What's the worst example of bad science in a film you've watched?

[Toaster Hunter]

1. Hearing explosions in space

2. Blowing up asteroids on a collision course rather than diverting them

3. Alien insects of a massive size. (they would be crushed under the weight of gravity and their respiratory system wouldn't be able to function properly)

4. Lasers with color

 

[DragonChi]

This.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4pBC4or9yY

 

[KapnKerfuffle]

Alien: Resurrection -
Ripley makes a small hole in the window of a ship in space and is able to suck the alien outside with it. Ridiculous. A James Bond movie also had a similar thing where a window gets shot out in an airplane and the bad guy gets sucked outside. The pressure is not going to be enough to suck you outside.

Outland-
Drugged up space miners going crazy and opening their suits or jumping out airlocks only to explode violently in the vacuum of space. That's pretty silly.

P.s. Also, the amount of knock back that most gunshots have in movies always bothers me.

 

[KapnKerfuffle]

the one that springs to mind for me is an all too common one in most action films and even serious thriller films, the idea that bullets can be stopped by the most mundane cover availible i.e. wooden tables, cars, steel barrels, a plasterboard wall is laughable as is shooting any oil drum and having it explode

I always think about that when I play Half Life 2. The poor strider pilots must be like "Curse these humans and their invincible plywood and corrugated metal sheets!"

 

[Damoclies]

Alien: Resurrection -
Ripley makes a small hole in the window of a ship in space and is able to suck the alien outside with it. Ridiculous. A James Bond movie also had a similar thing where a window gets shot out in an airplane and the bad guy gets sucked outside. The pressure is not going to be enough to suck you outside.

Outland-
Drugged up space miners going crazy and opening their suits or jumping out airlocks only to explode violently in the vacuum of space. That's pretty silly.

P.s. Also, the amount of knock back that most gunshots have in movies always bothers me.

Too true. Granted, death by depressurization is... messy... but nobody would describe it as exploding. more of... rupturing. As you lower pressure the boiling point of liquids goes down. so pretty soon at low pressures your blood would boil in your veins. Total Recall actually did a fairly good job of showing what it might look like when Arnie gets tossed outside near the end.

Most high power guns will just put bigger holes in you. The angular momentum of the bullet does not transfer to the entirety of your body, just to the very small part of you that is right in front of it. Granted, this means that the higher power the bullet often the larger the wound, but the human body is not dense enough to absorb enough force to actually make it fly through the air.

 

[Damoclies]

the one that springs to mind for me is an all too common one in most action films and even serious thriller films, the idea that bullets can be stopped by the most mundane cover availible i.e. wooden tables, cars, steel barrels, a plasterboard wall is laughable as is shooting any oil drum and having it explode

I always think about that when I play Half Life 2. The poor strider pilots must be like "Curse these humans and their invincible plywood and corrugated metal sheets!"

Grosse Point Blank did the same thing. Cusak hid behind a convenience store display to avoid an UZI's bullets. On the same note, every single time you see a car explode when shot by a gun is pretty much bullshit.

 

[Damoclies]

1. Hearing explosions in space

2. Blowing up asteroids on a collision course rather than diverting them

3. Alien insects of a massive size. (they would be crushed under the weight of gravity and their respiratory system wouldn't be able to function properly)

4. Lasers with color

And also to the guy talking about Lightsabers. To both of you I say this: http://www.wickedlasers.com/lasers/Spyder_III_Pro_Arctic_Series-96-37.html

to quote the description: Warning: Extremely dangerous is an understatement to 1W of laser power. At close range, this Class 4 beam will cause immediate and irreversable retinal damage. Use with extreme caution and use only when wearing proper safety goggles with an O.D. of 3+ is required and 4.4+ for longer exposures. Customers will be required to completely read and agree to our Class 4 Laser Hazard Acknowledgment Form.

Not a lightsaber, but a step in the right direction!

 

[Ask]

2012.

Seriously? The science was completely all over the place and nonsensical our scientific forefathers are rolling in their graves at the absurdity.

I loved the little tidbit about how all of a sudden the magnetic poles had just RANDOMLY shifted. Firstly, that takes about 300 years to do and it happens usually at intervals of 250,000 years. (Though we haven't had a pole shift in the last 750,000 years so, we're quite overdue) It doesn't just switch around in one day at its own discretion.

