Worst Hollywood pseudoscience?

[Asst. Asst. Lt. Cmdr. Smi]

In all the movies you seen, what movie had the least understanding of science? Was it those B-movies with building-size ants and 50-foot women? Was it some sci-fi movie with sudden transfigurations and gravitic weapons?

[Master of Ossus]

I always HATE the idea of giant insects because insect bodies cannot possibly be scaled up beyond a certain point.

The worst one, though, was the movie "Species." It had an alien race handing over the humans a "new form of methane," which solves world energy problems. Wait a minute, methane is the simplest of all hydrocarbons. It has no isomers! How can it have a new form? And any substance can only store energy. Making a substance and then breaking it down cannot possibly create energy, it can only waste it due to inefficient processing. What a terrible bit of science!

[Darth Wong]

For big-budget movies, nothing beats Armageddon.

For small-budget movies, the solaranite bomb from "Plan 9 from Outer Space" takes the booby-prize.

[Joe]

The alien-compatible computer virus from ID4 was pretty offensive.

The aliens in Evolution were killed when exposed to selenium. The logic behind this was: arsenic is a deadly poison to carbon based lifeforms, and is located one space over and two spaces down from carbon on the periodic table. The aliens were nitrogen based, and selenium is located one space over and two spaces down from nitrogen on the periodic table, so the movie assumed that selenium would be their deadly poison. Now I was a horrible Chemistry student, but I found this to be really ridiculous.

[Wicked Pilot]

Well, my picks, Armaageddon and ID4, have already been taken. Not to take this thread off topic, but if there's one thing I hate almost as much as movie pseudoscience, it's bad military tactics. Lately, the movie with more bad tactics than the Iraqi military is "Behind Enemy Lines." I could go for days on end about how bad it was. I mean there was just really stupid blantant stuff in that film. Absoutly horrible movie.

[Raxmei]

The movie Red Planet. So many problems, too many to list.

One nasty one, but not the worst, was a line spoken by a biologist, to the effect that he knew all about DNA and its bases: A, C, T, and P.

[SPOOFE]

Timecop was absolutely deplorable. "The same matter cannot occupy the same space at the same time." Well, guess what, Sherlock? After ten years, your body isn't going to be composed of the same matter.

The alien-compatible computer virus from ID4 was pretty offensive.

I dunno, I can almost buy that, considering that the boys at Area 51 had spent the past 50 years studying the alien systems. They had probably had a Mac-compatible emulator up and running already.

What was REALLY bad about ID4 was the notion that you can have a spaceship, 1/4 the size of the Moon, blow up in orbit and NOT suffer a nuclear winter on the planet below. Or the notion that the saucer destroyed over the base wouldn't fall straight down and destroy everyone. Or the notion that the aliens had a weapon capable of decimating cities, but couldn't generate enough power locally to create an energy shield. Or the notion that a modern fighter could outrun a ship meant to travel in the farthest reaches of space.

[Mr Bean]

The last one at least

Or the notion that a modern fighter could outrun a ship meant to travel in the farthest reaches of space.

Could be put down as pure arrogence and nothing more on the Alien's part

[Doomriser]

Well, my picks, Armaageddon and ID4, have already been taken. Not to take this thread off topic, but if there's one thing I hate almost as much as movie pseudoscience, it's bad military tactics. Lately, the movie with more bad tactics than the Iraqi military is "Behind Enemy Lines." I could go for days on end about how bad it was. I mean there was just really stupid blantant stuff in that film. Absoutly horrible movie.

That movie was brutal. 100 soldiers with AKs and a ZSU-57 SP-AA gun can't hit one running American soldier who just escaped a plane crash. That's just what I can remember off the top of my head.

[Sea Skimmer]

Timecop was absolutely deplorable. "The same matter cannot occupy the same space at the same time." Well, guess what, Sherlock? After ten years, your body isn't going to be composed of the same matter.

The alien-compatible computer virus from ID4 was pretty offensive.

