Hollywood Science: Difference between revisions
Rescuing 1 sources and tagging 0 as dead.) #IABot (v2.0.9.2
m (Mass update links) |
(Rescuing 1 sources and tagging 0 as dead.) #IABot (v2.0.9.2) |
||
| (7 intermediate revisions by 4 users not shown) | |||
Line 1:
{{trope}}
[[File:iwilldosciencetoit-
{{quote|"''I'm a filmmaker, not a scientist.''"|'''[[Roland Emmerich]]'''}}
Line 8:
When it comes to science and history, we can't expect the writers to get all the facts right. Maybe we ''should'' be able to expect this, but such expectations will lead to disappointment. To be fair, though, good story will always trump good science.
If it's an ''intentional'' change from real science, it's not
It's not always a bad thing. See [[Artistic License]].
'''Types of
* [[The Air Not There]]
Line 23:
** [[Gravity Sucks]]
** [[Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale]]
** [[Weird Moon]]
** [[Weird Sun]]
* [[Artistic License: Biology]]
** [[Devolution Device]]
** [[Evolution Power-Up]]
Line 57:
** [[Space Friction]]
** [[Stealth in Space]]
* [[Square-
* [[Technicolor Science]]
* [[Variable Terminal Velocity]]
Line 64:
As [[Science Marches On]], mistakes can result from discoveries made after the show was written. In these cases, we must forgive the writers, since they had no way of knowing. Thus, [[I Want My Jetpack]] and [[The Great Politics Mess-Up]] are not really
{{examples}}
Line 72:
* Almost anything where someone or something is in danger of falling into a black hole. A black hole produces the same gravity as a normal object of the same mass and distance. It only can produce higher gravity than a normal object when you get closer to its center of mass than you can for a normal object. (Without going ''inside'' the object, where the gravity from parts of it starts to cancel out). You can still fall into a black hole like you can fall into the Sun, but the idea of a black hole as a sort of space vacuum cleaner is right out.
** If you're outside the event horizon, you can escape if your engines are strong enough. Once you cross the event horizon, ''nothing whatsoever'' can get you out, period. Physics acts differently inside a black hole. Not that there'd be much [[Inertial Dampening|"you"]] left at that point.
* [[Montage
* ''[[Armageddon]]'' is loaded with
* An incredibly horrible example from ''Bad Boys 2'': A truck carrying some cars is traveling at very high speed. One of the cars falls off but is still attached to the truck by a chain. It hits the ground and digs in, thus acting like an anchor. Said truck's rate of acceleration actually seems to increase!
* A good example of bizarre Hollywood logic can be found in the movie ''[[Batman and Robin (
* In ''[[Batman Begins]]'', the microwave device intended to vaporize all the water in Gotham City is turned on ''with people standing right next to it.'' Keeping in mind that people are 80% water, this is just one of the more obvious reasons why the city-threat plot device is implausible.
** They ''did'' say the microwave device was a weapon, and would as such almost certainly be a ''focused'' beam, and when they turn on the device, the beam is directed downwards, away from the people standing next to it. But turning it on inside a massive steel tram car ''above'' the ground and vaporizing water from pipes ''under'' the ground, while there are lots and lots of people standing ''on'' the ground is an exercise in absolute stupidity.
* While we're on the subject of Nolanverse Batman, ''[[The Dark Knight]]'s'' "sonar phone" [[Deus Ex Machina]] has caught much flak for its... let's be nice and just say "implausibility".
* ''[[A Beautiful Mind]]'' features a scene in which John Nash explains his "Nash Equilibria" his big discovery that eventually won him the Nobel (Memorial) Prize in Economics. He explains it as "there are 4 guys at a bar, there are a bunch of ok looking brunettes and one hot blond. If everybody hits on the blond she will be turned off by the attention and turn all of them down, but then all the brunettes will be turned off by the fact that the guys are only hitting on them after the blond and thus the guys will all go home alone, but in the movie the "Nash Equilibrium" is to all make an agreement to snub the blond and go for the brunettes and thus for all of the guys to get laid." The problem is that a Nash Equilibrium is when no parties can improve their own situation by acting independently which the solution from the movie does not fulfill as any of the guys who was going to hit on the brunette could at the last moment switch to hitting on the blond. The real Nash Equilibrium is to agree before hand for one of the guys to hit on the blond with all the other guys to agree to hit on brunettes.
