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Bad Movie Physics Hurt Scientific Understanding
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Aug 15, 2007 07:28 PM
from the mommy-push-the-reset-button dept.
from the mommy-push-the-reset-button dept.
eldavojohn writes "A paper published by UCF researchers claims that bad movie physics hurt students' understanding of real world physics. From the article, "Some people really do believe a bus traveling 70 mph can clear a 50-foot gap in a freeway, as depicted in the movie Speed." The professors published this paper out of fear that society will pay the price. One of the authors commented on advancements in the past years "All the luxuries we have today, the modern conveniences, are a result of the science research that went on in the '60s during the space race. It didn't just happen. It took people doing hard science to do it." I commented on the physics of the most recent Die Hard having problems detracting from my enjoyment of the movie but is it really the root of a growing problem of poor science & math among students?"
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Idiots (Score:5, Insightful)
Watching movies is not physics homework... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Watching movies is not physics homework... (Score:5, Insightful)
Learning and education should be entertaining. Or at least, you should have the option of having an interesting and educational experience. I understand that there's stuff that one has to learn simply to have a job and function on a day to day basis in society, but if you receive no joy from learning new things in some sphere (i don't care if it's baseball statistics, esoteric poetry, how to make model ferraris or whatever), somewhere, then you probably live a sad static life.
Parent
Re:Watching movies is not physics homework... (Score:5, Insightful)
It is therefore bizarre to expect entertainment to be factually accurate.
Parent
Re:Watching movies is not physics homework... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Watching movies is not physics homework... (Score:4, Insightful)
However I can also see the point of the original article and paper. I studied Physics and Space Technology to degree level and I can remember numerous discussions I have had with non-phsycists regarding interesting areas of physics where they actually mentioned popular entertainment as an example of why what I was saying must be incorrect.
The real problem here is that when you get down to the nitty gritty alot of Phsycics is counter-intuitive to the layman. In order to cope with this movies and entertainment can either "dumb down" the ideas to make them sound right to the layman (also known as the majority) or can be true to the real world and make physicists happy (the few). Confronted with this choice anyone will go with angling the product to appeal to the largest market, unless you are already 100% sure the product will have no mass appeal regardless of which path you choose.
It is true that a solution to this problem could be to make movies factually accurate, but where is the fun in that? I am more than capable of watching speed when the bus does a super jump and not be instantly objecting at how inaccurate it is (I do object to the rest of that shit film though). Most of us are able to watch entertainment and suspend our disbelief to a certain level even when we know what we are watching is inaccurate.
I think a better solution is to force people to study Physics to a sufficient level that you gain a basic understanding of the underlying principles. I do not mean a true understanding of every concept, but enough so that you learn that the level of understanding you do have is not the complete picture and is a simplification (or scientific model) of reality.
The thing that frustrated me about studying physics was that every year I would be told that what I learnt the year before was not really what was happening and that you could no longer rely on it to hold true in all situations that would come up over the coming year. With hindsight however this was a very valuable to learn as it teaches you that your understanding of a subject may be a far to simple to apply to the real world. This understanding extends to all things.
Parent
Re:Watching movies is not physics homework... (Score:5, Insightful)
The truth is what matters in the real world for the most part is boring as watching paint dry. Think of all the people who are inspired to do great things but stop once they realize it's a long boring slow process. In today's instant gratification generation you really need to understand that sometimes you can only be a small part of something bigger. Take game development for instance, back when games were simpler and developer teams smaller it was there was a sweet spot willingness to suck up the hard work for creative control and unified vision. The truth is for the most part unless you are a genius it is unlikely that you add a significant amount to something you want to do, since it requires teams of people nowadays to get things done.
Movies, games, etc, are there to take us away from what is for the most part a pretty harsh and boring reality. Learning can be fun, what is Civilization 4 for instance if not learning the in's and outs of a complex game system? The truth is most people, and even educators today do not have enough of an understanding of how to get people so interested they are willing to get to go down into the trenches in drudgery of work that serious learning requires.
I know that learning in many respects is a very time consuming process and you can't force it. I think there is something to be said about letting people learn what interest them. In our society we 'stuff the ballot' on what we consider acceptable to learn and unacceptable, and also we judge learning whether we like it or not by whether our learning commands commercial value. The truth is many deep and serious things have no market value whatsoever in terms of taking care of yourself but it doesn't make those things any less valuable.
