My all time favorite is when a passenger plane decompresses.

In reality, a plane requires about 2 seconds to decompresses. And the pressure differential is only like 5 psi which may not even give you a hickie. The only danger with decompression is passing out from lack of oxygen. But in the movies, a plane decompressing takes a good 30 minutes and can suck a person through a pin hole like a spaghetti machine......

Here's an anecdotal demonstration of how the application of Hollywood Physics to real life situations can be dangerous...

When I was young and stupid (now I'm just older and still stupid) I went swimming at the local smimming spot in my home town with a mate.

This particular spot (The Gorge in Launceston for any Aussies out there) incorporates a large, deep basin of water in the middle of a river. On the down-stream side of the basin is a low footbridge with arches beneath it through which the water flows at quite a high rate.

Now, my mate made the ingenious suggestion that we climb onto a floating log and paddle it toward the bridge.

"You're an idiot," I said.

No, he says, what we do is paddle the log sideways up to the bridge at which point the pressure of the rushing water will wedge it lengthways against the arches and we can quite calmly get up and step off the jammed log onto the safety of the footbridge.

Just like Indiana Jones, he said.

Okay, I said, sounds like fun.

Well.

What actually happened was that when we were close to the bridge the force of the rushing water under the arch closest to us caused the log to rotate until it was pointed directly into the arch, spear-like.

We frantically turned it back into a sideways orientation, but once again the force of the water turned it back to aim straight down the barrel of the arch, and after several tries we found ourselves simply unable to turn it back anymore.

Did I mention that the clearance under the arch was about 10 inches from the surface of the water? And that beyond the bridge is a flooded, raging cataract full of razor-sharp rocks and white water?

I guess the end result probably looked pretty dramatic as it turned out.

Ben was sitting in front of me on the log. As it started to go under the bridge (all happened very fast, you understand, as these things tend to do) Ben threw his arms up and grabbed the side of the bridge, letting the log slide beneath him. Similarly, as I approached the bridge I too grabbed the side and let the log shoot through the arch to be shattered dramatically against the rocks on the other side.

Our legs were still immersed in the water, and the force of several tons a minute of water being funnelled through a narrow arch actually makes it damn-near impossible to pull your body out of the flow.

Just as we thought we were going to be sucked under and killed a couple of tourists happened to walk across the bridge and pulled us up by the arms to safety.

We were very scratched, very bruised, very embarrassed, and our legs ached for days from being nearly torn from their sockets by the water.

Moral of this story: when your half-wit friend comes up with an exciting plan to look like Indiana Jones, just shoot the b4st4rd.

Ah the A-team, the television MASTER of bad physics. Every episode had a flipping car. I remember one episode where Hannibal tossed dynamyte sticks at cars racing through a lumber yard. One lands near a car and flippo! Even got the slow motion and everything. And the fork lift they converted to a lumber cannon. Red Green would have been proud that the lumber it fired simply bounced off bad guys and made them fall over. In reality, it would produce some serious injuries.

The show was full of bad physics that looked like it came out of the Dukes of Hazzard (Probably because the two shows had the same 2nd unit director, Craig R. Baxley). But at the time, I was no older than 6 and it just looked cool.

I still love the show to this day. I'd hire them, if I could find them.

bad article really...notice he rights it at about a 9th grade level, then throws in a bunch of formulas that he could easily have made up if we match the writing level with the education level.

Sparking Bullets
what movie has bullets sparking??? if anything its the squibs, just an undesired result of the SFX.

Flaming Cars
plenty of cars explode when they crash, just ask cops or firemen. Or watch any cop chase show on FX or TLC.

The Mac 10 Problem
endless bullets. not really physics, and nothing earth shattering. If the gun would empty in 1.8 seconds...then so would the blanks. stupid.

Problems with Windows
guess homie forgot the endless sideshow people who walk on and swallow glass. and..I went on a ride along where a burglar jumped through a window, AND the venetian blinds and did NOT get cut.

The Attractive Force of Glass
hes reaching. really far.

Falls
homie needs to stop watching MacGuyver

Scaling Problems
I think the last movie with this plot was 40 years ago.

Outer Space Explosions
well duh

regarding A-team. the worst wreck my buddy a cop ever saw was a station wagon that was hit by fleeing bank robbers. It lifted UP INTO THE AIR and wrapped itself around a telephone pole. also, watch enough cop shows and you will see cars flip over when hitting other cars.

notice I right at a 3rd grade level...

Vominator: Just a few things....

"plenty of cars explode when they crash, just ask cops or firemen. Or watch any cop chase show on FX or TLC."

