Pedantic Dickweedery At The Movies
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Alex Weinberg is a structural engineer who has a big problem with how movies portray the destruction of bridges, and is particularly upset about suspension bridges.
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Whenever I see an article like this I am reminded of a piece I read many
years ago where some "scientist" explained why most of the technology
in Star Trek can't actually work. And a couple of years ago celebrity
astronomer Neil Degrasse Tyson wrote a piece about the "scientific
inaccuracies" in the George Clooney/Sandra Bullock move Gravity.Well, these are two totally different things. The first one can completely change the way we think about the world and see it, the other (Star Trek) one is an obvious hoax and doesn't change your world view.
I have no problem with people pointing out inaccuracies in movies, especially since a lot of those inaccuracies comes from plain laziness and lack of attention to detail. If hundreds of millions of dollars is spent on a movie, they could spare a million or a half and work with experts to make it realistic.
Just sayin'.
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He missed I, Robot, one of the most blatantly wrong examples. And it was a MAJOR plot point in that movie.
Asimov was an idiot in that respect, anyway. As if you needed to be telepathic in order to know that humans can feel other pain than physical injury.
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What? You don't just fire a ground-based rocket and it reaches the sun 10 seconds later, with immediately visible results?
Glad to see someone else was annoyed by that.I don't mind fictional science and engineering in these sorts of shows, but things like that break my suspension of disbelief; that's why I don't like them. If it's something technically obscure then I don't mind too much, but I'd hope that "it takes more than 10 seconds for a rocket to get to the sun" would be at least moderately well known. I might be wrong in that.
inb4 "the rocket had a teeny warp drive, and/or the star was a brown dwarf and the planet was really close to it"
The other thing that annoyed me was "If someone imploded the sun, how would that affect the trajectory" being answered with "it would do this" rather than "it would obviously depend on when they did it, here's a band of possible outcomes". You could still have the "hey, that band goes through the orbit of that planet!" realisation to drive the plot.
Of course if we're talking about normal physics forces the correct answer would be "it wouldn't make any difference", but that's another kettle of fish :)
He missed I, Robot, one of the most blatantly wrong examples. And it was a MAJOR plot point in that movie.
I've managed to forget all the details of seeing that movie, leaving only the general impression that it really sucked. Care toexplaindescribe the plot point in question?
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@FrostCat said:
What? That's actually true. Generalizing, pretty much all waves do that, including light.
I know, right?
As previously explained by @HardwareGeek and @Rhywden, the wavelength does change but the frequency does not.Asimov was an idiot in that respect, anyway. As if you needed to be telepathic in order to know that humans can feel other pain than physical injury.
He didn't in fact say that it was necessary. That's just the device he used to give that ability to a robot that wasn't supposed to be programmed to understand non-physical harm. Depending on which stories you read, that sort of programming is either considered to be beyond the state of the art, or possible but (as it would be) much more complicated and therefore expensive than understanding physical harm. Both interpretations can be upheld, since the stories cover a long time span during which the state of the art improves enormously.
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He didn't in fact say that it was necessary.
No, but only telepathic robots react to hurt feelings as dictated by the three (four) laws. Other robots say shit like "you appear to be distressed".that sort of programming is either considered to be beyond the state of the art, or possible but (as it would be) much more complicated and therefore expensive than understanding physical harm. Both interpretations can be upheld, since the stories cover a long time span during which the state of the art improves enormously.
That's bullshit. My three-year-old cries exactly the same whether she knocks her head on something or she can't have another chocolate. So if a primitive robot can recognize the one, it must be able to recognize the other.(In later novels he gets better at it, for instance the Solarian robots that have to discipline the children they are bringing up need "special programming". But in the Susan Calvin era it's bullshit.)
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But then they place "landmarks" where they shouldn't be. It'd be like a couple of actors in a movie set in New York said "the Brooklyn bridge is closed, let's take the Golden Gate instead!". The Golden Gate bridge isn't in New York, and the fact that they'd take it breaks the internal consistency of the movie.
