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?