Parent
Re:Watching movies is not physics homework... (Score:5, Insightful)
Most kids don't regard writing code as "fun", for example -- and that is the job of a software developer.
Most kids don't regard the determination of chemical bonds as "fun" -- but that's fundamental to the field of chemistry.
Most kids (including me, when I was one, and still to this day) couldn't care less what Shakespeare wrote -- and what he wrote is frankly irrelevant to anybody who does something useful for a living (scientists, engineers, doctors), though still useful for people who "play" for a living (e.g. actors/actresses), and possibly lawyers (when using a Shakespearean story as an digestible analogy that a jury or a judge can understand, anyway).
Most kids don't care about managing their personal finances, because that's not "fun" -- even though they will go into debt and/or broke if they don't learn how.
And so on. Rather than do any of these things, most kids would rather watch TV, run around outdoors (which is at least good for their physical health and socially-stimulative), play video games, smoke/drink/huff cans of pesticide, etc.. Real life can't compete with the entertainment value of delinquincy, and at the age of (for example) 14, the ostensibly more-responsible age of 21 seems almost infinitely far-away ("so who cares, right?")...
The sad reality is that most of life is boring -- and the sooner people recognize this, accept it, move on and learn the necessary material anyway, the better off we'll all be.
As a professional young adult, I know I spend *very* little of my 168 hours/week doing things I consider purely "fun" (playing video/computer games, poker, traveling, getting laid, writing code for a personal project (which is half work-related anyway, since such projects are a vehicle for learning new stuff))... Most of what I do involves working, doing things related to my work, maintaining my physical and/or financial health, and planning for my future.
The life of a responsible, disciplined adult isn't easy, nor does it tend to be fun. But we find ways to make such trivial work interesting...
More power to teachers if they can find ways to make education and learning interesting. It *can* be (and I think for most of us reading
Parent
Re:Watching movies is not physics homework... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Watching movies is not physics homework... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Watching movies is not physics homework... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Idiots (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Idiots (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a lot about the universe our physicists don't understand yet. They can't even figure out how to get Quantum Theory and Relativistic Theory to agree. They don't even really understand how gravity works, and that's the most important force which affects us humans in our daily lives. There's now some evidence that there might be other dimensions besides the 4 we're familiar with, and various particles have been detected (like neutrinos) which previously were only hypothesized. Many people like to claim that lightspeed is a hard-and-fast limit, and that it's impossible to travel faster. 150 years ago people thought it was impossible to fly in a machine that was heavier than air. There's no telling what other facets about our universe exist which we are unable currently to observe and understand, just like we had no idea how to split or fuse atoms and create enormous amounts of energy 100 years ago.
Parent
the fi in sci-fi (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, come to think of it, Bad Shit did happen to his partner Zues. The Motherf*ing snakes on the Motherf*ing plane. But alas, McClain was nowhere to be found.
Parent
Where to Begin With the Problems? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, not entirely true. I'd say that E&M is actually far more important to our daily experience than gravity, especially in the number of phenomena rooted in it.
"There's now some evidence that there might be other dimensions besides the 4 we're familiar with,"
What evidence? Point to some experiment or observation, please, not theoretical work.
"various particles have been detected (like neutrinos) which previously were only hypothesized."
This is entirely false. Neutrinos have been detected for several decades now, and they've even been used as tools in experiments - just look up some papers on deep inelastic neutrino scattering to see what I mean. No, what's new is that we're pretty sure that they have some mass, though we still only have an upper bound on it. In fact the last new fundamental particle to be discovered was the top quark in the 90s, and that was a couple of decades or so after the last new particle. It's now just down to the Higgs hunt as far as the standard model goes, and every particle physicist is praying that when we do find it there's something about it that doesn't fit in the standard model because otherwise particle physics is likely to die from it's too successful theory.
"150 years ago people thought it was impossible to fly in a machine that was heavier than air."
And those people would have been laymen who didn't know what was going on anyway. All you'd need to do is look at Newton's second law to see that if you could somehow push down on the air with enough force you'd be able to make anything fly. Even Leonardo da Vinci, a couple hundred years earlier than your estimate, knew that.
"There's no telling what other facets about our universe exist which we are unable currently to observe and understand, just like we had no idea how to split or fuse atoms and create enormous amounts of energy 100 years ago."