There was something like that (though not on the same scale) in True Lies. I forget what, exactly, but it was like they drove through a wormhole to get from, like, Georgetown directly into Alexandria or something (for those not familiar with the geography, there's a big river between the two). I remember it being jarring when I first watched it. Now we just laugh. I still like the movie, though.
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Care to explaindescribe the plot point in question?
The big AI in the building was "retiring" the older robots that she wasn't able to remote control. Before he died, the farmer from Babe programmed the location of the older robots in the new one's subconscious in the form of an image of a wrongly broken suspension bridge defying all laws of physics.
It turned out the building AI was storing all the older robots in a container port(?) under the busted bridge, and the warp engineer from Star Trek First Contact figured the good robot would be able to recruit them to help fight the building AI, but by the time he gets there the newer robots are killing all the older ones.
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What? That's actually true. Generalizing, pretty much all waves do that, including light.
Citation for whatever, also this.
Apparently wavelength is inversely proportional to frequency so long as the speed of light/energy remains the same.
If wavelength and energy change due to passing through some medium, it is entirely possible for the frequency to remain the same, I guess?I dunno, somehow I'm screwing up multiplication in algebra.
Filed under: I do maths wrong, because there is no real requirement for doing math right!
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@FrostCat said:
What? That's actually true. Generalizing, pretty much all waves do that, including light.
Citation for whatever, also this.
Apparently wavelength is inversely proportional to frequency so long as the speed of light/energy remains the same.
If wavelength and energy change due to passing through some medium, it is entirely possible for the frequency to remain the same, I guess?I dunno, somehow I'm screwing up multiplication in algebra.
Filed under: I do maths wrong, because there is no real requirement for doing math right!
While that is certainly true, it's important to remember that acoustic waves work a little bit differently. Namely that the speed of sound is dependant on the density / coupling of the material the waves travel through.
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acoustic waves
Awe shot! Somehow I missed that detail of the context! EM Waves are definitely different from acoustic I think. Isn't it because we're not talking electrical energy by kinetic energy?
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I wish I could remember what movie it was but there was one recently that shows a train crash through a subway station, and the train blows through like 25 concrete pillars and barely even slows down and it was PISSING ME OFF because there was no rebar.
Speed?
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Apparently wavelength is inversely proportional to frequency so long as the speed of light/energy remains the same. If wavelength and energy change due to passing through some medium, it is entirely possible for the frequency to remain the same, I guess?
Speed does, in fact, change due to passing through a medium. The "constant" speed of light is the speed in a vacuum. The speed through a medium is usually slower.
Ever hear of "index of refraction" of glass, water, gemstones, whatever? The amount light is bent when passing from one medium to another depends on the indices of refraction of the two media. The index itself is the ratio of the speed of light in vacuum to the speed (phase velocity) of light in the medium. Typical values range from just barely over 1.0 in air or many other gasses, to 1.333 in water, ~1.4 – 1.6 in various types of glass, to 2.42 in diamond. Thus, the phase velocity of light passing through water (at 20 °C) is about 75% of the speed of light in vacuum, and the wavelength is 1.333 times the wavelength in vacuum.
As noted by @Rhywden, the speed of acoustic waves also depends on the properties of the medium through which they are travelling.
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Hollywood seems to make unnecessarily bad decisions when they are trying to figure out a plot to a movie. Plane, staring Gerrard Butler, is no exception
In the latest installment of an ongoing series of "Hollywood vs. Reality", an airline pilot shreds the movie Plane:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjAwGY55Zdk
TL;DW:
So far, the only two things that are realistic are that there are two pilots up there, and they have the appropriate amount of stripes on their epaulets. So far, that, and the bickering [about management, not each other]. It's pretty crazy to be this deep into a movie and really 99% of everything that they've put up, there was a solution to accomplish the exact same thing [regarding the plot], but they came up with an idea that just made no sense at all... I've seen enough of this movie; I don't think it's going to get any more realistic. [End of video. The movie's tag line is "The crash was only the beginning", but he gave up even before the beginning of the crash.]
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@JoeCool said in Pedantic Dickweedery At The Movies:
Like that NCIS episode where there is a hacker and the two NCIS people start sharing a keyboard to type frantically to fight the hacker.
