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SCIENCE Movies MOMENT

SPOILERS AHEAD!

!!!SCIENCE MOMENT 2000!!!

BEWARE THE SCIENCE FROM THESE TITLES OF THE

1950s - 1960s - 1970s - 1980s - 1990s - 2000s

2000 to 2002
2003 t0 2004
2005 to 2006

13 MOMENTS OF SCIENCE AND COUNTING!

 

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2003

Daredevil
Kelly Parks
SCIENCE MOMENT BY
KELLY PARKS
DAREDEVIL (2003)
I have no problem with almost everything here. Who knows, maybe some odd side effect to toxic waste could produce a good mutation instead of the much more likely bad ones.

The only genuine mistake involves the Daredevil's ability to dodge bullets because he hears them coming. I'm sorry, but no. Bullets travel faster than the speed of sound. They would arrive at your skull before the sound got to your ear.

X Men 2
Kelly Parks
SCIENCE MOMENT BY
KELLY PARKS
X-MEN 2 (2003)
I want to say something about physics and biology (which, like all sciences, is a mere subset of physics). Biology first. Narration and conversation at several points make references to mutants being the next “stage” in evolution and they compare their situation with the “conflict” between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons. Both points of view are inaccuracies based on the common misconception that evolution is some mysterious force driving life toward greater intelligence and that we (and now mutants) are the pinnacles of that achievement. In fact, evolution could care less how smart you are. All evolution cares about is how good you are at reproducing. If being dumber helped, then each generation dumber people would produce more offspring until the human species was gradually replaced by a less intelligent breed (Hey, wait a minute…).

Thus, being able to freeze things like Iceman does is great fun but if it doesn’t help you get a date or support your offspring to make sure they survive long enough to breed, then evolution doesn’t apply.

And the Neanderthal / Cro-Magnon situation is spurious as well. When modern humans entered Europe 30,000 years ago the Neanderthal had been living there already for at least 100,000 years. Within 5,000 years of our arrival the Neanderthal were gone. This wasn’t a war or anything – we simply out bred them. We were better able to compete for resources (because we were smarter, but that part’s still disputed) and generation by generation they declined and we increased. The situation in the movie doesn’t fit the details very well.

And now the physics. The fact is the powers possessed by these mutants clearly violates one of the most hallowed rules of science: The Conservation of Mass and Energy (Neither mass nor energy can be created or destroyed – merely change form). In other words, where does the energy come from for Jean Grey’s telekinesis or Storm’s movement of huge masses of air? Are these things impossible?

No. But you have to assume that the basis for all mutant power is the ability to tap into some unknown energy source. What it is and what dimension it exists in is a mystery but if you assume its existence you can explain everything else.

 

The Matrix: Reloaded
Kelly Parks
SCIENCE MOMENT BY
KELLY PARKS
THE MATRIX RELOADED (2003)
I was pleased to see no attempt to add to the ridiculous idea mentioned in the first film that the machines are using their unwitting human slaves as a power source. That's just plain stupid for a long list of reasons and they wisely skipped over it here.

On the other hand a lot of the computer references are as ancient as Tron. The story centers around a plan to get into the enemy “mainframe”, an idea right out of the 70’s. Have these artificial intelligence programs not heard of distributed networks? Like, for example, the Internet? The Internet has no “central” computer, nor does it need one. I find it hard to believe that these vastly more advanced computers would take such a giant step backwards.

The Core
Kelly Parks
SCIENCE MOMENT BY
KELLY PARKS
THE CORE (2003)
Now, I'm not going to discuss the magical underground drillship. A half-crazy lone scientist inventing something essentially impossible is a staple of science fiction so that's fine. But I do have a problem when the movie makes scientific sounding statements that are just plain wrong. Here are the high points:

1. If there really were “solar microwaves” being held off by the Earth's magnetic field, why didn't they cook the Apollo astronauts when they ventured beyond the field's coverage? Why isn't Mars being cooked, since it hasn't got much of a field? The answer is that the sun doesn't produce much in the way of microwaves and that what it does produce isn't stopped by our magnetic field anyway. A magnetic field can only affect the paths of charged particles like protons and electrons. It has no effect at all on electromagnetic radiation like microwaves or visible light or ultraviolet light. It’s our atmosphere – not our magnetic field – that filters out the harmful parts of the sun’s radiative output.