Actually, we do have a pretty good idea. Just like it turned out that Einstein's relativity was only a small modification of Newton's physics in the known regime, it's a pretty good bet that any new physics will have to reduce to the current theories, approximately, in the areas we have already explored experimentally.
Parent
Re:Idiots (Score:5, Funny)
That would be the inventors of the F-4 Phantom, right? :-)
Parent
Re:Idiots (Score:5, Insightful)
O rly?
So it is realistic to hear loud explosions in space from abroad another vessel, when there is no air to propagate the sound?
So it is OK to use the hottest buzzword around to explain whatever piece of technology you need to explain, with the actual meaning of the buzzword having absolutely nothing to do with the operation of said technology (but it sure sounds "techy" so let's use it!)?
At best, Star Trek popularized scientific theories into science fiction, leading (some) people to be more interested in science. But even then, the people who were interested in these kinds of movies (the so called "nerds", "geeks", "losers", and other anti-social labels) were the people who were interested in science to begin with. Do you really think your average 60's football jock has became interested in physics as a result of watching Star Trek?
At not so best, Star Trek abused genuine scientific terms, due to their "scientific" sound, to suit their needs, with little regard of the actual meaning of the word. I know, they were not the first. In the 50's, "atomic" was the hot buzzword, in the 70's and later, it was "quantum", and there are a few newer ones today as well. The ironic thing is that the media is constantly looking for terms people DON'T understand, in order to capitalize on their names (since many people actually have the basic concept of "atomic" nowadays, the attempt to call the sci-fi teleporter or warp drive "atomic" won't slide anymore, but quantum? Sure. Nobody knows what quantum really is, so it's free game for the media, including Star Trek.
At even worse, Star Trek & co have stooped to using the same dirty tricks the rest of Hollywood uses -- like loud explosions heard through a vacuum, or complete disregard for the law of momentum conservation.
Star Trek didn't turn science haters into science lovers. It just gave established science lovers something they'd be interested in, and made a pretty buck out of it as well.
Parent
Re:Idiots (Score:5, Funny)
How is this unrealistic? Space fleets of the future outfit their crews with situational aural feedback implants. These use a miniaturized tricorder to detect environmental cues and respond by overlaying predetermined noises, which, as everyone in the Federation surely knows, greatly increases human reflexes and situational awareness.
Hell, the directors of Star Trek are doing you a favor by reproducing that audio track in the show. Of course, I might be lying. I imagine at least one Trekker will fact-check this post.
Parent
Think of the children... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Think of the children... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Think of the children... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Think of the children... (Score:5, Funny)
Curse you TV and your unreal chemistry.
Curses.
Parent
Well (Score:5, Funny)
Intuitor Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Intuitor Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics (Score:4, Informative)
Hand held laser are a very real possibility and can do fairly high damage to dark targets with portable energy supplies. They'd function much like the "flashlights" in niven's known space books. With all the resultant limitations as well.
Parent
Follow the money (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Follow the money (Score:4, Insightful)
Why bother working hard in school, when you can make 6 figures as a real estate broker without ever worrying about anything but a nice smile and the ability to sell an absolute lemon to even the most simple and innocent buyer.
Parent
Re:Follow the money (Score:5, Insightful)
You have a pretty terrible attitude about not-technical occupations, by the way. You need "speculators", brokers, and managers. Speculators are where the investment capital comes from - without them, where do the Googles of the world come from? Brokers are also a necessity - I don't know about you, but I'm not simultaneously an expert in all things. I could not possibly know the ins-and-outs of everything from the grain and pork markets to the local real estate market - I need a broker to make sure that my grocery store is full and that I filled out all the right paperwork for a house. Managers, for as much as they are made fun of on
There is tremendous value in finding inefficiencies in a system and removing them, even if the speculator/broker/manager gets a slice.
Parent
Riiiiight... (Score:5, Insightful)
It must be the movies. Before movies, everybody had a perfect understanding of physics.
But what would a more exact parallel be? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
We don't need to make movies more realistic... (Score:5, Insightful)
Coyote and Roadrunner; Pixar (Score:5, Interesting)
I teach physics at a community college, and I actually like to use Coyote and Roadrunner as an illustration of people's Aristotelian preconceptions. When the coyote steps off a cliff, he has to stop moving forward before he can look down and go, "oh, time to fall." This is exactly what Aristotle said had to happen: an object could be doing forced motion or natural motion, but it couldn't do both at the same time. One reason Aristotelianism was accepted for thousands of years was that it does a good job of codifying the incorrect expectations that people tend to have intuitively. If it wasn't for Coyote and Roadrunner, it would be harder for me to teach this!
