Friday, October 16, 2009

Bad science equals bad movie, or not



Movies are great. Explosion, outer space, and a hero who somehow manage to avoid hundred of bullets... We all love movies but once a while, we ask our self does that really make sense, however then another explosion blows our mind and stop us from thinking deeper. Only a couple of people who are addicted to science keep asking these questions. Now these science people picked up the mistakes (very bad ones) from famous movies. One scientist I interviewed said, "People should know that things from the movie is not always true." Yes, we should. So let's take look at some of them.
First one is about Superman saving his girl friend. When she died, Superman got mad, and went around the Earth so many times with extreme speed. Then for some reason, time went back before the girl friend was killed and Superman was able to save the girl with muscular body. If the superman was going with almost speed of light, the Science that Einstein found tells us, superman will go to the future instead of the past. The Theory of relativity shows us that when a thing goes by nearly speed of light, the time goes slowly than other slow objects. The movie makers were right about going with high speed alters time, but they were wrong way, it was future not past. Well, this helped Superman's girl friend live, so thank god for that mistake.
Another error is going to be from lasers in Star Wars. Lets get some facts straight. Even though, in current technology laser can be made, it is huge, and need a lot of electricity. So the chance of new hand-size laser getting invented is very small(I mean we have normal guns that is effective, right?) However, we will ignore that because we don't know what would happen in the future and that is not the worst part of the laser. Here is the fact: laser is made out of light, which goes with speed of 186000 miles per second(with this speed you can go around the Earth seven times in just one second), and you can not see the light unless there is some objects reflecting it to your eye. Yet, somehow movie makers thought laser was visible, and can be reflected by using light saver. Have you ever out run the light?(If you could, you are superman or may be having eye problems, so either way go to the doctors.)
Last one I am going to tell you is the computer virus from "Independence Day". It is very hard to make a computer virus that can infect both Mac and PCs. Somehow, David made a computer virus that is able to infect mother ship. The only explanation I could make is that Bill Gates was abducted by Aliens and somehow learned their technology to bring us Window software. Definitely, this must be what happened!
Not only these listed above, there are a lot more crazy mistakes in the movie. Finding these errors are fun but don't do this while you are watching movie with somebody else. This would just kill the mood. "The movies does not have to be scientific accurate. People wanted to see the laser," said George Lucas, which is very true, if there were know lasers, how do we know Skywalker is in the danger? I suppose the right way to have fun is to not think too much. Like, KB230, a High School student, told me,"If it was a good movie, I don't care(about mistakes)."

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