9 Laws of Physics That Don't Apply in Hollywood 807
Ant writes "Neatorama lists nine laws of physics that don't apply in Hollywood (movies and television/TV shows). In general, Hollywood filmmakers follow the laws of physics because they have no other choice. It's just when they cheat with special effects that people seem to forget how the world really works..."
#3 is partially incorrect (Score:3, Interesting)
9 Bad Excuses for a Fluff Piece (Score:5, Interesting)
That being said:
In most instances that come to mind, the director takes care of this problem by zooming you in on the Volcano, shell explosion, or baseball hit. Once you hear the sound at the source, the director usually cuts away to the actors after the sound has arrived. (As can usually be surmised by the ash and dirt flying at the camera.)
To the human ear, they are effectively simultaneous if the lighting crack is close enough to the observer. Considering how LOUD the director usually chooses to make the thunder, I don't think it's that bad of a summation. How about we start worrying why the actors aren't taking shelter?
This is actually incorrect. Radioactive "things" can emit light through two other methods:
1. They grow physically hot enough to glow red-hot or white-hot.
2. They heavily ionize the air around them, creating pretty streaks and rainbows.
However, the green-glow often seen in movies and cartoons does usually require the presence of phospher.
Or... the kicker could be properly grounded. If the kicker is properly braced against the ground, it's not impossible to send an unbalanced opponent off his feet. The fact that you can pick an opponent up and toss him in a single motion demonstrates that. That's not to say that the exact situation of many fights isn't ridiculous (excuse me, rediculous), but the physics of the situation don't prevent a kicker from delivering a blow hard enough to knock someone off their feet. Perhaps even to the point of sending them flying. (Though it's unlikely that it would be to the point of many kung-fu movies on strings. There's only so much structural capacity in the human body. After that, you start breaking your own bones.)
:-P
Now when they miss their target and don't go flying across the room...
Unless, of course, there is some sort of incline for a takeoff (ever notice how the Duke boys always manage to find that conveniently placed incline?) or the second section is lower than the first, thus allowing for the jump to complete depsite the drop in altitude. (As the camera appeared to make the situation in Speed.)
Smash cuts don't exist in real-life, either. Yet we don't complain about those. Slow motion is an entirely artistic thing, and is not related to the physics of the situation. At all.
Pretty much the rest of his arguments
Re:Outerspace is Cold (Score:5, Interesting)
1. They are called Sound Suppressors [wikipedia.org]not "silencers". They do not "silence" the sound just diminish it.
2. They do not really suppress the sound the way movies put it (I am looking at you Mr. Bauer).
Re:Outerspace is Cold (Score:3, Interesting)
Wile E. Coyote (Score:5, Interesting)
I was out surfing and paddled into a wave. When I jumped up to my feet, I missed the sweet spot of the wave and ended up on the breaking part instead (ie. not a good location). To this day I swear the wave dropped out from under me followed by the board while I hung there in midair. Misquoting Douglas Adams, "gravity finally looked my way and wondered what the hell I was doing" and down I went. The couple of people who saw it were sure I was surfing a board made by "Acme".
It was a really bizarre physical sensation I have not been able to adequately explain. (or recreate).
--Keith
Exploding buildings, too (Score:2, Interesting)
the most famous example is not mentioned (Score:5, Interesting)
I refer, of course, to the infamous 250-shot revolver.
basically, back in the black and white days, nobody EVER reloaded their guns.
you never saw any recoil, either, but that's because those movies were made when men were MEN and sheep ran scared, and those actors were truly made of steel, riding horses at a full gallop and able to hit a bad guy in the back of the head from 300 yards with a pistol with a four-inch barrel. and their arms never moved when the revolvers and rifles fired.
and the scenery along the trail repeated itself every 60 yards or so, but then we're not going for the top 2,000,327 movie lies here, are we?
Re:Umm... (Score:1, Interesting)
They also left out the "Superman catching falling damsel" myth. If Lois Lane actually fell off the top of a building, and Superman lept off the ground to intercept her, the impact of their collision would be MUCH GREATER than if she simply hit the ground! In essence, Lois would go SPLAT all over Superman's freshly dtycleaned costume, and Superman would be left muttering "Oops!"
Another situation where trusting Hollywood is actually dangerous is where they frequently show heroes leaping through plate glass windows completely unscathed. All the people I know that really got thrown through windows suffered life-threatening (due to blood loss) lacerations and required literally dozens of stitches, and usually cosmetic surgery.
Re:perfect vacuum (Score:3, Interesting)
How do you mean? I not aware of too many situations where Hollywood pretends there is?
For example, Star Trek has something called a "Navigational Deflector". This is a device (sort of a reverse tractor beam) that sweeps ahead of the ship and removes small particles from its path before they cause a catastrophe. Similarly, shows that posit the existence of hyperspace deal with this from the perspective of hyperspace being a shortcut to another place in space-time. Taking this shortcut does not necessarily convey any great velocity. Travel through "normal" space is usually done at relative velocities that are not dangerous in a non-perfect vacuum.
