Revisiting the Physics of Buckaroo Banzai

serutan writes "Shortly before the release of 'The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension' in 1984, physicist Carl Sneider of U.C. Berkeley wrote a surprisingly interesting essay on the physics behind the movie. Since the essay is not widely available on the web and I could only find it in plain text, I posted a more readable HTML version on my site. Among the more interesting points Sneider makes are that the oscillation overthruster is the result of decades of research instead of the usual laboratory accident, and its development corresponds surprisingly well with the evolution of particle physics from the 1930s to the 80s."

Weird science

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Consider this, if you were to disrupt the particle behavior of an object so that its molecular bonds were permeable (since they are mostly made of space in the first place), you'd end up with the particle either collapsing on itself or blown to bits due to repulsive charges of neigbor particles. So Banzai wouldn't be able to fly through a mountain because the mountain would have collapsed upon itself. If he used the oscillator on himself and his ship, he wouldn't be able to recover from the damage.

There's no doubt a lot of fun speculation to be made here, but if you're going to get your science from the web, it's best to stay away from Slashdot.

Re:Weird science

[serutan]

Bear in mind that the article was written in the spirit of making the movie more enjoyable for people who are geeky enough to understand something about particle physics. The point was not to prove the feasibility of the oscillation overthruster, but to show that the science thread that runs through Buckaroo Banzai is a cut above standard movie technobabble. Sneider sort of addressed the mountain-collapsing issue by mentioning that the area of effect was small and short-lived, which is why the jet car had to travel 700 mph to keep up with it. It's all in fun.

Re:Cool car mod

[MaGogue]

If you project your intermediate vector bosons accurately, you'll obtain a tunnel through the mountain with solid floor just below the wheels, and a collapsing yet transparent core in front.
Move fast enough, and banzai!, you tunnel through.
It is interesting to note that 'electron tunneling' is an actual term used in quantum physics.

Only make sure you don't use up your batteries too soon.

Re:Weird science

[JabberWokky]

For what it's worth, if you like it, it's pretty much a direct lift from the classic Doc Savage, "Man of Bronze" pulps of the 30s and 40s. They weren't camp at the time, just from a different era, both in terms of literature and science. This was before physics was considered a major branch of science, so much of the wizz-bang new inventions are through the modern miracle of cutting edge chemistry. The characters were painted in bright, broad strokes, just like Buckaroo's sidekicks. One even carries around a long eared pig. Ethnic stereotypes and slurs weren't considered politically incorrect, and women had only had the ability to vote for ten years, so you have to take some things with an understanding of the era (i.e., if you're offended by such things, don't read 'em).

Fun stuff, and highly recommended if you really like Science Fiction, as you can see where much of it came from. The Philip José Farmer take on the characters later in the century is a different beast (enjoyable, but not what we're talking about). Things like ice bullets and enzymes are the high tech weapons, plus a little dabbling in the (even at the time) classics of SF like hollow world theory. (There was an official Doc Savage movie that was done to be camp and sucked monkey balls).

--
Evan

Copyright?

[MMC Monster]

Doesn't the original writer have copyright over this essay? Is it legal for it to be posted to the web without his authority? I know we don't care so much about copyright on /., but this is a bit rediculous.

Atoms are mostly empty?

[lawpoop]

The metaphor that Buckaroo uses is something like tiny marbles in an orbit configuration. So an atom is a tiny cluster of marbles, neutrons and protons in the nucleus, and tiny electron marbles orbiting some distance from the nucleus, and mostly empty space. Even the author uses the metaphor of a bee in a cathedral when describing the nucleus.

But aren't these tiny marbles actually just a sort of bundle of waves? That what we think of as tiny parts of matter that give the hardness to matter not really hard at all, but just a collection repellent forces? That an atom really isn't mostly empty space, but that 'space' is full of the wave functions of the electrons in 'orbit' of the nucleus?

Re:Thanks, guy.

[Anonymous Coward]

I just watched it recently, too. I like that end credits music. I'd like to have that as my ring-tone.

This is one of my all time favorite movies. Stylist wardrobe, excellent cast, fun characters, campy but a true classic.

Re:Weird science

[mbourgon]

Agreed on the Doc Savage reference. Buckaroo is an updated version of the old pulps - and the novelization of the movie (written by the script writer) is written like a pulp, complete with references to other adventures. FWIW, Evan, someone took the old movie and replaced the "songs" with the original (instrumental) John Philips Sousa tunes, and it makes the movie MUCH more watchable. Still not great, but it holds up a whole lot better this way than I would've imagined.

Here's hoping that Raimi does wind up doing Doc (he recently got the rights to do movies based off of Street & Smith characters).

Re:Important questions

[MrPlastic]

Though the movie answers with, "Er...I'll tell you later," ISTR that Earl Mac Rauch has said that the watermelon in the vise was part of a program under development at the Banzai Institute to create food that could be air-dropped into a famine area without parachutes or other special equipment: any bush pilot could fly over and drop a load of watermelons, and the starving masses would rejoice, needing only a sharp knife to get through the tough, drop-rated skin. (This idea is somewhat reminiscent of the water spheres in the classic short story "Arena," by Frederic Brown, which are unbreakably held together with increased surface tension until something sharp releases the water.)