My sister works at Pixar, and a lot of her work is physics simulations. (She's working on hair and cloth these days.) She says that a lot of the time, they try simulating the right physics first, but then that comes out not looking the way they want, e.g., water splashes realistically, but they want a cartoon splash, not a realistic splash. So they intentionally mung the equations to get the artistic effect they want. Well, why not? Picasso painted people with two eyes on the same side of their face.
The reason people in the US are ignorant about physics isn't because they see movies with incorrect physics in them, it's because K-12 science education in the US is a disaster.
I'll cut the crap right now. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Coyote and Roadrunner; Pixar (Score:5, Interesting)
Two examples: on Star Trek TOS, they tried very hard to be scientifically correct (later versions were less careful) but wimped out when they depicted the Enterprise moving through space. They tried doing it without sound (no sound in a vacuum), but everybody complained that it "felt wrong". So we got the famous "whoosh" during the opening credits and a strange rumble when the ship orbited a planet..
In Babylon 5, they tried even harder. ("Conceptual Consultant" Harlan Ellison has many unendearing qualities, but he's always a stickler for scientific details.) So when spaceships docked, they had to pitch 180% so they could use their reaction engines to slow down. Perfectly good physics — but many casual viewers wondered why all the ships were flying backwards!
Parent
Re:Coyote and Roadrunner; Pixar (Score:5, Insightful)
That is part of the problem, but it is not the root of it. The real problem is that science and engineering are no longer as valued in society as they were during the space race and among the generation who grew up watching those early successes and failures as the cold war and the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union unfolded upon their television screens and in their imaginations. If you ask the more ambitious youngsters today what they want to be when they grow up then you will hear lawyer, CEO, real estate investor, professional athlete, and the next American Idol long before you will hear scientist or engineer. Combine this with the generally poor treatment that many scientists and engineers have received in the US job market lately, threatened with outsourcing and offshoring, burdened with long and difficult studies for, in many cases, very modest pay given the amount of work required to complete a degree in engineering, and finally low pay and seniority based pay, regardless of skill or merit, for teachers thereby ensuring that what scientists and engineers we do produce will almost never work in our primary and secondary schools. It is not just the United States either, the world today is in more danger of sliding back into the dark ages than at any other time in recent history. The war on terror, the dumbing down of our schools, the glorification of the pop idol, the rise of young earth creationism at the expense of scientific truth, the denial of global warming, and the general deference given to anyone who for whatever reason has something against scientific truth. Is it any wonder that we are falling behind?
Parent
Not at all the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree with TFA (Score:5, Insightful)
However, I think they're neglecting a very basic fact. Humans have evolved to find Newtonian mechanics intuitive! (especially in translational cases, somewhat less in rotational ones) If someone throws a ball, you can quickly figure out approximately where it is going to land. You have no need to do calculations, because its evolutionarily hardwired into your brain. Watching a movie which doesn't accurately display a free-falling bus is not going to erase that.
It's true that people don't know enough physics to determine the validity of what they see in movies, but they already know enough to get through life. I'd love for everyone to know enough physics to be understand the devices that they use in their lives, but that's probably not a reality in the modern age.
I think what they're encountering is a resistance to learning the formalizations of physics. As soon as you step beyond Newtonian mechanics (really, beyond two-body problems) all that evolutionary intuition is gone. When you get to physics at that stage, you must place it on firm mathematical footing, or you have no hope of understanding: that is hard work.
They are seeing this decline in science understanding, but I think that's an artifact of an overall educational decline, rather than a specific effect of Hollywood movies. Young people are now expecting to be entertained, and while physics is beautiful, at some point it requires you to sit down in a empty room with a pad of paper and a pencil. If anything, it's the "action-packed entertainment" nature of movies, rather than any bad physics that is likely having the detrimental effect. However, if they can entertain these students and have them learn something too, that's fine with me.