Re:Umm... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:the most famous example is not mentioned (Score:3, Interesting)
Things still have to make sense (Score:3, Interesting)
I think when we see the tanker truck blow up, the Power Rangers jump-kicking someone in the chest, or Neo fly through the air like Superman, we understand it's fiction. It's called "suspension of disbelief." It's what makes movies enjoyable. No one is really going to think that these things happen as regularly (or at all) in real life as they do in the movies.
But the power rangers were established as having super powers, and superhero stuff generally gets a pass and sits more in the fantasy realm anyway. Neo did most of his tricks inside a virtual reality where the laws of phsycis are defined by the programmer and redefined by the hacker.
Lots of artistic things are done to improve the quality of the movie that don't necessarily translate to real life.
Agreed here. Too many film geeks complain about "innaccuracies" when what really happened was artistic license. The orientation of moon phases is a common one. Even "2001" gets dinged for that.
Re:Wile E. Coyote (Score:5, Interesting)
That's possible: the water could pull the board downward faster than 9.8m/s/s due to surface tension. The board is somewhat 'stuck' to the surface of the water.
The same effect could explain how the water itself fell faster than 9.8m/s/s: wave action elsewhere created a suction below the water, such that atmospheric pressure above the water pressed down on it (and on the board), adding to the downward accelleration already provided by gravity.
Re:9 Bad Excuses for a Fluff Piece (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, but you do realize they did actually jump a bus, right? This scene was not done through CGI or with a helicopter towing a bus over the gap. The bus really jumped through speed and momentum alone. The gap was not there - it was added later digitally (or rather, the freeway was erased) - but the bus did jump that distance.
Granted, it was a) a specially modified stunt bus on a ramp, and b) pretty much totally destroyed by the jump. But it's proof that you can jump a bus. It would not behave exactly as you describe. Keep in mind most buses are back-heavy, so with enough speed to keep the bus relatively level as it went over the ramp, the rear would actually drop as it moved through the air, not the front. With a short enough jump (as is all a bus is really capable of), the bus would probably come close to landing on all four wheels when all is said and done.
(Side-note - according to Wikipedia, they actually had to shoot the jump twice because on the first shot, the bus made the jump too smoothly, which supports what I'm saying above.)
Re:Never mind hollywood (Score:2, Interesting)
They completely forgot that Clancy's work was fiction, and that he used well-known facts (such as certain ships or weapons and their publicly-known capabilities) as support material to add to the story.
It's bad enough that in the movie of the same title, the torpedo used to sink the Soviet Alpha was a wooden dummy with a "self-destruct mechanism".
Re:Been there, done that. (Score:4, Interesting)
Worked At Lam Research (Score:2, Interesting)
I worked at Lam Research in Fremont. The building used was one of our assembly buildings for plasma etchers. We had a few pics of Ahnold up at the time.
God, you bring back bad memories. How dare you, sir!
I have seen bullets spark (Score:2, Interesting)
I spent many years as an army reservist. Every so often we would head out into a training area to live fire our personal and unit weapons (both at night and during the day).
It is true I have never seen a spark during the day.
At night, I have seen rounds from machine guns (7.62mm and .50 cal) spark on rock, not metal. Especially with the .50's (larger round) you get sparks every time you hit rock at night.
Re:Outerspace is Cold (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, and they're called "automobiles" not "cars." The term "silencer" may not be as precise as you like but it is just as valid a term as "suppressor."
There are a lot more variables here than you are implying. I have some first hand experience with home-made silencers from my nonstandard youth. A .22 caliber is the most commonly suppressed round historically and used for assassinations. With a dry suppressor made in the basement, a .22 semi-auto will make the typical action noise and you can hear the bullet hit the target, but the sound of the bullet leaving the barrel is negligible. With a bolt action, you hear a sound like a pebble being thrown against your target and that is about it.
This is true with some sound suppressors, but not all. There are a variety of home made one shot suppressors you can build yourself and there are commercial, "wet" suppressors that have a limited number of effective uses. There are also traditional baffle suppressors that are just as effective for 100 shots as for 2. The relative size of the suppressor is dependent upon many factors, but you can certainly build a dry suppressor about 8 inches long that would make a .22 caliber pistol with subsonic rounds pretty darn quiet.
Re:#4 and #5 (Score:4, Interesting)
I've trained in various martial arts all my life. At one point in my life I was at an engineering school and I trained briefly with a class run by two physics professors. It really changes your perspective on some aspects of sparring when the instructor starts the class with, "you all know that f=ma, so let me show you haw to add the ground to your 'm' and increase your 'a' so the resulting 'f' sends your opponent flying."
That said, if you're not in contact with the ground, you will we recoiling when you hit an opponent and no they are not likely to go flying through the air when you strike them unless you are specifically throwing them or you are an idiot. The amount of force needed to move a person a significant distance is much, much, much greater than the amount of force needed to disable or kill a person if directed more effectively. I've seen video of Bruce Lee and he was amazingly fast and as a result transferred a lot of force because of the acceleration involved, but I never saw him hit someone and send them flying across a room.
