Classic film moments ruined by logic

[Klagermeister]

Lightsabers...

Dammit, why do those beams of light not just pass THROUGH each other?

I don't think their actually light. Their more like a laser beam that can only go so far. But I get where your coming from.

Actually, from what I can see, it's more like plasma.
Plasma would behave just like a lightsaber.
It'd cut through things quickly...
Stop about 3 feet out...
And come to a halt against other lightsabers.

Now for MY movie rant:
It'd take a BUILDING full of technology to make a plasma beam that size!

 

[Iampringles]

Ermm.

Iron Man.

I don't think somebody could seriously make such a suit, without the terrorists getting even a slight idea that he might not actually be making a powerful missile.

When was the last time you saw a nuclear warhead with a face and a leg?

 

[Vigormortis]

4. The whole fast than light speed crap is really a bunch of BS if understand the theory of relativity. Darn you physics class.

For the last point, faster than light travel IS possible, even within Relativity. Granted, it takes a bending of the known laws of physics to achieve, but it can be done, theoretically. The ideas of warp drives, wormholes, and other such phenomenon have frequented science fiction for decades, but they started as real scientific theories. In fact, the idea of wormholes and their ability to allow for faster than light travel and, potentially, time travel, came from Einstein himself. (with immense assistance from Nathan Rosen)

That's all well and good but to travel at those speeds, you would probably have to convert matter to pure energy and you REALLY don't want to do that...
Also wormholes are so pathetically small it would take ridiculously vast amount of energy to sustain for anything to actually go through. I'm not totally ruling these two out of the realms of possibility though.

Um...wait, what? Why wouldn't we want to convert matter into pure energy? I fail to see the issue there especially since physicists around the world have been trying to figure out how to do exactly that for decades. It is, in fact, one of the primary focuses of the teams trying to build sustainable fusion reactors. It's that level of matter to energy conversion that would allow them to provide all the power someone would need for nearly their entire life off of one bathtub worth of water.

For that second point, you're talking about micro-wormholes. A sub-class of the whole wormhole phenomenon. Some string theorists believe that micro-wormholes are popping in and out of existence, all around us, all of the time. While it is true that based on what some have theorized about certain aspects of wormholes it'd take, in your words, "vast amounts of energy" to keep one open, it is also just as theoretically possible that a macro-wormhole could be opened with far simpler means. However, it is almost universally accepted that, t'were a wormhole to be opened, it'd take some kind of exotic matter to keep it stable. While this makes the likelihood of ever creating a sustainable wormhole very slim, it doesn't put it beyond the realm of possibility. Besides, the REAL concern with wormholes isn't whether they can be created or sustained, but whether something could even traverse one without being ripped apart by the immense tidal forces sure to be present within.

 

[TwistedEllipses]

That's all well and good but to travel at those speeds, you would probably have to convert matter to pure energy and you REALLY don't want to do that...
Also wormholes are so pathetically small it would take ridiculously vast amount of energy to sustain for anything to actually go through. I'm not totally ruling these two out of the realms of possibility though.

Um...wait, what? Why wouldn't we want to convert matter into pure energy? I fail to see the issue there especially since physicists around the world have been trying to figure out how to do exactly that for decades. It is, in fact, one of the primary focuses of the teams trying to build sustainable fusion reactors. It's that level of matter to energy conversion that would allow them to provide all the power someone would need for nearly their entire life off of one bathtub worth of water.

Oh, sorry I should have been clearer. I meant for a person to travel at the speed of light, that person would have to be converted to pure energy. If you were attempting to do that you would open a whole new can of worms. Namely that it might be an irreversible process and you'd be fairly screwed - The science is a bit beyond me to be honest...

 

[Vigormortis]

Oh, sorry I should have been clearer. I meant for a person to travel at the speed of light, that person would have to be converted to pure energy. If you were attempting to do that you would open a whole new can of worms. Namely that it might be an irreversible process and you'd be fairly screwed - The science is a bit beyond me to be honest...

