:

So at one point the movie shows all the deadly “invisible microwaves” (because the visible microwaves a friendly and nice) coming in to pretty much melt a major bridge. Well needless to say this is impossible. As we talked about above there aren’t enough microwaves coming from the sun to do this and they aren’t that dangerous. The whole scene is just the most preposterous thing the movie assaults your eyes with. Oh and I almost forgot, cars exploded for no real reason in this scene too but that’s pretty much a movie standard.

7) Virgil’s Swim

So when the crew is finally ready to go save the Earth they start by diving their super ship, Virgil, into the Marianas Trench. This makes little sense to me in the first place, does it really matter how thick the Earth’s crust is to a ship that can cut through almost anything? So the ship goes diving straight into the water and starts moving around the ocean. There are two possibilities of what’s happening here. One, the ship is perfectly balanced to go straight down and through a series of luck and currents manages to get exactly where it needed to go. Secondly it could have being piloted through the water, but the ship was designed for going through the Earth and has nothing on it that looks like it could steer it in water. Either way it seems pretty implausible that things would have gone that smoothly through the water.

8 ) Moving in Virgil

Over and over again we see the crew getting up and walking around Virgil. But let’s think about that for a minute. The ship is traveling more or less straight down, so how were they standing when the ship was going straight down? There are two possibilities. One, the movie has blatantly disregarded the most basic notions of physics. Two, the crew all possess the powers of spider-man. I’d guess the first one is correct.

9) Questionable Communications

Yeah, I don’t understand how they managed to stay in communication with the military the whole way through the mission. Neither radio waves nor an internet signal would make it nearly that far underground. In fact, they would have lost communication pretty quickly into the mission.

10) Geode Escapade

Oh, so much bad physics here. Let’s start with the fall into the geode. When the crew is falling into the geode they are struggling against their seatbelts. But when they are falling they should be in free fall. So there should be nothing for them to struggle against. Now that they’ve burst through the geode they land inside it and slowly come to a stop while being slowed down by some sort of crystal their super laser can’t cut through. Now, I noticed the lava hadn’t started coming in through the hole they obviously must have made in the geode. Now the geode has to be massively pressurized to survive in that environment. So when the ship entered the geode it should have compromised this pressure causing the geode to almost instantly be destroyed. Instead the magma somehow manages to magically stay outside the geode for several minutes and just hang there without entering the hole, and then suddenly start poring in when convenient for a dramatic moment in the movie. So going back to the crashed ship, they got into their magic suits made of what I assume to be unobtanium (as nothing else can survive that heat…other than the mysterious geode I guess) that somehow counteract the pressure, though I’m not sure what their visor was made of to not melt and the suits were loose fitting and didn’t look pressurized at all. So there is a crystal blocking the laser from working and it needs to be cut with a normal oxygen powered cutting tool. Really? The super laser couldn’t instantly cut through the crystal but a normal oxygen powered cutting tool does it in a couple minutes. That doesn’t make much sense, but neither does anything else in this movie. Here’s the best part, when the cutter isn’t working and they’re low on time (magma finally managed to meander on in) Dr. Keyes takes his oxygen hose out and puts it in the cutting tool to get it working again. First of all, he just compromised the integrity of his suit and should have been killed instantly. Second, he just released pure oxygen into a super pressurized, super heated environment. Bad idea. It would have reacted instantly and violently with that environment killing everyone outside of the magic ship. Speaking of the ship, I’m going to assume the best and hope it had some super air lock or opening the door in it should have destroyed the ship as well.

11) Giant Diamond Disaster

So now Virgil is nearing the Earth’s Core and manages to cut the ship on the sharp edge of a diamond compromising the ship’s integrity. First, it’s surprising that the super indestructible material could be damaged so easily. Second, this scene goes to show just how useless the safety systems on the ship were. When the ship was damaged that last compartment – conveniently it was the last that was damaged because it would be a real drag if one in the middle or the one with the controls for the ship had to be ejected – began crumpling due to pressure, and the doors slowly closed in order to seal the compartment off. In reality, if the ship was compromised in an environment with that much pressure the closing doors would have been moving much too slowly to save the ship from being destroyed. Everyone onboard would have died.