* Many a [[Disaster Movie]]. The most ridiculous, though, is definitely ''[[The Core]]''. Magnets do not affect energy, regardless of what the movie says. A very tiny portion of the sun's energy hits Earth. Radio signals do not penetrate thick rock. Energy and sound waves diffuse as they travel and become distorted. 1,000 Megatons of force is far too weak to restart the Earth's core. A cave with 5,000 degree heat and 10,000,000 psi of pressure would collapse. Oxygen exposed to high pressure becomes a highly unstable polymer. Many more examples exist, but these are quite egregious. Weirdly, the portrayal of the space shuttle in Earth orbit -- "upside down" relative to
** The most egregious of all is the premise: That a new Defense Department system has somehow ''stopped the Earth's core from rotating relative to the Earth.'' What became of the core's momentum and kinetic energy is never explained.
** A few of the promotional interviews for the movie involved the man who was the 'scientific adviser' for the film, who had a bit of an "it could have been worse" attitude. Apparently, the original script called for the Plot Bus to have ''a window''.
* Some people, though, [[So Bad It's Good|enjoy these sillier aspects of such movies]], citing them as [[Rule of Fun|part of the fun]]. ''[[Deep Impact]]'', however, was [[Narm|supposed to be serious]], which arguably [[Dan Browned|makes its inaccuracies worse]]. For instance, the four nuclear devices causing a clean cut in the comet (as shown in a graphic in the movie) is impossible on several levels.
** One troper's Astronomy teacher in college was a science adviser on ''Deep Impact''. They ignored most of what he said, except for his strong warning about the ridiculousness of having astronauts hopping around on the surface of a comet as though they were on the Moon (if you were standing on a comet you more than likely wouldn't be able to tell there was ''any'' gravity, period); the scene was altered. Of course, he also got a cameo out of the deal (balding guy in mission control, even has a line).
* Skipping blithely over the [[Artistic License: Biology|biology]] in ''[[Evolution (
** It also depicts evolution as inevitable progress towards intelligent mammals, while a line in another part of the film correctly states that natural selection doesn't favor complex animals over simple ones. And it depicts a simple soft-bodied crawling invertebrate as having a mouth on the dorsal surface and an anus on the ventral surface, while every real-life analog is the other way around. On the other hand, [[Rule of Funny|it's a comedy]].
* ''[[Fantastic Four (
* ''[[Godzilla]]''. [[Attack of the 50
* In ''[[
* ''[[The Rocketeer (
* ''[[Spider Man 2]]'' has a depiction of nuclear fusion that is almost, but not entirely, completely unlike real fusion techniques.
* ''[[Total Recall]]'' has a fairly bizarre example: in the film, Mars' core is supposedly ''made of ice'' in defiance of density and temperature
** Also, when the villain explodes by being sucked out of the building on to the surface of Mars.... there are many, many things wrong with this. For one, Mars is not a vacuum, it has an atmosphere (Though to be fair, not much of one, so the surface pressure would be much lower than the interior of the building which had Earth-like atmosphere). Even if it was a total vacuum, going from Earth atmospheric pressure to a total vacuum will not make anybody explode. The human body is much more resilient than that - astronauts have lost pressurization in parts of their suits while doing space walks and come back only noting a mild discomfort in the part which had been de-pressurized. Full body vacuum exposure will kill you, but from suffocation, not from exploding.
* ''[[Twister]]:'' The antics of the chasers in the movie would get real chasers killed in the field. Add into this that they get some chaser terminology wrong, some of the science of tornadoes and other severe weather wrong, and that the climax is {{spoiler|the heroes riding out a violent tornado just by tying themselves down when they would have been ground into beef by the debris is real life}}, it is little wonder that this movie is watched by chasers and meteorologists [[Snark Bait|just to mock it mercilessly]].
** Not to mention the fact that a twister can well outdistance a human on foot and thus it would be impossible for the protagonists to run away from them as they did several times. It's also fairly obvious how the speed of the twisters are changed to suit the scene's needs.
* ''Buffalo Soldier'' contains a scene where someone in charge of a large-scale heroin synthesis operation warns that if the solution hits boiling point, dire consequences will occur. Conveniently enough, as we later discover during a dramatic close-up on a thermometer, it boils at exactly 100 °C. (Even if it were to hit the actual boiling point of ~270 °C, the result wouldn't have been nearly as explosive as shown in the film.)
