Moral: If you can stop in time DO!
If you can’t, giving it some gas increases you chances of landing on the tires, rather than your head.

even without it will stumble on what we really are-us humans-AFTER they read “On Human

Nature” by E. O. Wilson. We can all learn from some serious thinking-before we eliminate

ourselves -or nature does it for us.

Moral: If you can stop in time DO!
If you can’t, giving it some gas increases you chances of landing on the tires, rather than your head.

A very realistic way to make it seem as though the viewer were actually in the movie…

~|K|~

The blue glow that comes from a nuclear reactor core is the real McCoy, but requires a really large amount of radioactivity to be visible. It is due to the effect of the ionizing radiation on the surrounding cooling water or surrounding air.

On another subject: Speed of sound.
The movie “Quigley Down Under” has Tom Sellick as an American sharpshooter in Australia. There is a scene in which he kills two (three?) men from a long distance away with his high-powered rifle. The single bullet went through the men, who were lined up together. There was only a very soft sound, and then the two men collapsed. Shortly afterward, the gun’s report was heard. Very nice effect to indicate the distances involved.

The movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” used the soundlessness of space to good effect, dramatically contrasting the relatively noisy interior of the spacecraft with the stark silence of the outside.

It actually IS possible for one PERSON to fall at a faster rate than another PERSON: this one time, at band camp, a saw a girl fall off of the drum major stand and the second on the stand hit the ground before her; it was mainly because the first girl bounced off some stuff like drum cases and whatnot, but is IS possible–I SAW IT, plus I read on the internet that you can take those “Fast Pills” like Wyle E. Coyote did…

The notion of a martial artist sailing through the air, kicking someone, and sending that person flying while the kicker doesn’t, is of course inaccurate. Also, most martial arts discourages flying kicks (or even high kicks) as having little practical use, and being dangerous. If you miss, you keep sailing to wherever you were headed. If you connect, your trajectory is affected, you have no power (just your own momentum), and you’ll bounce back. Bad form.

The preferred way is to retain firm contact with the ground, and (as I said) strike upwards. That gives you all your strength, which can be considerably more than your momentum when airborne. It uproots your opponent, causing him to get off balance or take flight completely. And it allows you to recover quickly if things don’t go exactly as planned.

Funnily, he didn’t say that about other movies, although he probably should have. Good thing I had a very decent physics teacher.

And regarding kicks: that the person flies is possible, yes, but wasteful. A real kung-fu fighter would kick a hole into you, not make you fly. The point of a deadly kick is to execute it so fast that the majority of the victim’s body stays where it is (due to inertia), while great trauma and deformation is caused around the point where the foot connected with the body.

Newtonian flight physics for spaceships (and even a mention of g-force effects on pilots), and rotating sections on all human spaceships for the gravity (the alien races have figured out artifical gravity, however).

Beam weapons are instant hit, no slow moving lasers there.

Admittedly they do have explosion sound effects, but hey, 3 out of 4 ain’t bad, right?

Oh, and why aren’t more people mentioning http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/ ? Not only does this cover all the above and then some, it includes actual conducted experiments to back themselves up. Not to mention damn funny.

http://www.corriere.it/Primo_Piano/Spettacoli/2007/03_Marzo/07/hollywo od.shtml

Congratulation! You have been paraphrasated!

My copy of the book does not have authors’ names attached on the individual articles, but his name was in the physics section of the book (which I kind of skipped going into the articles). So a mea culpa is in order: I am sorry to have omitted Prof. Muller’s name as the original author – it was unintentional, and had I been more diligent, this wouldn’t have happened. The post has been corrected to reflect his authorship.

Actually, I will have to go back and update the original author info for all the book-derived mental_floss articles on Neatorama.

As further credit to Prof. Muller, here’s his short contributor bio:

Richard A. Muller is a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley. His research includes astrophysics, geophysics, elementary physics, and climate. He has received a MacArthur Prize and the NSF Alan T. Waterman Award. He currently teaches a course called “Physics for Future Presidents.”

And lastly, yes, Neatorama does have permission to reprint the articles.

On a personal note, I actually took a physics course with Prof. Muller when I was in college at UCB. Go Bears!

You can push someone back a meter or so, since they often stagger whilst falling back and since when you kick you actually accelerate your entire body and use relativity to ensure that your foot has a lot more force then just your extending leg can exert. However in the movies they greatly exagerate this. Which is perfectly inline with your statement, and explaination of the physics. The shutgun is a more accurate display of this, since the person is generally not moving, a shotgun will not push you back, except for your feet staggering backwards from being hit with it. I’ve seen someone actually shot with a shotgun before, he fell backwards and bled.

However Number 7 shell shock has a few problems, a shell which hits at an angle with force, can create a non-symetrical explosion. Additionally a lot of shells just explode in a non-symetrical pattern, due to design flaws. Also if you’re talking about grenades / rpg’s the effective kill radius is about 6 feet, this is why you walk in a staggered and dispersed pattern out in the field, so a grenade should only be able to kill one person.

Also Ken wrote earlier:
If two people are falling, one person first followed by another person moments later, the second person cannot catch up to the first person in midair to save him or her.

A second person can catch up to the first person if the first person is less aero dynamic (Such as when skydiving the first person is in the boxman position and the second person is in a standing up position, he will be moving much faster). This is due to the drag being decreased in the second skydiver.

Either way, not a bad article.