12) Bye Bye Brazzleton

When Brazzleton was in the process of dying I noticed a few things. One the hot melting wrench seemed to burn his hand, but the suit was fine walking outside in the geode. It should have easily protected him from a melting wrench. The second’s not really physics but, I also noticed the rubber melting on his boots. So these suits that were meant to survive outside in something like 4500º had rubber soles on their boots. That doesn’t make any sense. Finally, I noticed Brazzleton let out a gasp because of what I assume is due to the sudden heat and escaping oxygen from his lungs. This meant his suit’s cooling system failed pretty much as soon as he entered that part of the ship. He would have never made it anywhere close to finishing his mission.

13) Saving the World

So now I’m going to talk about the plan to save the Earth and how they went about it. The plan is to drop a bundle of five 200 megaton nuclear bombs to start up the Earth’s core spinning again. Well, for one we learned in class that the largest nuclear weapon made was a 100 megaton bomb. Also, I don’t know the specifics but if the Earth’s core really stopped rotation, it would probably take a lot more than five to get the core rotating again. Even if you did have enough bombs, you couldn’t just blow them up and get the core moving. The explosion would move out in a spherical manner so there wouldn’t be any specific focus on direction for the core to move. You would have to focus the blast in a specific direction to be able to cause torque which is needed to get the core rotating. Well even with all that didn’t matter the plan didn’t turn out like they wanted for our heroes. Instead they detonated five different bombs at specific intervals, but this would have all the same problems as their original plan anyway.

14) Our Hero Dr. Keyes

In the end of the movie Dr. Keyes had to perform two important tasks to save the world and himself. The first task was rigging the final nuclear weapon to make a 40% larger explosion. To do this he walked into a working Nuclear reactor without head protection…showing he’s no nuclear physicist…and grabbed the plutonium rods. Like Brazzleton’s wrench these managed to burn him through his super suit somehow. The real bad part comes in how he made the nuclear bomb bigger. He came up with the ingenious idea of placing the plutonium rods next to the real bomb for a bigger boom. Now, I also am no nuclear physicist, but I know when the military wants a bigger bomb they don’t just duct tape some plutonium rods to their exisiting bombs. I’m thinking that there’s a little more involved then that. Also, I like how there was just enough plutonium on board to make a 40% bigger blast, what a coincidence.

Now when it comes to saving himself, Dr. Keyes has the idea to use the unobtanium’s property of turning heat into energy in order to power up the ship. To do this they simply attach a comically big piece of wire to the inside of the ship. I’m going to assume it was attached to the outer wall or this wouldn’t work no matter the circumstances. But circuits are complicated things, and the electronics on Virgil are sure to be super complicated. To think that they had exactly the right set up to get this done, or were able to fix the electronics in the ship in the little time they had before the explosion so that it would work is pretty much laughable.

So that’s the bad physics of The Core in a nutshell; however, you would need a pretty big nutshell to fit all that stuff in. That’s alright though, because you were probably a pretty big nut to watch the movie in the first place.

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Intro:

In the movie “Armageddon” a huge asteroid is headed toward Earth, and humanity is only saved by plans made by NASA and a rag tag bunch of roughnecks flown to the asteroid. In class we’ve already seen how woefully inadequate the plans made by NASA in the movie were. Now I’m tasked with coming up with another plan here that hopefully is a little better.

Parameters:

First I’m going to change some of the parameters for the scenario of impending doom via asteroid from the movie. First, an asteroid the size of Texas is just a little too big for me. A 10 km in diameter asteroid is capable of doing the type of damage (i.e. possibly eradicating humanity) that the movie is trying to portray, and even that’s a little bigger than I want. Now a 2 to 3 km in diameter asteroid is known as a civilization killer. It’s not going to wipe us out instantly, but it will kill a massive amount of people and possibly send us into a new Dark Age. I’m going to deal with that size of asteroid, specifically a 2 km in diameter asteroid. Secondly, I’m going to assume we found the asteroid coming at us years or decades before it was to strike giving us ample time to prepare for it. Finally, since we had so much time to prepare for it, I will be enacting my plan on the asteroid at four times the distance of the Moon from the Earth.

One parameter I can not change is the velocity of any asteroid. On final approach to the Earth the velocity of the asteroid is given as 1.1 x 10⁴ m/s. I will be using this as a constant velocity for the asteroid (i.e. no acceleration), and neglecting gravitational forces for this problem.