I dunno, I can almost buy that, considering that the boys at Area 51 had spent the past 50 years studying the alien systems. They had probably had a Mac-compatible emulator up and running already.

What was REALLY bad about ID4 was the notion that you can have a spaceship, 1/4 the size of the Moon, blow up in orbit and NOT suffer a nuclear winter on the planet below. Or the notion that the saucer destroyed over the base wouldn't fall straight down and destroy everyone. Or the notion that the aliens had a weapon capable of decimating cities, but couldn't generate enough power locally to create an energy shield. Or the notion that a modern fighter could outrun a ship meant to travel in the farthest reaches of space.

The ship would only fall down if all of its anti grav units failed at once. Most likely, they failed randomly along with parts of what ever it uses for engines, thus causing it to float down more like a peace of paper then a brick.

[Asst. Asst. Lt. Cmdr. Smi]

There's this new movie called "The Core" coming out, and it sounds corny. What would really happen if the earth stopped rotating?

It graduated from the Armageddon School of an Alien Invasion/Giant Meteor being stopped by a few megatons of es.

An not to mention, the ID4 alien station was 1/4 the size of the moon, and it didn't have a significant effect on the Earth's tide.

[SPOOFE]

Could be put down as pure arrogence and nothing more on the Alien's part

I dunno, I didn't get the impression that the aliens wanted to toy with humanity.

The ship would only fall down if all of its anti grav units failed at once.

We don't even know if it had multiple anti-gravity units, or if it was just one singular system. But even so, if the AG units on one half of the ship were to fail, that would only result in that half of the ship falling down... it WOULDN'T make the ship move laterally. Certainly not for a good 10 kilometers, anyway (and that's a conservative estimate).

[Wicked Pilot]

Or the notion that the saucer destroyed over the base wouldn't fall straight down and destroy everyone. Or the notion that the aliens had a weapon capable of decimating cities, but couldn't generate enough power locally to create an energy shield. Or the notion that a modern fighter could outrun a ship meant to travel in the farthest reaches of space.

I found it funny how the F/A-18s fired air to air missiles at the city wide saucer ships. As if those would put any recognizable dents in it.

[Durandal]

There's this new movie called "The Core" coming out, and it sounds corny. What would really happen if the earth stopped rotating?

The consequences would be pretty hilarious, actually. If the Earth just suddenly stopped rotating, everything would fly off on a tangent vector.

Think of a bola. You spin it around and let it pick up lots of angular momentum. When you let go, it goes flying off in a straight line, maintaining the momentum it picked up from spinning around.

Now, let's apply that to the Earth and everything on it. Right now, you've got lots of angular momentum from the Earth spinning, because you and Earth are part of the same system, so you don't notice. Now, imagine the Earth stops spinning. Now, you will notice how fast you're going, because you'll become the equivalent of a bola projectile. You'll go flying off on a tangent vector at about 1000km/hr.

Now, consider that the surface of the Earth isn't solid-state. All the water in the oceans will undergo a huge shift, creating a monstrous tidal wave-like effect. The continents will also shift over. In short, it'd be a global catastrophe.

[Sea Skimmer]

Or the notion that the saucer destroyed over the base wouldn't fall straight down and destroy everyone. Or the notion that the aliens had a weapon capable of decimating cities, but couldn't generate enough power locally to create an energy shield. Or the notion that a modern fighter could outrun a ship meant to travel in the farthest reaches of space.

I found it funny how the F/A-18s fired air to air missiles at the city wide saucer ships. As if those would put any recognizable dents in it.

Whatever those 90-pound warheads had in them, I want a ton of it.. Course, then there's the fact that you couldn't lock onto a target that big and slow.

Iron bombs would have been the best option, blast a crater in the top, then drop a B-61 nuke into it.

[Mr. B]

I wonder why they didn't just have some B-52s carpet bomb those ID4 ships.

[Asst. Asst. Lt. Cmdr. Smi]

There's this new movie called "The Core" coming out, and it sounds corny. What would really happen if the earth stopped rotating?