Re:I disagree with TFA (Score:5, Interesting)
Mythbusters is particularly bad about this, often things that they "test" you could just do on a piece of paper and see it is or is not going to work. Other times the design of the experiment is hugely flawed, often conceptually, and nobody talks about the elephant in the room (I could give you a bunch of examples -- one that comes to mind is the 'catching an arrow' episode which does not take into account anticipation of reaction or even moving the target backward). However I (as you can tell) still enjoy the show once in a while -- it is, to me, entertainment and kind of funny. I loved "Beyond 2000" as a kid (does anybody remember this?) and Mythbusters I think is by the same producers...
One of the things that would help all of what we outlined is a change in culture where discovery and true inquiry is advocated, asking well formulated / scientific questions is ok... To this degree, getting kids interested in answering questions empirically is a good thing. The Mythbusters occasionally visits true scientists at nearby NASA, etc., and attempts to learn very well and are respectful of what they learn, which is great IMHO. Kids / young adults will see this and want to be like the expert (hopefully!)
Parent
in a word, "no" (Score:5, Insightful)
Hollywood Porn Biology Hurts Sexual Understanding (Score:5, Funny)
1. Women always wear 6-inch high-heels to bed.
2. Men are never impotent.
3. Women never have headaches... or periods.
4. If a woman gets busted masturbating by a strange man, she will not scream with embarrassment, but rather insist he have sex with her.
5. When going down on a woman 10 seconds is more than satisfactory.
6. If you come across a guy and his girlfriend having sex in the bushes, the boyfriend won't bash seven shades of shit out of you if you shove your cock in his girlfriend's mouth.
7. Women always look pleasantly surprised when they open a man's trousers and find a cock there.
8. Women moan uncontrollably when giving a blowjob.
9. All women are noisy cummers.
10. A common and enjoyable sexual practice for a man is to take his half-erect penis and slap it repeatedly on a woman's butt or face.
11. A woman can't wait to get it in the ass.
12. People in the 70's couldn't cum unless there was a wild guitar solo in the background.
13. Men always groan "OH YEAH!" when they cum.
14. Double penetration makes women smile.
15 Assholes are so clean, you could eat out of them.
16. When taking a woman from behind, a man can really excite her by giving her a hard slap on the butt.
17. Nurses always suck patients' cocks.
18. Men always pull out.
19. When your girlfriend busts you getting head from her best friend, she'll only be momentarily pissed off before fucking the both of you.
20. Women smile appreciatively when men splat them in the face with sperm.
21. A man ejaculating on a woman's tits or butt is a satisfying result for all parties concerned.
22. Asian men don't exist.
I hope the next generation fed on an abundance of internet porn doesn't have the same misconceptions.
Let's be fair. (Score:5, Funny)
I like how people complain about that bus jump. (Score:4, Informative)
They actually did that bus jump. It's real. And, no, they didn't edit out any ramps.
They had to used CGI to edit the landing area shorter, to make it look like it landed closer to the edge than it actually did, because the bus actually jumped farther than it should have. (And they edited out the camera rig it smashed into.)
How? The gap is not level. Yes, it looks that way on film from certain angles if you're not paying attention, but the starting end was a several yards higher than the back end. Everyone sits there and complains about how a bus cannot do a level jump, and fails to notice that it's not a level jump.
About the only physics that stunt played fast and lose with was by weighing down the back somewhat so the bus wouldn't rotate forward, and, thus, still be movable after landing.
Re:I like how people complain about that bus jump. (Score:5, Informative)
According to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], you don't know what you're talking about:
One of the most famous scenes in the film shows the bus jumping across a gap in an elevated freeway-to-freeway ramp while still under construction. Both sides of the gap are at identical heights, making it impossible that the jump would work in real life. According to the "Making of..." feature that accompanied the DVD release, the stunt used a ramp and really did traverse fifty feet in the air. To handle the sudden jolt on landing, the stunt bus had no passengers aboard and the driver was wearing a shock-absorbing harness.
The gap in the highway was added through CGI; note the flock of digital seagulls added by the special effects company to enhance the realism of the scene. While the flyover ramp is shown to be essentially all complete and paved, except for the gap, in actual construction that gap in the road deck would have been fixed before the guardrail and asphalt is added. You may also note if you look closely, when the bus is flying over the bridge that is under construction the gap between the two bridges was edited in.
You should really write the authors of that paper though, I think they'd get a kick out of your comments and they'd love to add you as a data point.
Parent
Movie physics, game physics, and reality (Score:5, Informative)
I used to do animation tools for physically based animation [animats.com], and got some idea of the Hollywood view of dynamics.