Sometimes cars BURN when they crash, but they usually don't explode. And I work in the nes media, so I've seen plenty, myself. Even when a car is engulfed in flame for whatever reason, the fuel tank almost never explodes, unless it has a leak. That's why you're told to hide inside your car if a bush fire is approaching.

"If the gun would empty in 1.8 seconds...then so would the blanks."

That's what scene-cuts are for - time to reload. Chain 'em all together and it LOOKS like a 5-second burst. I'm assuming that's what homie has a problem with.

"I went on a ride along where a burglar jumped through a window, AND the venetian blinds and did NOT get cut."

Then he was very VERY lucky. Usually when someone falls through a plate glass window they die very quickly from severed arteries. If you're lucky you come out of it with some exciting scars.

"any cop chase show on FX or TLC"

The thing you need to take into account here is that on TV they will only show the really spectacular ones. Because the low-speed car chases in which the car simply blows a tyre and doesn't erupt in flames make very poor television. For every spectacular explosion you see on TV there are about 100 boring ones.

I love how in space, all ships are right side up (when compared to other ships) you never see a ship warp in and have it upside down.

I had a bunch of friends over once; one of which was leaning on the sliding glass door, couple of assholes outside saw him and decided it be fun to scare him by throwing rocks as him.

You can guess what happened.

While I wouldn't say his arm (which was against the window) was mincemeat, he came pretty close to bleeding to death.

And as for the bullets, it read like he was complaining about the squibs making visible sparks, rather than just chipping bits off the wall like a bullet would.

Heheh, of course, movies are all in good fun, but like ArmchairDissident pointed out, it's sometimes fun to point this stuff out, especially when the movie's bad.

actually copper claded led bullets do spark when they hit metal (sometimes even plain concrete) but its not seen in broad day light.

i remmeber we were shooting at a house in ramallah, from an m-60 it sparked like the 4 of july.

When i was a kid my family rented Aliens. I suppose i was 6-8 years old and I remember seeing the scientist (this is the only part I remember so bare with me) get his torso ripped off and watching him play with his intestines. Of course being the smart kid I was I asked my father why didn't he die. It seemed to me that ripping half your body off would kill you but I still asked. Not knowing exactly what to say, my dads' reasoning was simple: becasue he was a scientist. For a while after that, I wanted to be a scientist. Movies are so fake.

I think movies are starting to get better with effects. Check out the battle scenes in Band of Brothers, Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down and They Were Soldiers Once as just a few examples of how Hollywood is approving these type of affects. Check out this website to see how they did some of the Band of Brothers effects, very cool. Click on the "Recreating the War" areas of the website.


Cheers,
Dawg

Armageddon got the worst possible rating? Wow, I never would have guessed!

Tobychubacca: Also, Bishop was an android. Might have more to do with it than the scientist part. I seem to recall all his organs and blood were white; you weren't watching on a black and white tv, were you? :o)

Huh.... I just took their "Basic Physics Savvy Quiz" and only got an 82.5%.

"I love how in space, all ships are right side up (when compared to other ships) you never see a ship warp in and have it upside down."

The Trek transporter sequences have always bothered me. Not the science, but the scheduling. There's times when they're beaming out, and they initiate the sequence from their end. That's fine. But the other option is all those times when they're beaming someone else onboard, when you ALSO see the local end start the sequence.

You never see the obvious counterpart -- the guy just standing around on the pad looking at his watch, waiting for the other end to yank him away without warning.

Hollywood physics rule #73
Seat belts are not required. No matter how fast you are travelling, and how hard your car hits the wall/tree/truck, you will come to an instant halt with little more than a rough jolt. Of course, now you must flee from the car and dive into a handy ditch before it explodes in a nuclear fireball.


I watched Die Hard III the other night. The two lead characters have a head-on collision in their car, without belts, and just get a slight jolt rather than being torn to tiny lumps of sticky meat.

Um....nerd alert.

This is like CAP Alert for physicists.

Thank you. It's about time somebody called Hollywood on some of these things. Doesn't it bother anyone else when they see someone get shot with one round from a 9mm and it propels them across the room. I mean, even if you've never fired a 9mm or seen anyone get shot, common sense oughtta tell you that that's not going to happen. There's enough of those extreme police videos out there for everyone to know that when someone gets shot they just fall down in a little heap.

The thing that really ruins a movie for me is when the hero propels himself through the air with the recoil force from a 9mm in each hand. That's just stupid. Think about it this way, if you put all the gunpowder in those 9mm round in a little rocket and sat on it, how many feet in the air do you think it would shoot a 200 pound individual? Zero.

I saw a movie once when two spaceships met and they were not on the same plane. I can't remember what movie it was, though.