Re:Middle C (Score:4, Interesting)
The quasi-official frequency for middle C is, as the original poster mentioned, 261.6ish. The rub lies in the fact that the only really "official", or at least widely accepted, standard of concert pitch defines A (as 440Hz), not C. On an equal tempered instrument, as most pianos are tuned, C will then end up at 261.6Hz. However, most other instruments allow on-the-fly adjusting of pitch (strings, winds, brass), which, at least in the hands of a capable performer, can result in being better in tune than an equal-tempered piano, as equal-temperment is a compromise that results in all intervals being slightly out of tune so that you can play in any key equally well (or equally poorly, depending on your point of view).
There's a handy little chart on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] for the frequencies of each note given equal temperment on A=440.
Now, for the historical aspect, take a look at that chart and consider that a common Baroque (17th and 18th centuries) tuning was A=413, which means about a half step flat to modern tuning. However, during the same period, it was not terribly uncommon to have a tuning as high as A=475 (over a half step sharp).
Even though we've more or less settled on A=440, the parent poster is correct that modern orchestras often get higher than that to create a brighter sound (although usually not much higher than A=445). This occasionally results in something of an arms race, although there's only so high you can go before the instruments start acting up. This arms race can also happen on a personal level. One of my cello teachers used to play in a European orchestra, where this sort of thing is somewhat more common, and he said that sometimes there would be players who would purposely tune sharp to the orchestra so they would stick out (generally speaking, if you're sharp to the ensemble, you sound bright, and if you're flat, you sound out of tune).
Interestingly enough, although I have not researched this, from anecdotal evidence it appears that string instruments tend to be a bit friendlier when tuned flat of A=440. I first noticed this when comparing two recordings of the Kodaly Suite for Solo Cello. One recording I had (Janos Starker) was more or less concert pitch, but the Yo-Yo Ma recording was about a half-step flat of A=440. I discussed this discrepancy with my teacher at the time and his response was that he had tried tuning his cello like that for solo work, and found it to be "looser" and more responsive and forgiving. Because string instruments behave better when they're kept consistently in tune to one standard, and because I do a lot of orchestral playing, I haven't experimented with this much, but I have noticed times when both my cello and my bass felt better, and then later realized that they'd drifted flat (which happens if you only tune the instrument to itself for a while).
All that to say that while A tends to drift higher and higher if left unchecked, we might be better off if we actually went flat of concert pitch.
Oh yeah, and I find C=256 very handy for back-of-the-napkin calculations, since it means easy powers of two for each octave.
/musician rambling
Re:Been there, done that. (Score:4, Interesting)
Try firing an incendiary tracer into water (at night). I don't understand the physics of it, but you can see the round move in a spiral like some sort of futuristic rail gun from the movies.
Re:Outerspace is Cold (Score:3, Interesting)
Space isn't cold, but water evaporation is. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Been there, done that. (Score:5, Interesting)
I've watched mythbusters (including that episode) and they can be pretty amusing, but please don't confuse them with actual evidence. It is a TV show mostly about making stuff blow up. I know from personal experience that bullets do not "disintegrate" on contact with water from normal firearms. You can watch incendiary rounds as they go through the water (although they are probably subsonic). I had a friend accidentally shoot himself in the foot with a .22 when he fell through the ice on a pond and the bullet certainly went through quite a bit of water. I once saw a jackass shoot a carp with a shotgun, while it was under about 24 inches of water, and the rounds certainly reached it.
As young kids we routinely used an old gravel quarry as a shooting range and it was mostly full of water. Someone standing on a typical shoreline and firing at someone or something maybe 20 feet out would experience rounds deflecting off the surface and hitting things on the other side. It is one reason hunters are cautioned about shooting rifles towards water. A rifle round can hit the water and skip half a mile across to the far shore and kill someone.
Again, mythbusters is TV, do not try to take anything they "prove" as some sort of fact. Half the time, they don't seem to have any real intention of finding out if something can happen, just making a big mess and some explosions. It is entertainment, not science.
Re:Been there, done that. (Score:2, Interesting)
(Honest question; I don't know much about guns.)
Re:Pet Gun Peeve (Score:4, Interesting)
Man, I miss Marine boot camp. It was a lot of fun
I fired my M203. Boy I missed them. Yeah, they make a nice bang.
I remember during my Marine boot, when we did live grenades, some dude threw his like a girl. It did not go far enough to be in a "safe zone" so the instructor with him threw him into the trench pit (I don't remember if there was a Corps name for it). Me and my fellow recruits were all in a building in-line waiting for our turn. However, we were able to watch what was going on. I remember when that grenade went off. I can not imagine how something so small could make suck an explosion. The force from the grenade was just incredible.
Man I miss the Marines bootcamp
Re:Pet Gun Peeve (Score:3, Interesting)