The Big Picture:

I’m going to set up my coordinate system so that the Earth is the origin. This will make it as though Earth is stationary and the asteroid is coming toward it. I’m also assuming the asteroid is coming at a straight line toward the Earth. This might be a bit of a stretch, because depending on the orbit of the asteroid, a coordinate system with the Earth as the origin should have the asteroid curving toward the Earth to make up for the movement of the Earth itself that is actually happening. Someone else could try leaving the Sun as the origin of their coordinate system, and then simply slowing down (or speeding up the asteroid) so it misses us due to the Earth’s rotation without ever having to change the asteroids trajectory. But, for my purposes I’m going with the most simplified version of the problem. I’m also going to have the asteroid slamming dead center into the Earth.

Saving the World:

So, first we need to find the mass of our asteroid. This is done the same way we did in class for the Texas sized asteroid. Using the diameter of the asteroid (2 km or 2000 m), and assuming that the asteroid is roughly round we can find the volume of the asteroid.

V = (4/3) π (d/2)³

V = (4/3) π (2000/2)³

V = 4.2 x 10⁹ m³

Now that we have volume, we need to find the density of the asteroid to solve for mass. Like the movie, I’m going to say that our asteroid is made of rock and metal. So we can roughly use the density of Earth (5500 kg/m³ ) for our asteroid. Now we can solve for mass.

ρ = m / V

m = ρ V

m = (5500) (4.2 x 10⁹)

m = 2.3 x 10¹³ kg

Now that we have the mass and velocity of our asteroid, it’s time to decide how to stop it from slamming into the earth. The plan is going to be pretty simple. Having been given a lot of time, those working to save earth have set up a 100 megaton (4.2 x 10¹⁷ J) nuclear weapon in position to slam into the side of the asteroid. The weapon has been set up to release all it’s energy in the direction of the asteroid (think a cone shaped explosion), and we are hoping to move the asteroid so that it will miss the earth. One should note that this plan will not change the velocity of the asteroid going toward the Earth at all. It will instead give the asteroid another velocity in a direction perpendicular to the direction the asteroid is already moving. Because of this, the problem can be treated as a one-dimensional collision with the asteroid being stationary (zero velocity) in the direction we are trying to nudge it. So using conservation of energy we can find this new velocity.

ME_f = ME_i

PE_f + KE_f = PE_i + KE_i

0 + (1/2) m v_f²= (4.2 x 10¹⁷ J) + 0

Note that the initial velocity is zero so there is no initial kinetic energy, and there is no final potential energy of the asteroid. This means that all the original potential energy (the nuclear weapon) is converted into kinetic energy for the asteroid without any loss of energy. This isn’t very realistic for an explosion in this scenario, but it will do for our purposes.

(1/2) m v_f²= (4.2 x 10¹⁷ J)

v_f² = 2 (4.2 x 10¹⁷ J) / m

v_f²= (2) (4.2 x 10¹⁷ J) / (2.3 x 10¹³)

v_f²= 3.7 x 10⁴

vf = 192 m/s

So did we get the asteroid moving fast enough to save the Earth? We need to know two things first. One, how far did we have to move the asteroid? Two, how long until the asteroid would have hit the Earth if going in a straight line? The first question is solved pretty simply. I said earlier that the asteroid was going to hit the Earth dead center, so we have to move the asteroid a distance greater than the radius of the Earth. The diameter of the Earth is about 13000 km or 1.3 x 10⁷ m. So the radius is 6.5 x 10⁶ m. For calculating the time it would take the asteroid to strike the Earth we need the velocity (coming toward the Earth) of the asteroid and the distance from the point of impact of the nuclear weapon to the earth. The velocity has already been given as 1.1 x 10⁴ m/s and the distance has been given as four times the distance from the Earth to the Moon. The distance from the Earth to the Moon is 3.8 x 10⁸ m so four times that is 1.5 x 10⁹ m. From that we can see how much time we have until the asteroid reaches the Earth.

v = d / t

t =d / v

t = (1.5 x 10⁹) / (1.1 x 10⁴)

t = 1.4 x 10⁵ s or 39 hours.