* ''[[Equilibrium]]'' has the concept of [[Gun Kata]], a combat martial art whereby it is possible to determine the locations of opponents in a gunfight and their most likely lines of fire, breaking it down into a statistical formula that can be memorized to allow the Grammaton Cleric to evade incoming fire and shoot back at his opponents without looking. Needless to say, this ''doesn't'' work in [[Real Life]], as actual gunbattles are based around cover, maneuver, and lines of sight, and can be extremely unpredictable and chaotic. They are virtually impossible to control, let alone analyze for statistical study, and the vast range of variables inherent to a gunfight simply cannot be predicted.
* ''All About Steve'' has a case of this, among other things. What was the deal with that hurricane getting downgraded into a mere tornado?
Line 113:
** And writers who don't even bother to look terms up when they're ''trying'' to be accurate, as when the term "distal phalange" was used to describe a pinky bone. "Distal" is a correct description for a fingertip-bone, but "phalanx" is the proper singular of "phalanges". Somebody put the dictionary away too soon.
* ''[[Black Hole High]]'' seems to want to convince children that science is kind of cool. Unfortunately, "science" is taken to generally mean, "String random scientific terms together and claim this makes sense somehow."
** For example, the space around a metal ball "loses its gravitational field" therefore, it "makes perfect sense" that it would not only float, but would ''accelerate'' every time it collided with
** Also, physics seems generally flexible. This has something to do with the nearby black hole. That a nearby black hole could alter the normal behavior of the laws of physics is entirely reasonable. That it doesn't just destroy the planet ''isn't''. And that it might alter physics in such a way that it can be [[Straw Vulcan|trumped by one's emotional state or plot-induced personality flaws]] is... well... Television.
** "Probability" takes the cake. This week's anomaly inverts the bell curve, inverting "likely" and "unlikely", as a result of Marshall's writing a list of predictions for the future. The last of these is that a science club member will die. As the science club members each narrowly survive dangerous accidents, they "realize" that they are now safe, as the laws of probability say that to be so endangered once in a day is at the "far edge of the bell-curve" and therefore it is nigh-impossible for such an accident to happen twice to the same person. This ultimately leaves Marshall in mortal peril as he is the only member of the club not to be "pre-disastered", until he has his own narrow escape. All this adds up to Professor Zachary being patently unqualified to teach probability. If it worked that way, a lot of gamblers would be rich men now: the idea that one unlikely random event happening could make other independent random events less likely is the ''single biggest fallacy in all of probability''
** Worse, even if probability worked like that, the ''whole idea of the episode'' is that the laws of probability have been inverted, so if the odds really ''had'' gotten worse, it should have made their deaths ''more'' likely.
* ''[[CSI: Miami]]'': "Prey": A suspect's IP address is traced as 359.33.9.234. This is actually a new variety of [[555]] (while intentionally avoiding private IP address, like 10.X.Y.Z, 172.16.X.Y or 192.168.X.Y). All of those examples are possible with IPv4. The '''exact''' behaviour is not defined, but most systems will do modulo 256 on all four numbers. This was used in many movies to create weird IPs that people who know just enough to recognize an address think it's ''bad'', while those that decide to try ''hacking'' end up attacking for example 127.0.0.1
** To be fair to CSI, an IP starting 10 or 192.168 would also be problematic... those ranges are different to [[555]] in that 555-numbers are normal phone numbers that just aren't (or weren't) used... however the private IP ranges ''are'' used, but aren't normal... and their use in the CSI scene would be just as worthy of appearing in this list (whoa, this hacker is hacking via the Internet, but from a private IP!)
** It's even worse in "Big Brother", where the last numbers of the IP addresses have ''four'' digits. Also note that IP v6 would use Base 16, where 1) 255 would appear as FF, 2) numbers are separated by colons, not periods; and 3) the numbers are based on 8-digit binary numbers (known as a byte), so IP numbers would ''still'' never rise above 255, which is 11111111 in binary.
* The writers of the third season of ''[[Heroes (TV series)|Heroes]]'' clearly have no idea how solar eclipses work, giving us a total solar eclipse within a year of the previous one, which is visible ''all over the world'' for several hours. Oh, and it has some sort of effect on people's genes. Right.