Gods there was so much bad science in that film I just couldn't go through the entire thing without writing a novel on the subject.

 

[Angryman101]

Sunshine, where the Sun is dying and needs to be reactivated by a nuclear explosion is pretty bad science. Also 2012 where the Earth's core is being heated up by neutrinos, causing disasters everywhere. Both are facepalmingly good examples of OT subject.

This. This really bothered me, especially since pretty much everything else in the movie is, as far as I know, REALLY accurate and realistic. It was rather jarring to have that random piece of trash in an otherwise great movie.

 

[Bara_no_Hime]

Oh, I totally suspended disbelief on the magic red goo (mentally filed under "Technology Indistinguishable From Magic" folder) But the "black holes as magic gateways through time" and the "black hole resistant Romulan ship from the future" (not black hole PROOF, but tested to survive event horizon gravitational forces for long enough to have one last dramatic conversation.) Was.. a little much for me.

Ah, yes. Point. Honestly, I didn't notice it at the time - movies often suspend rational physics for a dramatic conversation.

As far as blackholes as magic gateways, well, Star Trek has classically used sling-shotting around the sun (a method so stupidly easy they spent the entire Next Gen and beyond pretending the original series didn't use the method three or four times) so I suppose using a blackhole seemed marginally less stupid, and therefore an improvement.

 

[Halceon]

In the Mummy the big blockbuster verson, the poor slave chaps who dig up the box with the mummy's innerds in get sprayed with a substance refered to later as "salt acid" this is impossible a salt like sodium cloride (table salt) is the result of the combination of a Base and an Acid (useally a Bases are alkilid) this combination of alkilides and acid preduces a PH neutral substance (that PH 7 fucking 7 not 5.5 like the dove adverts say 5.5 is a mild acid!!!!!!!!!!!!!) if you so either ur substance is a salt or a acid or a base it cannot be a combination of any of these fuck sake

Fun fact, in several countries HCl is referred to as "salt-acid".

 

[Halceon]

1. Hearing explosions in space

2. Blowing up asteroids on a collision course rather than diverting them

3. Alien insects of a massive size. (they would be crushed under the weight of gravity and their respiratory system wouldn't be able to function properly)

4. Lasers with color

And also to the guy talking about Lightsabers. To both of you I say this: http://www.wickedlasers.com/lasers/Spyder_III_Pro_Arctic_Series-96-37.html

to quote the description: Warning: Extremely dangerous is an understatement to 1W of laser power. At close range, this Class 4 beam will cause immediate and irreversable retinal damage. Use with extreme caution and use only when wearing proper safety goggles with an O.D. of 3+ is required and 4.4+ for longer exposures. Customers will be required to completely read and agree to our Class 4 Laser Hazard Acknowledgment Form.

Not a lightsaber, but a step in the right direction!

And it's still not a beam visible from the side.

 

[lukenhiumur]

Fucking Iron Man 2.

"Of course! i just need to make an element with another proton in it! also it's a fractal"
wtf

 

[Damoclies]

Oh, I totally suspended disbelief on the magic red goo (mentally filed under "Technology Indistinguishable From Magic" folder) But the "black holes as magic gateways through time" and the "black hole resistant Romulan ship from the future" (not black hole PROOF, but tested to survive event horizon gravitational forces for long enough to have one last dramatic conversation.) Was.. a little much for me.

Ah, yes. Point. Honestly, I didn't notice it at the time - movies often suspend rational physics for a dramatic conversation.

As far as blackholes as magic gateways, well, Star Trek has classically used sling-shotting around the sun (a method so stupidly easy they spent the entire Next Gen and beyond pretending the original series didn't use the method three or four times) so I suppose using a blackhole seemed marginally less stupid, and therefore an improvement.

A fun fact is that you actually CAN use something like a "sling shot" effect to really travel through time. The "deeper" you are into a gravity well, the slower time flows. This has been demonstrated by extremely precise clocks placed in orbit gaining millionths of seconds over exactly synced clocks on the planet's surface. To truly see a noticeable change you would have to have a massively stronger gravitational effect, such as orbiting within a few miles of the event horizon of a black hole. At that point it's theoretically possible that you could reach a degree of time distortion that would mean that two days would pass outside the gravity well while only one passed inside your ship. A rather slow sort of time travel, but actually possible.

