Hollywood Density: Difference between revisions

Writers frequently misapply, distort, or outright forget about the concept of density and its implications. This results in such oddities as most metals, including gold, being treated as weighing the same as an equivalent volume of iron or steel, with the possible exceptions of aluminum (famous for weighing less) and lead (famous for weighing a lot). The only thing typically treated as denser than lead is matter from a neutron star, by orders of magnitude -- theremagnitude—there's apparently nothing in between.

* In ''[[Umineko no Naku Koro ni]]'' episode 11, Rose puts a brick-sized gold bar into the bag of her nine-year old daughter Maria, who doesn't react even slightly to the weight that must be close to 60 pounds! However, just a bit later Rosa uses the same bag as a blunt weapon with extreme effectiveness -- consistencyeffectiveness—consistency was just too much trouble, apparently. In the Visual Novel, the ingot is given an approximate weight of, I believe, around 11 kilograms; in addition, it's directly stated that she carries is in a blanket which she later use as a weapon against the {{spoiler|goatmen attacking her and Maria}}

* ''[[X-Men]]'': Piotr Rasputin has an official weight of 114  kg, and a height of 198  cm. When transforming into his [[Chrome Champion|metal form]], his height becomes 226  cm, while his weight doubles to 228  kg. Assuming these numbers are correct, refers to him turning into metal instead of just gaining a metal coating, his human density is roughly equal to 1  kg/l, his metal form would have a density of 1.35  kg/l, or about half the density of aluminium. The kicker? The metal he transforms into is explicitly compared to osmium, the element with the highest density (22.6  kg/l, or exactly twice as dense as lead). If his metal form actually was osmium, Colossus would weight 3826  kg.

* [[Soft Water|Water is soft,]] and according to many, many disaster movies, very light. [[Most Writers Are Human|Most of us use water every day,]] and we expect it to flow around anything it encounters that is denser than air. However, one liter (1 cubic decimeter) of water weighs one kilogram. This means that every cubic meter of water weighs 1,000  kg, or 2,204.6  lbs. ''This'' means that a 7-foot wall of water hits a building with 3.1 pounds per square inch, which is comparable to an explosion at close range. Now, scale this up to the 300-foot wave in ''[[The Day After Tomorrow]]'' or the 3500-foot wave in ''[[Deep Impact]]''. Bomb shelters built to withstand megaton nuclear blasts ''might'' survive, but they would be very hard-pressed.

* Pavel Bazhov's ''Malachite Casket'' happily averts this -- itthis—it ''is'' a collection of miners' fairytales, after all. In one story the hero doesn't let himself to be deceived by the [[Fair Folk]] because he knows ''exactly'' how heavy the gold is, so he immediately sees that the teenage girl effortlessly holding a tray full of gold sand, ingots and lumps (that would weigh hundreds of kilos in [[Real Life]]) is a fake.

* At the other end of the scale, one episode of ''[[CSI]]'' has the team investigating a casino heist, supposedly of ten million dollars in cash. Grissom realizes the money would weigh around two hundred pounds -- farpounds—far too much for one man (seen in security footage) to practically carry. (It isn't stated, but it would also be unfeasibly bulky.)

** And since it keeps coming up, many of these games give you a strict limit to how much equipment you can carry, say, 100  lbs. And then lets you carry around, on your person, hundreds of thousands of units (typically coins) of gold which don't factor into encumbrance ''at all''.

** The problem with various [[Role Playing Game|Role Playing Games]]s, especially those based on on (A)D&D is the cost of not so rare items that sometimes reaches hundreds of thousands "gold pieces". This is actually magnitude of late medieval war contributions and budgets of duchies or smaller kingdoms.

* The info in the Pokédex in ''[[Pokémon]]'' frequently applies this to living things, giving weights that are often ridiculously heavy or light: Wailord is 14.5 m long, yet only weights about 400  kg.

** In ''[[The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall|Daggerfall]]'', when the shop had been bought out of its money, a nondescript letter of credit was issued. You could never be over-encumbered with too many 0.25lb25 lb pieces of paper placed directly into your inventory by shop-keeps. On the other hand, you could never pick up anything else until you returned under normal inventory weight limits.

** Don't forget Link in...well, every ''Zelda'' game ever. But especially ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time|The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time]]'', where he can swing his giant hammer almost as well as his sword, and the Iron Boots only make him sink if he's wearing them -- notthem—not while he has them stored inside his other boots (or wherever it is that they go).

* In ''[[Uncharted]]: Drake's Fortune'', Nate realizes the golden statue they're looking for was brought to the island when he looks at some old freight logs and notices something weighing "about 500 pounds". A cube of gold that weighed 500 pounds would have about 8.94 inches (22.7  cm) to a side. The statue they find looks like it should weight several ''tons'' at least.

* ''[[Puss in Boots (animation)|Puss in Boots]]'' averts this in the scene where the heroes discover the golden eggs--theyeggs—they're too heavy for any of them to lift a single one, so they take the goose that laid them instead. It's played straight in every other scene with gold, where dozens of those same eggs are carried around in a single cart and casually thrown around, as well as Puss-in-Boots's flashback where Humpty is able to move around two huge bags of gold.

* Often, actors who handle fake human limbs without realizing that actual body parts are much heavier than you'd think they are. We tend to forget that because legs and arms seem to move around so easily. Of course, so do cars. Since it's something most people wouldn't really know about, it can be excused as a case of [[Reality Is Unrealistic]]. The weight of human body parts can be roughly calculated by the "rule of nines." The head is 9%, the torso is 18%, the abdomen is 18%, each arm is 9%, each leg is 18% (with 1% left over). So, if you weigh 80  kg (175  lbs), each of your arms is about 7  kg (15  lbs), and each of your legs is about 15  kg (30  lbs), give or take.

* There is a story about a nobleman coming into the lab of a scientist working with platinum. He complained it was a bad joke -- gluingjoke—gluing the metal to the table.