Physics in Film

Remember when I told you in class that people will sometimes try to prey on your ignorance and convince you of things that simply aren’t true, and they often make their arguments sound plausible by using scientific terms and “facts?” Well, another example of this are those who promulgate the myth that NASA never landed astronauts on the Moon. The FOX network helped the cause a few years ago by producing a show called “Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land On The Moon?”. Fortunately, there are scientists and other respectable parties who have taken the time to rebut these theories. For instance, Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy page deals quite straightforwardly with this controversy. And now the “MythBusters” television show has added their own contribution to debunking this myth. Their “NASA Moon Landing” episode originally aired on the Discovery Channel last night, but is scheduled to repeat again tonight. Here is the programming schedule for “MythBusters” for this week.

After you create your blogs in class next Thursday (9/4), be sure to send me the address so I can add you to my blogroll. If you do not wish for your blog to be viewable by other members of the class, please inform me so that I can make a private link to your blog (so that only I can see it). If you have further privacy concerns regarding your blog, please bring them up with Mendi Benigni next week in class, and she can discuss additional security measures you can take.

The first “Speed” movie enjoyed moderate box office success, so Hollywood of course felt compelled to make a sequel. Unfortunately they were really stretching for a plot in this one (even more so than the first). Alas, sometimes our “Physics in Film” class is not about reviewing the best movies, but about reviewing movies that have something to teach us (good or bad) about physics. In this movie, most of the physics is bad (other than obvious things like boats float and planes fly). But we’re not to the point in the semester yet where we’re really ready to judge good or bad physics (although most of you probably already know enough to make some good guesses). Before we can begin applying the laws of physics we need to learn how to make scientific observations – these will be our “experiments.” To make a useful observation, you first need to decide what to observe. Not everything happening in the world around you or in a movie scene is relevant to the questions you are trying to answer at the time. For instance, if you’re trying to figure out if a person really can bodysurf behind a seaplane, it’s not terribly relevant how long the line is that the person is holding onto. More relevant is how fast the plane is traveling and how large the person is (to estimate their drag). Once you’ve filtered the relevant from the irrelevant information, you can set about the task of actually making your measurements. In movie scenes, this isn’t always easy. You can’t pull out a measuring stick or put the object in question on a scale. You may need to step through scenes one frame at a time so you can carefully analyze the images. You may need to estimate unknown lengths in scenes by using objects of known size that are also in the scene to set the scale. You may occasionally need to resort to outside resources to help you. For instance, in our example, you may need to go online to see how fast a seaplane usually travels just before take-off. Finally, you may have to make some educated guesses.

Assignment: This week I want you to analyze at least 3 scenes from the movie “Speed 2.” I want you to: 1) state what physical questions you are trying to answer in each scene; 2) state what the relevant quantities are you would need to measure to answer your posed questions; and 3) give me your best estimates for those quantities and some explanation of how you came up with your estimates. To make things more consistent for me, I would like everyone to use the scene of the cruise ship colliding with the dock as one of your scenes. Other scenes you might consider are the opening motorcycle chase sequence, the cruise ship colliding with the oil tanker, or the seaplane colliding with the oil tanker. Or choose some of your own scenes. In making your estimates, you can use whatever units you like (whatever is convenient for you, just don’t forget to include units). For instance, you might use the common American unit of a foot for measuring length. However, I also want you to convert your measurements into metric units (meters, kilograms, seconds, etc.) There are a variety of tools available on the web to help you do this. REMEMBER, the point of this assignment is NOT to measure every possible quantity in a scene, it’s to measure the relevant quantities. So at least half of the task on this assignment is judging what’s relevant. And you can only do that AFTER you’ve decided what question you’re trying to answer.

Please post your answers to your blog by Monday, 8 Sep.

Ch. 1 – Don’t Try this at Home
Ch. 1 – ISMP

This week there are 2 “homework” tasks you need to accomplish:

1. Take the “start of term survey.” Click here to take survey.

2. Sign up for an edublogs account here.

Both of these need to be done by next week (2 Sep).

I don’t think we’re going to officially discuss this movie as part of the course this semester, but I wanted to include a review of it anyway. My reason for doing so is that this movie represents one of the more serious reasons I think a course like “Physics in Film” is important.  The main goal of the class, of course, is to teach some basic principles of physics in a fun and enlightening way. In a sense it’s an experiment in teaching for me and an experiment in learning for you. But why might it be important for college-educated people to have some basic knowledge of physics? One reason is to avoid being duped by people with an agenda. Now, almost everyone has an agenda – mine, right now, is to teach you physics. Many people’s agendas are good-intentioned and basically harmless. Others are not – a person committing asault and battery has an agenda that is anything but harmless to the victim. Anyway, this movie presents itself as an alternative view of science, an “awakening” to a new reality, cryptically subtitled “Down the Rabbit Hole.” What it’s really pushing is a form of religious mysticism associated with the followers of Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Bleep_Do_We_Know%3F). Of course they don’t tell you that in the movie; they instead interweave a fictional tale of a deaf photographer with extended (in my opinion exhausting) monologues that are couched in the language of quantum physics (using terms like entangled states, uncertainty principle, superposition of states, the observer effect, etc.), yet address topics completely unrelated to that field of science (How can we say we’re in love? What is consciousness? What is reality? Who, what, or where is God?). Please understand, I feel that all of these are legitimate questions to ask, but quantum physics is in no way designed to answer them, so it is inappropriate and misleading to try to draw an association. Apparently the movie’s creators were so bent on furthering their agenda that they were willing to take great liberties with editing the film. At least one of the scientists appearing in the film has come out since its 2004 release to complain about how his views were completely misrepresented (see http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2004-10/cult-science). The trouble is that an unsuspecting and untrained audience may be tempted to take this movie at face value, as a legitimate revolution in our understanding of science and religion, whereas in my opinion, it is just a collection of creatively edited snippets of dubious credibility interspersed within a completely fictional story. Unfortunately, without actually understanding quantum physics, it’s almost impossible to distinguish where the movie is on sound scientific ground and where it’s just blowing smoke, and it’s just this kind of ignorance that the movie’s creators are banking on (literally, since the movie grossed over $10 million).

Hey, just for fun, here’s a cool link one of my former students shared with me this morning – The Physics of Batman. It’s a review by Adam Weiner, author of “Don’t Try This At Home: The Physics of Hollywood Movies,” of some of the physics in the latest Batman movie “The Dark Knight.”

Welcome to PHYS 298 – “Physics in Film!” It’s about time to start the Fall 2008 semester here at the College of Charleston. I’m looking forward to some fun discussions! How about you?