So now we need to see how far our nuclear weapon pushed the asteroid in that amount of time. Note that vf from earlier equals v in this case.

v = d / t

d = v t

d = (192) (1.4 x 10⁵)

d = 2.7 x 10⁷ m

So did we save the Earth? We moved the asteroid 2.7 x 10⁷ m, and we had to move it a distance greater than 6.5 x 10⁶ m. Yes we did it! We saved the Earth, and Bruce Willis didn’t even have to die this time.

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Intro:

This time I’ll be looking at generic action movie “Eraser.” It’s got the big macho hero (Arnold Schwarzenegger), the girl in distress, the good guy turned bad guy, the corporate bad guy, crocodiles that a zoo apparently never feeds, a crappy catch phrase…basically everything a generic action movie should have. On the plus side it comes with a mob family that’s so stereotypical I thought they were from a cartoon and rail guns. And not just any rail guns, but hand held rail guns. For this assignment I’ll be ignoring the implausibility of hand held rail guns, its “x-ray vision,” and of course the magical blue trails of stuff they put out in the movie. I’m only concerned with momentum and its conservation in this case. Specifically, I’ll be looking at the gun / shooter, bullet, and victim in the relatively early scene where poor Lee’s former boyfriend experiences the rail gun firsthand. I’ll also be treating the problem as though the bullet stays in the person it hits, though you can see it doesn’t. The fact that it exits the person, without transferring all its momentum, and that person still goes flying only makes the movie even more unrealistic.

Lee’s Former Boyfriend vs The Rail Gun:

To start off, I’m going to find the velocity of the rail gun’s projectile. I’m going to use the scene where the bullet hits Lee’s former boyfriend. In order to do this, I’ll need the mass of the victim, his velocity, and the mass of the bullet. Well, the mass of the guy isn’t too hard to estimate. He’s not small, but he’s not super big. I’d estimate he weighs around 180 lbs or 82 kg. I’ll also have to estimate his velocity. He’s moving through the air straight backwards through a decent sized room, and slamming hard enough into the wall to make a huge body sized dent. But you can clearly see him as he flies back (i.e. no motion blur) so it’s not like he is traveling 40 or 50 mph. I’d guess he’s going between 10 and 15 mph. I’m going to go with 15 mph or 6.7 m/s as my estimate, as the upper side of that range seems a little more right to me when viewing the scene. The really hard thing to do is guess the weight of the bullet. I mean, since there’s no such thing as a hand held rail gun, there’s no such thing as a hand held rail gun bullet. There’s not much to go by to guess its weight, so we’ll have to use some action movie logic. In “Eraser” the rail gun is a high powered sniper rifle, though the bad guys do eventually stupidly use it as a normal rifle, which results in their death. It’s powerful enough to shoot through walls and people alike. So it’s the biggest most badass gun in the movie, and it’s going to need a big badass bullet to go along with it. So I’m going to estimate the rail gun projectile to be something like a .50 caliber bullet. You can assume it’s made of some sort of magic metal to go through all obstacles, as the rest of the gun is pretty much made of magic too. .50 caliber bullets don’t all weigh the same, but 700 grams (.7 kg) is a good number to use. With these values, we can find the initial velocity of the bullet before it collides with Lee’s former boyfriend using the conservation of momentum in an inelastic collision.

pi = pf

m1 vi1 + m2 vi2 = (m1 + m2 ) vf

( .7)(vi1) + (82)(0) = (.7 + 82) (6.7)

(.7)(vi1) = 554.1

vi1 = 791.6 m/s or 1771 mph

Well, now that we have the initial velocity of the bullet before it slams into its victim what should we do with it? Well, if you go back and look at the movie you can see that the bullet tends to travel through every obstacle without slowing down at all. If that’s the case, we can assume that the initial velocity of the bullet before it strikes its target is about the same as the final velocity of the collision involving the bullet leaving the rail gun. We can find the velocity the recoil puts on the gun and its user. Now, in the movie the gun shows no recoil whatsoever, but this is a gun that’s only been used as a ship mounted canon and tends to break itself by firing. In other words, there’s going to be some recoil in the hand held version. Let’s solve for the velocity the firing gun should have given by the parameters in the movie, and the information I solved for in the first problem. Like I already said, vi of problem 1 = vf of this problem for the bullet. We also already know the bullet’s mass to be .7 kg. All we need to know is the mass of the shooter and gun. He looks a bit smaller than Lee’s former boyfriend, so I’ll estimate that 160 lbs or 73 kg should about cover the mass of the shooter and gun combined. So using the conservation of momentum for an elastic collision we can find the final velocity of the gun and shooter.