The consequences would be pretty hilarious, actually. If the Earth just suddenly stopped rotating, everything would fly off on a tangent vector.

Think of a bola. You spin it around and let it pick up lots of angular momentum. When you let go, it goes flying off in a straight line, maintaining the momentum it picked up from spinning around.

Now, let's apply that to the Earth and everything on it. Right now, you've got lots of angular momentum from the Earth spinning, because you and Earth are part of the same system, so you don't notice. Now, imagine the Earth stops spinning. Now, you will notice how fast you're going, because you'll become the equivalent of a bola projectile. You'll go flying off on a tangent vector at about 1000km/hr.

Now, consider that the surface of the Earth isn't solid-state. All the water in the oceans will undergo a huge shift, creating a monstrous tidal wave-like effect. The continents will also shift over. In short, it'd be a global catastrophe.

That's what I was thinking. In the movie, the poles shift, and the planet becomes vulnerable to large-scale disasters. Of course, it isn't out yet, and I'll have to find out more about it.

[Durandal]

The poles shift? The poles are points defined by human subjectivity. Unless you mean the magnetic poles, but those, as far as I know, have nothing to do with the Earth's rotation. The magnetic poles shift regularly.

If the Earth stopped rotating, there would be no film, because everyone would be dead.

[RedImperator]

When they set off the nuke in ID4, they set it off NEXT to the ship, instead of underneath it where it could partially contain the blast. So most of the bomb's energy was wasted.

[Tsyroc]

There's this new movie called "The Core" coming out, and it sounds corny. What would really happen if the earth stopped rotating?

I saw the preview of that and originally thought they were making a remake of "Journey to the Centure of the Eearth". I didn't exactly think that was a good idea but after seeing the rest of the preview I WISHED that were the case because "The Core" looks horrible.

[Darth Wong]

New candidate for worst pseudoscience: Eraser. Let us look at the list of charges:

1. Cyrez corporation designs an "electromagnetic pulse weapon" which is actually a railgun.
2. The railgun has no visible power source, which implies that its power source was so compact that it could fit into a man-portable firearm. This implies that Cyrez somehow incidentally developed a super-dense power source along the development path for this weapon, and they never thought of selling it for, say, the automotive market.
3. The railgun has a scope which is capable of seeing through solid objects, and not just with infrared. Again, this implies that Cyrez developed this as an accessory to the railgun, and never thought of selling it separately.
4. The sale is for $52,000,000 for 1,000 units. This means that each gun costs $52,000. Since the US army already pays $35,000 for the fully loaded weapons of a single Delta Force commando (according to Newsweek; somebody please correct me if I'm wrong), it seems ridiculous to say that they would refuse to pay for $52,000 railguns which can see through walls (while the Russian mafia could, hence the illegal arms sale).
5. The railgun is said to fire projectiles at nearly the speed of light (cough cough).
6. The railgun has no appreciable recoil.
7. The railgun's projectiles are said to be aluminum slugs. Why would they choose non-ferromagnetic aluminum instead of steel, which would be a smaller, harder penetrator for the same weight, and would respond well to EM forcefields?
8. The railgun's projectiles make very little sound as they travel through the air. I guess the producers have never heard of a little thing called "sonic boom".
9. The railgun's projectiles don't pass effortlessly through human flesh. Instead of having a tiny hole punched through him, a human target is picked up like a rag doll and thrown against the nearest wall, where he is pinned by the projectile. Apparently, we're all made of adamantium.
10. There is no plasma bow wave created by the projectiles, even though an ionization bow wave is created by any hypervelocity projectile in atmosphere.

However, the movie did contain the line "you've just been erased", which is kind of cool.

[Durandal]

There was an episode of The X-Files where some guy could see through walls by virtue of being sensitive to "different wavelengths of light."

When we see things from his point of view, he gets a perfectly clear visual of events taking place behind the wall in front of him.