* In the ''[[Doctor Who]]'' serial ''City of Death'', the Mona Lisa plays a significant role as [[MacGuffin]], but the painting shown is much larger than the actual Mona Lisa (most people who have never seen it in person would be surprised by how small it actually is). It's also depicted as being painted on canvas, not wood. Even the ''My Favorite Martian'' episode with time-travelling da Vinci got that part right.
* The Mona Lisa is also too large in ''Mona Lisa's Revenge'', a story of ''[[
* ''[[CSI]]'' is often accused of Hollywood Science; which arguable applies to the time compression more or less necessary for dramatic purposes. Early on in the show's run, the producers stated that they made the science deliberately bad, to avoid becoming a primer on evading detection for budding criminals.
* In one episode of ''[[How I Met Your Mother]]'', a character waits for a phone call at 11pm at night from Germany. Although there is a six-hour time difference between New York and Germany, Germany is six hours ''ahead'': 11pm in New York is 5'''am''' in Germany, not 5pm.
Line 130:
* Spoofed in ''[[Odyssey 5]]''. At one stage the Odyssey team consult an abrasive sci-fi writer clearly based on [[Harlan Ellison]] (who conceived the series). As they can't tell him the truth (that they've travelled back in time five years to avert the destruction of the Earth) the team pretend they're writing a science fiction novel. The sci-fi writer goes into detail on how cliched and scientifically implausible their 'novel' is.
* ''[[Stargate Atlantis]]'' featured an episode where one of the heroes had a hard time closing a space station's bulkhead because the ''air rushing out'' kept blowing him back. We can assume that he didn't seal himself on the "You die now" side of things, so it seems that air pressure flows from low to high in the world of Stargate.
* ''[[Star Trek:
** Another episode had the cast using what they probably thought was a high number - one to the twenty-fifth power, which is...one. What they probably meant was 1 x 10^25, which is 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000.
* ''[[
** Or someone noticed the shared syllables in Nitrogen, Nitroglycerine, and Trinitrotolulene. Again.
* On ''[[Veronica Mars]]'', Veronica and her dad ring in the new year by watching the ball drop in Times Square. Three hours earlier. (It should be noted, however, that the Times Square festivities are in fact broadcast "live" on the West Coast on a three-hour tape delay.)
Line 138:
** Somewhat justified by the acknowledgement that, at least in some cases, the laws of nature and physics don't follow those of the real world.
* In the 1977 ''[[Doctor Who]]'' serial ''The Robots of Death'', a character dismisses the Doctor's explanation of what's going on as impossible, and the Doctor retorts that bumblebees fly even though that's also "impossible". This is an urban legend which has been traced back [[wikipedia:Bumblebee#Flight|to at least 1934]] if not earlier and is based on applying equations to bumblebee flight that were known to be the wrong ones even back then.
* ''[[
Line 146:
** To be fair, the "Infragreen" dome itself is yellow while the rest of the references are green. Perhaps a developer tried to make an optics joke that was misunderstood by others.
*** And perhaps Gnomes visible light spectrum ends with green instead of red as ours, which would make it just fine to use infragreen for red, yellow and all the other colors with lower frequency than green.
**** To be even ''more'' fair, this is Gnomes we are talking about. Gnomish Engineering includes such gems as the [[Exactly What It Says
Line 152:
* In ''[[Captain SNES]]'', this is invoked deliberately: Alex points out to his captor that Videoland doesn't have science; rather, it has ''Science!!''. Basically, Videoland science works on [[Rule of Cool|what's cool or useful]], not by logic or by real-world science.
* [[Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal]] parodies this [http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1804#comic here].
* ''[[
== Web Original ==
* Parodied, like nearly everything else, in ''[[Italian Spiderman]]''.
* The classic website [https://web.archive.org/web/20131030162524/http://www.aycyas.com/ And You Call Yourself a Scientist!] is devoted to pointing out the numerous examples of bad science in cinema.
* Likewise, [[The Nostalgia Chick]]'s video "Playing God" has numerous helpful tips about how to stop science going wrong in movies.
Line 168:
== Real Life ==
* ''Hollywood Science'' was also an Open University program run on [[The BBC]], which attempted to assess the scientific validity of several events from movies including ''[[
{{reflist}}
[[Category:Medical Drama]]
[[Category:Artistic License]]
Line 177 ⟶ 176:
[[Category:Hollywood Style]]
[[Category:Steampunk Index]]
[[Category:This Index Will Kill You]]
[[Category:
[[Category:
| |||