I was going to page @topspin but, upon eventually discerning the appropriate search incantation, there has been a wide variety of people linking the exact same video.
But he did have the most recent two¹ with no interruptions in three years, so the mention stays.
¹ that showed up in the search results
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@HardwareGeek In the comments,
Those old Airport movies were more technically accurate than anything we see today, and they were goofy as heck!
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@kt_ said in Pedantic Dickweedery At The Movies:
Alex Weinberg is a structural engineer who has a big problem with how movies portray the destruction of bridges, and is particularly upset about suspension bridges.
-- snip --
Whenever I see an article like this I am reminded of a piece I read many years ago where some "scientist" explained why most of the technology in Star Trek can't actually work.
And a couple of years ago celebrity astronomer Neil Degrasse Tyson wrote a piece about the "scientific inaccuracies" in the George Clooney/Sandra Bullock move Gravity.
Well, these are two totally different things.
No they aren't. I think the OP has a valid point. Nearly all movies and television shows contain things that are not entirely realistic -- or even possible . How many Marvel/DC superhero movies have been made in the last few years?
Even non-scifi movies are sometimes based on situations that would never actually happen in real life. And that's sort of the whole point of fiction. Making things up and then saying "what if you could do this .... what if this happened"
Complaining about "technical inaccuracies" in something that is completely made up to begin with, really does seem like pedantic dickweedery.
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@Gern_Blaanston I sort of agree, but I also sort of don’t.
There are films whereby the content and premise are going to be so fanciful by design that you begin immediately by suspending disbelief and leave it turned off at the door - your Marvels, your DCs, etc because if you’re accepting an alien from another world just happens to look exactly like a human in form but will grow up to be super strong, super fast, heat vision, freeze breath, flight, near invulnerability, etc. you have to accept sufficiently that everything else might as well be just as made up.
However… for fiction that doesn’t come with that level of disbelief by design, being technically accurate where feasible seems like it should almost be a given unless rule of cool trumps it.
E.g. two idiots, one keyboard is one of those times that rankles me. In my head the gag of the scene (two idiots, one keyboard, tech illiterate boss just pulls the plug) is just not enough to get over the multitude of stupid going on. See also CSI:NY, building a GUI in Visual Basic to track a serial killer’s IP - it just undermines the show by being unnecessarily stupid.
If you’re going to blow up a suspension bridge, why not take the effort to make it look a little more realistic in how it will behave? Isn’t this just the nerd version of “practical special effects > CGI”?
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If you're wondering how he eats and breathes
And other science facts
Then repeat to yourself 'It's just a show,
I should really just relax.'Although it also comes down to how much you want to lean into realism vs fiction. Saying you're going for realism, but then doing something unrealistic for dramatic effect is not ok. But if doing it for entertainment the suspension of disbelief can hold up much longer, as long as it doesn't stray off too much into the incredulous.
The key thing is really what's allowed in-universe according to the rules of the fictional universe. Breaking those rules is where you get into fun territory.
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@Arantor said in Pedantic Dickweedery At The Movies:
E.g. two idiots, one keyboard is one of those times that rankles me. In my head the gag of the scene (two idiots, one keyboard, tech illiterate boss just pulls the plug) is just not enough to get over the multitude of stupid going on.
Yes, I actually remember seeing that episode and I agree that it is completely stupid. But I think there are different levels.
Two people typing on a keyboard is stupid and wrong. Saying that "If you're in orbit, you can't actually see the Hubble telescope and the International Space Station at the same time" is just .... being an asshole.
Which tends to be my overall opinion of people like Neil DeGrasse Tyson. A really smart guy who is more concerned with being a celebrity than contributing something worthwhile.
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@Gern_Blaanston said in Pedantic Dickweedery At The Movies:
Saying that "If you're in orbit, you can't actually see the Hubble telescope and the International Space Station at the same time" is just .... being an asshole.
In the spirit of
, you should be sometimes able see them both. At least one will be inevitably rather difficult to resolve as anything other than a small dot and might be hard to make out at all, but perceiving them both at the same time should be entirely possible.