Sorry, dude, but you’re wrong. I saw one explode in that Leslie Nielsen movie, and the car behind it barely tapped the Pinto.

Nope.

Some of the Apollo astonauts tried this. Didn’t work. There isn’t enough contact area to conduct enough sound to be audible.

Another SF plot device shot to bits by real life.

…say, if Richard Muller wrote this, he ought to get credit! (however, he might get more credit for things if he didn’t put typos into his own website address! The correct URL is muller.lbl.gov/ )

(Hopefully that was clear.)

The news story was staged, the gas cap was removed and very little gas was in the tank. This allowed lots of air to be mixed with the gas in the tank. Upon impact the car exploded, big surprise.

I found this site because one of my students said it covered some of the things I had said in class. Does this web site really have permission to reproduce that part of the book? Does the permission form that they presumably have on file mention anything about giving correct attribution to the author?

And in regards to everyone mentioning laser guns in various sci-fi movies; the guns are pretty clearly NOT shooting lasers. A quick laser blast wouldn’t do the kind of damage these weapons do, and they would move much faster. It’s pretty clear that they are only called lasers for convenience sake, while in the fictional setting they are actually some other sort of energy, whether it be plasma or some as of yet undiscovered substance.

Anyway, you left off the most prominent physics error seen in movies: If two people are falling, one person first followed by another person moments later, the second person cannot catch up to the first person in midair to save him or her. It doesn’t matter if the second person is heavier than the first person. Objects (or people) all fall at the same rate, it has nothing to do with how much they weigh.

We saw this mistake in Batman Forever, when Robin is ejected from a chute and seconds later Batman is dropped. Batman speeds up in midair (without any tools from his utility belt, just gravity at work) and saves Robin.

We also saw this in Spiderman when Mary Jane falls from the city hall building balcony and Spiderman jumps out and he too manages to speed up in midair and catch up to Mary Jane just before they hit the ground.

First, as noted, space isn’t completely empty. And just like the accelerated viewpoint of a blackhole provides a tenuous, but detectable, atmosphere, similarly accelerating through space will have the affect of causing those sparse molecules to look more and more like something that might exert some viscosity.

Second, once you start experiencing time dilation, there’s a consequence of relativity most people are unaware of. Because the speed of light must be measured the same in all frames of reference, different frames of reference see photons as being more or less energetic. Specifically, photons coming from your point of origin will be less energetic, while photons from your direction of travel will be more energetic (the ratio is the exact same as your current time dilation) – net effect being that you have more energy pushing on you from in front than in back, resulting in deceleration.

This effect acts at relativistic velocities as a sort of space-friction… sapping inertia in a way very similarly to air viscosity would in an atmosphere.

Other than that one piece of bad info, good article.

falls usually depend on projectile motion which is determined by the weight of an object and the velocity that it is travelling at the point of fall. if a car was travellin at an extremely high speed, it would still be able to clear a gap

You’re forgetting you’re standing on a floor here, if you kick someone across the room they’ll be flying in the air hence the force negating them is the air resistance which is minimal in force, the friction of the floor will take out a lot of this equal momentum, momentum can also be exerted within your joints inside your body but its mainly friction

just think about it like this, if i pushed someone on concrete i would be unlikely to fall back myself
but if i pushed them on ice, yes i might go back the same distance or roughly as which i pushed them

different surfaces, different friction, different forces exerted on your bodily joints and mass in relation to gravity

Biologicals vs. radiation: important point here is to remember that the measurement unit Gy is a unit of radiation absorbed by tissues (i.e. how much you should care , which is affected more by tissues in question and the type of radiation in question. If you are ‘irradiated’, your tissues have absorbed radiation in the form of cell damage. Would be nice if you could radiate that away, but no such luck; this is why medical personnel can go in to treat a patient of radiation therapy as soon as the treatment is over without fear of being exposed themselves. For example in the case of the spy the concern was for people exposed at the same time as the spy; if the source of radiation was something he carried with him unknowingly, people he met during that time might have been exposed (though of course total irradiation much less due to the smaller time involved).

One popular tv show which featured Newtonian physics in space battles was Babylon 5, which managed to even make it look cool, with all kinds of clearly space-only maneuvers, as well as ships losing power drifting far out battles if without power. This has also been tried in a number computer games (I-War for example), and while requiring some getting used to, turned out to be both doable and logical after a little while.

The initial #4 and the following commentaries both have a point in them. Yes, it is possible to kick people backwards without flying back yourself, by e.g. assuming a proper martial arts stance. In think the point in #4 is that in order to punch or kick anyone across a room would result in at least multiple fractures, if not in catastrophic implosion of hand or leg bones. Compare energy needed to kick someone 10 meters away with dropping from a height of 10 meters, and add the upward power needed to keep the target aloft for the distance. Not to mention breaking, say, causing the target to break a concrete wall at that distance. Boom.

A pure hypothetical: one could also imagine that a laser cannon with sufficient power to destroy spaceships from ranges of several kilometers would have sufficient power to cause interplanetary/stellar dust to emit radiation, which could result in visible laser shots. I’m sure someone will correct me in this …

So; movies are fun, but trying to learn physics from them can be awkward and dangerous .

My major space gripe is that in sci-fi films there seems to be no up or down, everything exists on one plane. At the end of Return of the Jedi, when the rebel forces are caught between the Death Star and the empirial ships, they say “OMG WE’RE TRAPPED!”. But they could have just gone UP or DOWN, and saved a whole load of bother.