These aren't even the worst. In Point Brake, Patrick Swayze jumps out of a plane, and Keanu follows him something like 15 seconds later. So the distance between them about a mile. Yet Keanu manages to maneuver through the air and catch him somehow. Then the two of them deploy a single chute mere seconds before hitting the ground, but walk away from what should be a splatworthy impact. Absolutely ridiculous!

I'm with you Efot.

My favorites are when people can somehow fall faster, or slower, than other objects, ala any James Bond movie. Yeah, yeah, I know about wind resistance and so forth, but c'mon.

Bullets do spark sometimes. Anyone who has done any night firing with military rounds can confirm this. You can actually see where the rounds strike earth, and aim accordingly. Otherwise it would just be spray and pray.

Worst. physics. ever.

This is the most mundane an uninstersting I've read coming from Fark. What a bunch of nancy idiots. These are exactly the type of people that I DON'T WANT TO SEE A MOVIE WITH. Who ever said that film is supposed to completely emulate real life?

I mean, why aren't they writing a whole diatribe about why people can't REALLY fly (superman) or why it's totally improbable that the undead walk (NOTLD). Yet they nitpick about the physics of GLASS?! GLASS, PEOPLE!

It baffles me that anyone would take the time to dedicate a site to something as stupid as that. It baffles me even further that I'm writing a post on how dumb I think it is.

Curses.

Oh yeah, James Bond movies, those are some classics. Like in Diamonds are Forever, when a satellite travelling through space STOPS in order to shoot a laser. And the objects hit by the laser glow red for a while before exploding.

Bios303 has a point, but I still think movies should aspire to including proper physics. For example, take Animal House. I can't find a single thing wrong with the parade scene.

I am probably the only one who read this going, "yeah! haha ha, YEAH! I always say that!"

They forgot to mention another convention that irks me. The way that fighters fly in space movies (star wars star trek, etc.) is that they have rockets on the back end and they bank and turn and dive and even sometimes have wing-like things, as though they were plying their way through an atmosphere. Because there is so mutch atmospehere in space. also, the rockets run continually, which in space would cause them to accelerate exponentially, not, as is depicted, cruise along maintaining a constant speed. (sigh) why do my friends tell me to shut up when I talk about this stuff?
Kymry

Honestly, it depends completely on the tone of the movie. For example, I had no problem with Back To the Future, despite the obvious ridiculous science.

Independence Day, on the other hand, was completely insulting and assinine. People outrunning the explosion of the city and then hiding in a little alcove? Then, the hero's wife miraculously finds the First Lady who not only survived the exploding city, but also a helicopter crash? I could go on...

aNOTHER FAVORITE MOVIE MOMENT, WHEN A TRAIN GOES UP AGAINST TWO STEALTH BOMBERS IN uNDER SIEGE 2.....AND THE TRAIN WINS. uM, YEAH.
kYMRY

That article really was interesting.

I agree skittles - but that's just what we call a BAD MOVIE. A movie can still be awesome and have retarded physics. Movie makers are movie makers, not scientists.

I am totally in agreement with Bios303. Go to the movies to HAVE FUN! This is not real life! I get mad when movies are typical. Don't give me the same formula a dozen other movies have. However, I do realize what I am watching is MAKE BELIEVE! I hate to be the one to tell you, but Independence Day was never intended to be a docu-drama. Just mindless fun. Why do computers in movies all use 1 inch font, because we'd all have to squint to read 8-point font. How can computer geeks do complicated programming in 20 seconds or less, because the average movie goer does not want to sit there for the next 40 hours watching someone type.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I am going to jump through my window, plummet four floors and land on the ground, on my feet and unhurt, so I can smoke a cigarrette.

Yeah, like in American Pie, you don't just pull down your pants and jam the pie on there. You get it all over yourself and your clothes! You have to do a little planning ahead so I wouldn't get ch............er...nevermind.

However, impacting pieces would have the same kinetic energy they had right next to the blast.

Someone should make a website about poor English on physics sites.

Why Spiderman and Batman movies suck -

You can fall faster than another person who's already 32 feet down if you really really want to.

At least Superman could accelerate with his super pooting or whatever it was that propelled him forward.

I remember the days before The Matrix, when you could watch an action movie that didn't have wireworks, a driving techno soundtrack or 'flo mo' effects.

To quote a friend of mine, there's a difference between suspending your disbelief and hanging it by the neck until dead. :-)

well OK...cars might not explode as soon as they hit something, but plenty do after burning a little....

which is what movie makers want.... run...the car is burning...oh no! Jump in slow mo! its gotta get blowed up!