Pi = pf

m1 vi1 + m2 vi2 = m1 vf1 + m2 vf2

Oh wait, we didn’t solve for the initial velocity of the bullet and shooter! That’s ok, since they weren’t moving it’s zero.

0 + 0 = m1 vf1 + m2 vf2

- m2 vf2 = m1 vf1

Since the initial component of the equation equals zero, momentum can only be conserved if the final components of the two objects cancel each other out. In this case one has to be negative (backwards momentum) for the other to have positive momentum. I’ll be assuming the bullet is moving in the positive direction and the shooter is moving in the negative direction.

- m2 vf2 = m1 vf1

- (73)(vf2) = (.7)(791.6)

- (73)(vf2) = 554.1

vf2 = – 7.6 m/s or -17 mph

That’s just a little more recoil than the nothing the movie showed. It’s enough momentum to move both the shooter and the gun backwards at 17 mph, or maybe it’ll just break the shooter’s arms every time he fires. I suppose that would be entertaining too.

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Intro

For my first blog entry, I’ll be looking at the physics in Speed 2: Cruise Control.  The point of this assignment is to state a question dealing with the physics of the movie, determine what quantities I need to measure to answer that question, and to estimate values for those measurements while explaining how I made those estimates.  I’ll also go a little further and try to answer my questions, simply because I’ve had enough physics to do so.  I’ll be analyzing the motorcycle chase scene, seaplane crash scene, and the dock crash scene for this assignment.

Note: Due to the “magic” of Windows Media Player, I was able to measure my values for time accurately to the closest second during the movie scenes I have chosen.  This is how I measured time for every calculation below.  I’m stating it here so I don’t have to state it over and over again for the rest of this blog entry.

Scene 1: Motorcycle Chase

In this scene I would like to know how fast Officer Alex Shaw was traveling when he ditched his motorcycle.  To figure this out all we will need are values for time and distance.  These values should preferably be measured right before he ditches his bike to get a relatively accurate velocity for that specific event.  Measuring time was easy, due to the method I mention above.  I chose to use a 1 second interval of time for my calculations because the motorcycle scene never stayed in a fixed location and camera angle for more than a couple seconds.  The fixed location and camera angle are needed to help the accuracy for my measurement of displacement.  For measuring displacement, the first thing I needed was a reference material from which I could determine a relatively accurate length measurement by sight.  I noticed that there were a lot of traffic cones and barricades set up along the road at varying intervals.  Luckily, there is a scene right before he ditches the bike where Officer Shaw travels past some of these from a fixed “behind the bike” view.  I chose to take my time interval here.  I also figured the height of a traffic barricade was about 3.5 feet, but with a quick search online I found it to be exactly 4 feet tall or 1.22 meters high.  If barricades were laid on the ground end to end, it looked like he would travel past approximately 11 of them during 1 second.  With this I can find the velocity Alex Shaw was traveling when he ditched his bike.

Δv = Δx / Δt

Δv = (11)(1.22) / 1

Δv = 13.4 m/s ( or 30 mph for those not used to m/s)

Even if that’s not quite as fast as one wants most movie car chases to go, ditching a bike at 30 mph is an incredibly dangerous and stupid thing to do.  One could easily be killed.  If we were not in Hollywood land, Officer Shaw would probably be rolling around on the ground in pain instead of pulling out his pistol to arrest the bad guy.

Scene 2: The Seaplane Crash

For this scene I would like to know how far the seaplane traveled before it crashed on the oil tanker.  The interesting thing about this problem is that there is no accurate way for me to simply measure distance from watching the movie scene.  Because of the way the scene is set up it gives very little landmarks to tell how far the plane has traveled, and no reference material that I could use for measuring distance.  One more familiar with an oil tanker might find something.