Here's the problem. The light with a high enough frequency to pass through solid objects with little respective disruption is very high energy light, probably on the x-ray level. And, guess what? They don't give you lead vests to cover your balls when they take x-rays for no reason. Such high intensity light has very detrimental effects (the most well-known being a rapid energization of living tissue, which induces rapid mutation and reproduction, also known as cancer).

Needless to say, the density of x-ray photons on the surface of the Earth is very small. In order for this guy to get a clear picture, his apartment building would have to be saturated with high-energy photons, which would essentially kill everyone in the building and cause structural damage to the building itself.

Infra-red works because it is lower energy light, which occurs all the time, because photons which fall into our visible spectrum are continuously being disrupted by air molecules, walls, everything. So, they lose energy and pass below our visible spectrum, into the infra-red range.

[Sea Skimmer]

[*]The sale is for $52,000,000 for 1,000 units. This means that each gun costs $52,000. Since the US army already pays $35,000 for the fully loaded weapons of a single Delta Force commando (according to Newsweek; somebody please correct me if I'm wrong), it seems ridiculous to say that they would refuse to pay for $52,000 railguns which can see through walls (while the Russian mafia could, hence the illegal arms sale).

35,000 dollars for a Deltas weapons? That sounds like they took the cost of all weapons Delta force has on hand, including MANPADS Stingers and ATGW's and any armed vehicles, and then divided by the number of Commandoes in the unit. In reality where looking at more like 800 dollars for personal weapons.

That’s how you get things like the 700-dollar USAF hammers, the reporters include the price of things like APU and diagnostic computers in the total and then divide that by the total number of tools. In reality, the Air Force paid a couple bucks for them.

[Autochton]

The peudoscience that to this date still peeves me most is Armageddon. An asteroid approaches Earth. Iis, according to that NASA guy, "the size of Texas". Texas is something like a thousand kilometers across at the widest. We'll be generous and say that this would be a 500 km diameter asteroid we're talking about. That's about the size of Uranus' moon Ariel. Big booma... No wonder they call it a worldkiller! That thing would crack the Earth like an egg, if my guess is right! Also, an object that size is roughly spherical, unless it is specifically constructed to a certain shape, and even then only with considerable difficulty. The 'spiky monster' shape displayed in the film is, shall we say, somewhat unrealistic?

This behemoth is discovered by coincidence by a hobby astronomer who happens to look in the right direction. That's quite lucky, considering that the biggest problem of such a scenario is that we might not even see the damned thing before it hits us... Of course, with such a big rock, we likely would.

Then, the plan to solve the problem: A nuke in a hole some 300 meters deep. Even if we make this the biggest nuke ever constructed by humanity, and then some (at 100 MT), it's still more equivalent to farting into a hole in a bowling ball in the hopes of cracking it in two with sufficient force that the parts will make strikes on two different lanes, than anything else. Not gonna happen. What will happen is that you make a small (50 km across max) crater in the side of the thing, and it then hits Earth. Everybody dies, the movie ends...

The small asteroids that hit New York are "the size of basketballs or Volkswagens", again, according to the NASA guy. A Volkswagen is approximately 3 by 2 by 1.5 meters, which converts to 9 m^3. 9 cubic meters of silicate rock (about 3 g/mL) will weight 28,000 kg, or 28 tons. If it is ferrous instead, (5.5 g/mL) it weighs an awesome 49.5 tons. Rocks of that size hitting downtown New York with a speed of 15 km/s (not unreasonable for a falling meteorite) would deposit 6.3E12 J, or 6.3 TJ... for the light one. A ferrous rock hitting with the same parameters would lay down 11 TJ. I don't think much of Manhattan would be standing after such mistreatment.

There are other problems with that horrible movie, but usually, after a while, I grow tired of iterating them... Plus, it does seem a bit Americanocentric, something I'm never fond of. But well. It was made in Hollywood, what can you expect?

[Asst. Asst. Lt. Cmdr. Smi]

Was there ever a Hollywood writer that didn't flunk high school science? If there is, why aren't they the ones writing these type of movies? There were a lot of corny pseudoscientific movies a few decades back.