A basic concept in filmmaking is that the endpoint of a motion is predetermined. Directors think in terms of "here, then here, then there". The path desired is quite likely to be physically unrealistic, and may have to be pieced together from several shots.
A real physics simulator just isn't "directable" enough. What's used in practice is a combination of hand animation, piecing together motion capture, a collection of clever tricks to make real-world objects go where you want them, and lots of cuts to hide discontinuities. The MTV-style "one cut per second" approach to action scenes makes it even easier.
Much the same thing happens in games, except that you have to allow a user with limited control to drive a character with too many degrees of freedom and not enough embedded smarts to manage movement against real-world physics. This is why, in most sports games, you see beautiful motion-captured motion interspersed with strange jerks as motions are blended in ways that are continuous but nonphysical.
In most driving games, the physics is totally unrealistic. The wheel adhesion is huge, the CG is very low (often below the ground) and it's very common to lock roll rate once the vehicle is tilted beyond recovery angle, so that the vehicle rolls all the way over and lands upright. Driving a full sized car through a remote joystick works badly (we tried this with our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle once, then immediately bought a MoMo steering wheel and interfaced it) and game controller joysticks are even worse. So the vehicle model has to be incredibly forgiving.
There is a classic of computational Hollywood physics worth noting. In the Bond movie, "The Man with the Golden Gun" (1974), a car is driven over a ruined arch bridge at high speed, executes a 360 degree roll, and lands on the far side. It really did do that. The dynamics were calculated by the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory (now CALSPAN) and the ramp was constructed to make it happen consistently if the vehicle was driven at the correct speed. But there's a cheat there, too. The car had a fifth, solid wheel underneath which hit a rail on the launch ramp to initiate the roll. It wasn't possible to induce enough roll rate fast enough through the vehicle suspension.
So wait? (Score:5, Funny)
Movie Science Stops Terrorisim (Score:5, Interesting)
For instance, both the Columbine killers and the recent London "bombers" had an entirely false belief that propane cooking cylinders would explode like grenades. In reality, the cylinders are purposefully designed to rupture without causing a fragmentary explosion.
The recent London "bombers" even seemed to believe that any car set alight would produce a large explosion. In truth, cars burn all the time, it is very, very rare for any road vehicle of any sort to explode. In fact, none of the London "bombers" schemes had any real potential of a large explosive effect.
For this, I think it's fair to say we can thank good old Movie Science. As long as ignorant villians keep believing what they see on TV, we'll be all the safer for it.
Re:Acme School of Physics (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Oh please.. (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Oh Noes! (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed. I mean after all, you have to save room for 50% of the population on the OTHER side of the Gauss/normal/bell curve.
Then again, if you look at all the scientific progress made SINCE the 1960's, I'd say the world doesn't have to fear stagnation yet. Also bear in mind that most of this progress has been made by the same generation that was busy smoking pot/other things in the 1960's...
This is just the same old fallacy about "this generation is morally depraved, completely off the rails, etc" that has been around since Plato and Socrates. Old farts never understand the young idiots that are going to replace them. It's the way of the world.
Parent
Re:Not yet? Really? (Score:5, Informative)
Problem statement: A point particle moving at 70 MPH at some angle must cross a 50 foot gap, and be at the same height when it reaches the other side.
Given:
v0 = 70 mph
x = 50 feet
Assumption: Force-free motion
Constant gravity ( g = 9.81 m/s^2 )
Solution:
v0 = 70 mph = 31.2928 m/s
x = 50 feet = 15.24 m
t = Time of flight
theta = Angle from horizon
x = v0*t*cos(theta)
y = v0*sin(theta)*t - g*t^2
Solve for t t = x/(v0*cos(theta))
Substitude into y equation
y = x*v0/v0*sin(theta)/cos(theta) - g*x^2/v0^2/cos(theta)^2
Set y = 0 and solve
x*sin(theta)/cos(theta) = g*x^2/v0^2/cos(theta)^2
sin(theta)*cos(theta) = g*x/v0^2
g*x/v0^2 = 9.81*15.24/(31.2928)^2 = 0.15267
sin(theta)*cos(theta) = 0.15267 can be solve graphically. The first valid solution is 8.89 degrees.
So yes, a bus (with no friction) can cross a 50 feet gap, if the ramp was at an incline greater than 8.89 degrees.
Yay.
Parent