 

[Damoclies]

And it's still not a beam visible from the side.

That, my friend, is what they make fog machines for.

 

[YamadaJisho]

There are a lot to choose from, like 'The Core', where Aaron Ackheart travels to the center of the earth in a tube made of unobtainium to detonate nukes to restart the earth's core. In this movie's defense, it REALLY didn't take itself seriously.
No, maybe not the worst example, but the one that sticks out most in my mind, is 'The Day After Tomorrow'. Same premise as the OP's movie shipwreck, kind of, with 'super scientist' versus 'lazy polititian', and the world's coming to an end. Okay, it's a movie about global warming. I can deal with that. I'm not really on board with the whole global warming thing (mainly that part where we caused it), but whatever. What I really have trouble with is the storm fronts they have. There are these super hurricanes with miles-long eyes that are funneling super-cooled air from the stratosphere and instantly freezes everything it touches. I barely know where to begin. First off, this kind of funnel would be impossible unless the pressure inside the eye, and below it, were much less than the pressure of air in the stratosphere, as to say, negative numbers lower. Thus, no one would have been alive. Since everyone was alive, pressure must have been at normal levels, which brings me to my second point. Air that high is super-heated by the sun, it just feels colder because it's so much thinner. Kind of. Well, in thermodynamics, heat is particle vibration and pressure. Lower the pressure, you lower the temperature. If you take a bag of air from 50,000 feet at 0 Celsius, and bring it, within a few seconds, to ground level, the pressure now on that bag with the vibration of the particles would bring the air in the bag up to 50 Celsius. Easily. That air wouldn't have been super-cooled, it would have been super heated, and melted the ice instantly.
I was very disappointed that not everyone in the movie died.

 

[klakkat]

I think it would be far easier to list all the shows that DON'T use retarded science than to list the ones that do. So, here's my contribution to movies that use good science:
Space Odyssey 2001

and, uh... Ok, I can't think of any others. (that isn't to say all other movies are bad, or that Odyssey is the ultimate sci-fi movie, but it is literally the only one I've ever heard of that gets 99.99% of it's details correct. Or even 90%. Or even 80%. Hell, it's probably 1 of 10 or so that get more than 50% correct).

 

[klakkat]

A fun fact is that you actually CAN use something like a "sling shot" effect to really travel through time. The "deeper" you are into a gravity well, the slower time flows. This has been demonstrated by extremely precise clocks placed in orbit gaining millionths of seconds over exactly synced clocks on the planet's surface. To truly see a noticeable change you would have to have a massively stronger gravitational effect, such as orbiting within a few miles of the event horizon of a black hole. At that point it's theoretically possible that you could reach a degree of time distortion that would mean that two days would pass outside the gravity well while only one passed inside your ship. A rather slow sort of time travel, but actually possible.

Sort of. This is just a Time Dilation effect, not "Time Travel." Basically, you can make your localized time slow down compared to the rest of the universe. However, the "sling shot" technique isn't at all necessary (hell, I'm not even really sure it works; astrophysics isn't my specialty). Time dilation works with any very high relative velocity, say in the neighborhood of 0.5 c for a useful effect (it is visible at small fractions of the speed of light [c] using synchronized atomic clocks, but a couple nanoseconds of difference isn't helpful to us mortals). Still, I wouldn't classify this as "Time Travel" since there is no way to go back in time, only forwards. Thus, it is technically equivalent to just waiting around, only without the hassle of actually waiting around.

 

[superbatranger]

That you can hear explosions and laserguns in space.
It's the worst because the film-makers can't even plead ignorance - everybody knows about this.

I've tried thinking of a way to do this in a movie, and I just can't.

Imagine if you will, a movie in which a giant epic space battle is taking place, all while no sound is heard. It would be boring.

Really, really boring.

Do it like the silent movies of the early 20's and throw in some intertitles?

 

[Miffmoff]

Sunshine

lets have a quote from imdb

"In the future, the sun is dying and Earth lives another glacial period. After the failure of the Icarus Mission, a team of eight astronauts are sent to the sun in the Icarus II Mission to explode a weapon generating a supernova within the sun in the last hope of planet Earth."

you're gonna reignite the sun with a supernova? good luck with that...