2. The inner core of the Earth is a ball of crystalline iron about 2400 kilometers in diameter. A good way to get a feel for how much energy would actually be required to get it spinning again if it stopped can be found from calculating the rotational energy it has right now. This is the rotational equivalent of kinetic energy: the energy of motion. Plugging in the numbers reveals that the inner core has a rotational energy of 385 trillion trillion joules. That’s equivalent to 96 billion megatons of TNT, so the mere 1000 megatons worth of nukes they bring along is about 100 million times too small.

3. Many times in the Earth’s past the magnetic field has reversed its polarity, making the south pole the north pole and vice versa. During these field reversals (just the field flips – not the Earth itself) there are intervals of a few thousand years where the field collapses completely and the Earth has no magnetic field to speak of. None of these incidents resulted in the Earth being cooked by microwaves, and the fossil record doesn’t show any evidence of mass extinctions during these times. The biosphere survived just fine.

4. An overlooked effect has to do with gravity. The deeper you penetrated into the Earth, the less Earth there’d be below you and thus the less of a gravitational pull you’d feel.

5. If you have a bomb, and you put a pile of explosives next to it, that will make the total explosion bigger. However if you have a nuclear bomb and you put a pile of plutonium next to it, that will only be a waste of plutonium. Nukes just don’t work that way.


28 Days Later
Kelly Parks
SCIENCE MOMENT BY
KELLY PARKS
28 DAYS LATER (2003)
At first I thought the fast acting nature of the infection was a bit contrived but the more I thought about this, the easier it turns out to be. Consider that there are many drugs (and poisons) that can have an almost immediate effect upon reaching your blood stream. Now imagine such a fast-acting drug that turns you into an enraged monster (maybe a variation on PCP). It is probably within our technological ability to genetically engineer an existing bacterium to manufacture this drug.

Now put it all together. A blood-infecting bacteria strain that makes the rage drug as soon as it hits your blood stream. Infected blood splashes your face during a struggle and the bacteria is in through your mucous membranes. Suddenly you want to kill, kill, KILL! We could probably do it.

 

link to Cabin Fever review
Kelly Parks
SCIENCE MOMENT BY
KELLY PARKS
CABIN FEVER (2003)
The monster in this monster movie is a member of the Streptococcus family, but you may know it better as the flesh eating bacteria. It's quite rare but when it does happen it usually enters the body through a cut or other injury. Once in the blood stream it infects the muscles and fat just beneath the skin and produces toxins that dissolve the flesh in a process called necrotizing fasciitis (Be careful if you google those words, by the way, because you'll probably end up seeing some of the grossest medical photos ever taken). This is a life threatening infection and treatment usually involves immediate amputation of infected body parts.

And yes, the movie mostly gets the details right. This infection really isn’t very communicable (unless an infected bleeds into some else’s open wound) but these kids ain’t exactly rocket scientists so their ignorance (and terror about getting “the disease”) is very believable. And the way they get infected is basically believable, although it requires some criminal negligence.

 

Click here for full review
Kelly Parks
SCIENCE MOMENT BY
KELLY PARKS
ARACHNIA (2003)
Giant spiders violate the square-cube law in the sense that spiders as big as horses wouldn’t be able to support their own weight and would have a long list of internal problems like not being able to absorb enough oxygen to survive. But when the snooty professor is first told about (but hasn’t yet seen) the big spiders, he snootily points out exactly those facts! Later, when we learn that the giant spiders are some unknown underground species, all that’s left for me or the snooty professor to say is that it’s really unlikely but not impossible.