Now, on to what I need to measure for this scene.  I will need to measure the time it takes from the plane to take off until it hits the ship and its initial velocity.  I found the time it took from take off until crash to be 99 seconds.  After that things get a little complicated.  From just watching the scene, it’s pretty much impossible to tell at what speed the plane takes off with. As I mentioned, there’s no reference for measuring distance I can use for this scene.  Fortunately, I was able to get some estimates for this by finding these values for a sea skimmer (a relatively small seaplane like the one in the movie) online.  The max speed a seaplane can travel on water is equal to its stall speed for the air.  For a sea skimmer that is 30 mph or 13.4 m/s, and I will use that value for Mr. Geiger’s plane. We already know that the final velocity is 0 m/s, and since we only care about the time from when the plane takes off until it crashes, we can use 0 m for the initial distance (i.e. that is the origin point in my frame of reference).  From this we can find the final distance traveled.

xf = xi + (1/2)(vi + vf)(t)

xf = 0 + (1/2)(13.4 + 0)(99)

xf = (1/2)(13.4)(99)

xf = 663 m

Note: In order to use the formula  xf = xi + (1/2)(vi + vf)(t)  I had to assume the plane had a constant acceleration from take off until crash.  I see no way to figure out if that is completely true, so there could be some error in this answer.

And of course xf is equal to the displacement in this case:

Δx = xf – xi

Δx = 663 – 0

Δx = 663 m

This problem shows that one can find how far an object traveled even without the ability to measure it or the knowledge of the average velocity of the object.  In order to use the formula  xf = xi + (1/2)(vi + vf)(t)  I had to assume the plane had a constant acceleration from take off until crash.

Scene 3: Cruise Ship Crashes into the Dock

This scene is very similar to the previous, in that I again want to know how far an object traveled.  This time I want to know how far the cruise ship traveled from the point where it hit the dock to when it stopped.  I’ll of course be assuming the movie is accurate and that a ship that size colliding with a dock like that can happen, no matter how unlikely it may seem.  What makes this problem different, and more interesting then the previous is that I can compare the answer I’ll calculate to how far the movie shows the boat traveling.  I’ll also calculate a percent error of how far the movie shows the boat moving as compared to how far it would go with the parameters given by the movie.  Those parameters are what I have to measure for this problem, and they are time and velocity.  For time, it turns out from the point the boat hits the dock to when the speedometer shows 0 knots is 3 minutes and 18 seconds or 198 seconds.  Thanks to the friendly little crewman calling out the speed of the ship, we know it is moving at 6 knots shortly after hitting the dock.  This means it would be reasonable to assume the ship was moving at 6.5 to 7 knots right before the collision.  I’ll be giving the movie the benefit of the doubt and assume it was moving at 6.5 knots or 3.34 m/s.  Like the seaplane crash, final velocity is 0 m/s and I can start my frame of reference with the ship impacting the dock so my initial distance is 0 m.  I’d like to use a slightly different formula in this problem, for the sake of variety, so I’ll start by calculating acceleration.  I’ll also be assuming the acceleration is constant, but while watching the movie one can see on the speedometer that the velocity of the boat seemed to go down at a constant rate.  Because of that, the assumption that the acceleration is constant is not such a bad one to make.

a = Δv / Δt

a = ( 0 – 3.34) / 198

a = -.02 m/s^2

With this information we can get the displacement the boat should have traveled according to the movie.

xf = xi + (vi)(t) + (1/2)(a)(t^2)

xf = 0 + (3.34)(198) + (1/2)(-.02)(198^2)

xf = 661- 392

xf = 269 m

Δx = xf – xi

Δx = 269 – 0

Δx = 269 m

Now that’s how far it should have traveled, but how far did it really travel?  Thanks to the movie we can find this out.  At the end of the movie, a shot of the rear of the boat shows that it went just about exactly one boat length into the dock.  With a little bit of research one will find that the Seabourn Legend was used for most of the exterior shots of the ship in Speed 2.  The Seabourn Legend is 439 ft or 134 m long.  This means that the information the movie gives has the ship going in just about twice as far as the movie shows.  Now let’s calculate the percent error.  The formula for that is as follows.

percent error = ( obtained value – accepted value / accepted value ) * 100

For this case, I’ll be using my answer as the obtained value and the distance the movie shows the boat having moved as the accepted value.

percent error = [(269 - 134) / 134] * 100

percent error = 101%

That’s a very high percent error, but it’s not beyond my expectations of what a movie would do for the sake of entertainment.  The interesting thing in this case is that the movie had complete control over every parameter I used to make my calculations.  These results aren’t even taking the reality of how a boat really would run into a dock into the equation.  It the movie creators had wanted, they could have easily made this crash scene more realistic.

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