Big Trouble in Little China

[Jonah Hex]

http://imdb.com/title/tt0086856/trivia [imdb.com]

# The end of the movie invites the viewer to watch for the upcoming film "Buckaroo Banzai vs. The World Crime League". This was the real title for a sequel that Sherwood Studios planned to make if this film had been successful. Unfortunately, it was a box-office bomb, and Sherwood Studios went bankrupt. After its release on video and cable, however, BB became a cult favorite, much in the same way as Mad Max (1979) (which crawled from obscurity to spawn two sequels). Legal wranglings due to the bankruptcy prevented any other studios from picking up the sequel rights, and even years later MGM had to fight through a pile of red tape simply to get the OK to release it on DVD.

# The script for the proposed sequel Buckaroo Banzai vs. The World Crime League ended up becoming the script for John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China (1986).

Since I read this I can't watch BTiLC without thinking of Buckaroo and crew going deep under Chinatown.
Jonah HEX

Re:Weird science

[mengel]

Actually, as long as you did it for a really short period of time, the main effects would be:

• particles would fall due to gravity (unless this effect also weakened gravity, but current theory wouldn't support that). But it would take a signifigant portion of a second for the particles to move much due to gravity.
• particles vibrating due to brownean motion would possibly continue past each other possibly rearranging crystaline structures

Once you turned the field back off, the forces between the atoms would reappear, and most of the molecules would snap back into place.

If you left the field on a long time, yes you would possibly get a tunnel, as the particles would fall to the bottom of the region at which point their fields would turn back on, and there would possibly be... fusion? an explosion?

Disclaimer: I am not a particle physicist, but I do talk with them in the cafeteria...

Alignment solves everything

[mattr]

I'm quite worried a lot of people will get the wrong idea about this movie, that it's all impossible. Of course the overthruster isn't disintegrating the matter on which it is focused, it is simply enabling a bidirectionally permeable interface to form naturally between two space harmonics.

It has been long known that spacetime has a granular quality, in fact when you get small enough everything is spin networks (you can learn more about it on Wikipedia) which can basically be thought of as a quantum of space. in other words we are all just living on particles strung on lattices (see lattice theory). But since the granularity of spacetime is at a resolution of Planck units, there is obviously an infinity of other universes that can exist between the lines as it were, made of particles strung along a lattice just out of step with our own. If you can gauge the distances correctly along this string-net and apply a constant field to shift the center of gravity of space quanta a little to one side and perfectly coincide with the spin networks on a different lattice, then voila! you can continue motion over that other dimension, which is only confusing because we use the word dimension when clearly it is simply a spacetime superimposed on our own but with a topology ordered along a geometry that is slightly out of step with ours.

This duality over the lattice may seem difficult to stomach but it will be invariably clear to anyone who has gotten used to the television version's compression of the entire x-axis into the tube's smaller aspect ratio (the ultra-cool credits scene). That, and if you can believe a key researcher is named Joan Baez.

This is what the movie is trying to illustrate when the Buckaroo's nemesis gets himself stuck halfway through a wall. That probably happened partly because they were using an inefficient energy carrier (as TFA suggests), bosons not being known in the 30s, but mostly in fact due to insufficient speed, since if you lose momentum while in the interface you would have to push against quite a lot of knots in the spin network to extricate yourself. It is a kind of rigged Hilbert space, with the knots rigged along the lattices like a ship's rigging, and it is all so intertwined you really have to push with a lot of oomph.

Hence the 700 miles per hour rocket. Obviously the characters are pushing through onto another lattice and not disintegrating the matter in front of them, because if they were destroying matter not only would things probably get quite hot, but also gravity would drag down the nose of Buckaroo's craft toward the center of the Earth! And that doesn't happen at all in fact.

We shall soon see how well the movie predicts reality with the next generation of particle accelerators. TFA only makes one terrible mistake, in that they suggest the movie is wrong about magnitudes because Buckaroo is superhumanly able to miniaturize accelerators. In fact just recently research scientist Anatoly Maksimchuk and Donald Umstadter, and another team in Europe, have been able to focus high energies with table-top devices. Certainly as higher energies are reached there will be a manifold of possibilities to study. Just remember, wherever you go, there you are.

Re:before physics was ...

[Gr8Apes]

Argh, the limits of textual communication. Einstein made a huge splash in the scientific community in 1905. My point was that the GGP was incorrect, physics was a major branch of science, as scientists were working studiously to discover the workings of the world/universe at that time. Whether the public had the slightest concept of this is irrelevant.

I'd say physics still isn't in the public consciousness as big science, although "nukulear" physics sure still seems to be, barely. After all, if it's not slapping Joe Sixpack in the face, it doesn't exist.

Sneider would show the film

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually went to one of his presentations at Berkeley. He would give a talk about the science behind the movie, show the movie, and then have a discussion after. It really made the movie for me. Otherwise BB would have just landed on the pile of cheesy '80s B - scifi like Hell Comes to Frog Town.