 

The Matrix: Revolutions
Kelly Parks
SCIENCE MOMENT BY
KELLY PARKS
THE MATRIX: REVOLUTIONS (2003)
There is a very brief scene where a ship piloted by the good guys gets above ground and then, just for a moment, above the perpetual cloud cover. Trinity sees the sun for real, probably for the first time in her life. The sunny, beautiful world above the clouds is a huge contrast to the grim horror below. But it's also more proof that the whole “using people as batteries” idea (that's what we are told the machines are using people for: electricity) is stupid. Totally aside from the simple fact that burning the food you're feeding these people would provide more power than you'd ever get from their body heat (humans are poor heat engines), just a few miles up you’ve got as much solar energy as you want. The tech these machines have is plenty for solar cell covered blimps or solar power satellites. I don't know what they're using people for, but it ain't electricity.

 

TLoEG
Kelly Parks
SCIENCE MOMENT BY
KELLY PARKS
THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN (2003)
There is a scene where we discover that Nemo's great submarine is solar powered. Yeah, you heard me. Now that's not quite as stupid as it seems because they mention this when the sub is on the surface, charging its batteries with solar energy. But why would Hollywood writers choose solar power when (nuclear) there is a much more (nuclear) obvious choice (nuclear) that the U.S. Navy has been (nuclear) using for many decades (nuclear)? Who can say? My guess is that solar energy, while perhaps not the most obvious choice as a submarine power source, was the most politically correct choice. And by the way: in the original Jules Verne story Nemo's sub was powered by extracting electrolytes from the water. That wouldn't work but it still makes more sense than a solar powered submarine.

 

Paycheck
Kelly Parks
SCIENCE MOMENT BY
KELLY PARKS
PAYCHECK (2003)
The idea of any kind of "memory marker" artificially set in the brain is something I'm pretty sure wouldn't work, given that memories are stored holographically rather than linearly but maybe they learned a way around that. I have to be careful because I don't want to ruin the surprise of what Michael was working on. All I'll say is that although current thinking on the topic would not allow the idea in question to work, the whole subject is sufficiently in flux that I'm fine with a future discovery making it workable.

 

Hulk
Kelly Parks
SCIENCE MOMENT BY
KELLY PARKS
THE HULK (2003)
There are a lot of violations of basic physics here (like if a multi-ton creature can leap miles into the air then by virtue of equal-and-opposite-reaction he should kick a huge crater into the ground with each leap), but the most blatant is the transformation itself. If an average-sized man triples in height then according to the square-cube law his weight will be three cubed or 27 times greater. That means he goes from 200 pounds to 5400 pounds (more than 2 and a half tons!). Where does that mass come from? Not from "accelerated cell growth" because cells don't just appear from nowhere. To gain 5200 pounds you'd have to eat more than 5200 pounds of food and let your body process that raw material INTO more cells. That's not what happens here. The mass just magically appears (and then disappears when he changes back), a clear violation of Conservation of Mass and Energy. Only magic can do that so this is fantasy, not sci-fi.

 

King of the Ants
Kelly Parks
SCIENCE MOMENT BY
KELLY PARKS
KING OF THE ANTS (2003)
There is a standard plot device in thrillers involving turning on the gas on a stove and either leaving a candle burning or waiting for someone to light a match and thereby blow up a house in a huge fireball. Very dramatic and it would sort of work. It's just that it would take hours for the house to fill with gas this way, not the mere minutes that's usually shown.

 

Time of the Wolf
Kelly Parks
SCIENCE MOMENT BY
KELLY PARKS
TIME OF THE WOLF (2003)
I say frustrating because, since the movie never explains what happened, there's no science for me to analyze. If I had to guess I'd say some kind of terrorist-released plague was the culprit but the fact is it could be a lot of different things. Civilization is surprisingly fragile.

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