Ah. I see what you meant now. That's what I thought you were hinting at, but to be honest, I thought maybe you were just quoting some bad scifi story, no offense.
To clarify, though, you don't convert someone/something into pure energy to allow it to travel at the speed of light, it's what happens to an object as it approaches the speed of light. Sort of. It's mass also must approach infinity. By that I mean the fuel and energy (and subsequently the fuel it must carry, adding to it's mass)it'd take to accelerate an object to the speed of light spirals exponentially higher the closer you get to light speed. This is why Einstein posited that the speed of light is as fast as anything can theoretically travel. However, wormholes and "warp drives" bypass that law because they allow an object to travel a greater distance at a much lower speed by effectively decreasing the distance an object must travel in space, utterly destroying the notion of the shortest distance between any two points in space being a straight line.

I point anyone interested to three sources of further reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_speed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormholes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp_drive

 

[TwistedEllipses]

Oh, sorry I should have been clearer. I meant for a person to travel at the speed of light, that person would have to be converted to pure energy. If you were attempting to do that you would open a whole new can of worms. Namely that it might be an irreversible process and you'd be fairly screwed - The science is a bit beyond me to be honest...

Ah. I see what you meant now. That's what I thought you were hinting at, but to be honest, I thought maybe you were just quoting some bad scifi story, no offense.
To clarify, though, you don't convert someone/something into pure energy to allow it to travel at the speed of light, it's what happens to an object as it approaches the speed of light. Sort of. It's mass also must approach infinity. By that I mean the fuel and energy (and subsequently the fuel it must carry, adding to it's mass)it'd take to accelerate an object to the speed of light spirals exponentially higher the closer you get to light speed. This is why Einstein posited that the speed of light is as fast as anything can theoretically travel. However, wormholes and "warp drives" bypass that law because they allow an object to travel a greater distance at a much lower speed by effectively decreasing the distance an object must travel in space, utterly destroying the notion of the shortest distance between any two points in space being a straight line.

I point anyone interested to three sources of further reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_speed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormholes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp_drive

WHOOSH! (that the sound of that going over my head faster than the speed of light, sorry)
Wormholes I think are still only hypothetical at the moment anyway...I think...maybe? I'm so confused...

 

[Vigormortis]

Oh, sorry I should have been clearer. I meant for a person to travel at the speed of light, that person would have to be converted to pure energy. If you were attempting to do that you would open a whole new can of worms. Namely that it might be an irreversible process and you'd be fairly screwed - The science is a bit beyond me to be honest...

Ah. I see what you meant now. That's what I thought you were hinting at, but to be honest, I thought maybe you were just quoting some bad scifi story, no offense.
To clarify, though, you don't convert someone/something into pure energy to allow it to travel at the speed of light, it's what happens to an object as it approaches the speed of light. Sort of. It's mass also must approach infinity. By that I mean the fuel and energy (and subsequently the fuel it must carry, adding to it's mass)it'd take to accelerate an object to the speed of light spirals exponentially higher the closer you get to light speed. This is why Einstein posited that the speed of light is as fast as anything can theoretically travel. However, wormholes and "warp drives" bypass that law because they allow an object to travel a greater distance at a much lower speed by effectively decreasing the distance an object must travel in space, utterly destroying the notion of the shortest distance between any two points in space being a straight line.

I point anyone interested to three sources of further reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_speed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormholes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp_drive

WHOOSH! (that the sound of that going over my head faster than the speed of light, sorry)
Wormholes I think are still only hypothetical at the moment anyway...I think...maybe? I'm so confused...

Yes, they are still hypothetical. However, that doesn't mean they can not exist naturally. It's ironic really, that the end result of an equation within relativity is what spawned the idea of wormholes.

 

[inkheart_artist]

Oh god. My friends like to call it Talin syndrome because we have a friend named Talin thats like this ALL the time. It sucks watching movies with him because no matter how compelling a sequence is in a movie if theres a logic flaw you can't shut him up about it.