Energy can’t cancel out. If all of the comet’s material had hit the Earth, then the Earth would have received all of the energy of the comet, plus the (insignificant by comparison) energy of the nukes. However, it’s not at all clear that all of the comet’s material hit the Earth. Most of the fragments ended up on rather different trajectories than before, leaving it plausible that most of them missed.
And I didn’t say that the orbital calculation was the only mistake in the movie, only that it was the biggest. There were others: For instance, the surface of a comet should be a tarry black color, not the icy gray that they showed. They knew this, and acknowledged the inaccuracy, but it wouldn’t really have been possible to film folks on a black comet against a black background, so they sacrificed that for the sake of artistic license. And the control computer at the observatory wouldn’t have been in the same room as the telescope, and there certainly wouldn’t have been bright lighting in the room, but again, artistic license rules: The general public wouldn’t have recognized the place as an observatory, if all we saw was the control room.
As for comet names, the recent comet was Hale-Bopp, not Haley-Bopp. It’s called that because it was jointly discovered by two astronomers with those names. So far as I know, there’s no connectrion between Hale and Haley, other than the similar names. And presumably, a comet jointly discovered by three folks would have a triple name, though I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head.
On the subject of tornadoes, the events shown in Twister are unlikely, but not impossible. Tornadoes can, in fact, be eerily erratic. There have been cases where a tornado has completely wiped out one house, while leaving another a dozen feet away completely unscathed, and I heard once about one that completely plucked a chicken while leaving it otherwise unharmed. So, while I wouldn’t want to be in the path of one at all, it’s not a certain death sentence.
Dooku’s lesson for the day: don’t rely on 20 year-old memories when talking about a movie on the SDMB. You’ll be corrected, more than once, with Spoilers, no less, to prevent anyone from knowing the ending of this masterpiece. I would swear I remember how the movie ended. What do they say about eyewitness testimony being unreliable?
As penance I’ll offer up another one: Mission To Mars. M&Ms in zero gravity instantly form a rotating double helix. What they’re rotating around exactly is anyone’s guess. And then there’s my favorite line, when looking at a simple model of a DNA strand: “That DNA looks human!!”
A hypenated name indicates that two observers discovered it more or less simultaneously, independently or perhaps working together as a team.
However, it takes a large number of observations to work out the orbit of a comet. Deep Impact made it look like the way it works is Alan Hale saw the comet through his telescope, called up Thomas Bopp, and say, “Hey, look at this!” and then they both went to the press with their new comet. In real life, you get an image of a thing that looks like it might be a comet, then you observe it again for many nights, calling in additional astronomers only after you’ve confirmed that the thing is really there and really is a comet. Many, many observations go into determining its orbit, and even then you don’t really know the orbit well (well enough to, say, conclude that it’s going to hit the Earth!) for months or years.
Also in Deep Impact, they made Polaris out to be the brightest star in the sky, which always annoys me. (I actually give them a pass on most of the science, because, unlike Armageddon, most of the focus is on how society would react to the threat of a cometary impact, which was interesting to me.)
My own personal pet peeve bad science was in the movie Sneakers(1992, starring Robert Redford). Here’s the setup. There is an office, a rather large one, probably 25’ by 16’ at the least, equipped with heat-sensing motion detectors. The “good guys” plan to defeat these detectors by raising the ambient temperature of the entire room to body temperature(98.6 degrees F) and have the hero’s body heat blend with the surrounding heat. So he’s crawling the ceiling to get to the room and he lowers this little box, maybe 8" on a side, into the room. This little box is some sort of heater which warms up the room to 98.6 degrees and then he can lower himself down into the heated room and move around.
Now it was a clever approach to solving the problem of heat-activated motion sensors, but completely physically impossible! Firstly as soon as the box started generating heat it would register as a new heat source unless it warmed up EXTREMELY slowly. Heck if it was off when he first lowered it it would maybe show up as a cold object source moving in the room(depending on the resolution of the sensors, supposedly top of the line). Secondly, how in the hell can a 8" X 8" X 8" box with no external power source POSSIBLY put out enough BTUs to raise the temperature of such a large room between 25 and 30 degrees F! Especially with it working against the building’s climate control system. Thirdly, where was the air circulation method to ensure it was not just creating a “hot spot”? Without a circulation method it would have rendered it only effective in a small part of the room and provided a large warm air mass/cool air mass boundry which would set off the alarms if there was even a tiny bit of air movement along the boundry.
Totally killed the movie for me. I was completely unable to suspend disbelief beyond that point. I tell you, there wasn’t a thing on this planet the “little black box” could have been which would be worth more than the technology used to create that kick-ass heating unit.
The other recent famous comet, Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 (which impacted Jupiter in '94), had a double name, but it was actually named after three people: Gene Shoemaker, Carolyn Shoemaker, and David Levy.
Much as I love Star Trek: TOS, they had some real whoppers. The one that stands out most was when they had a device that could amplify the sound of human heartbeats to the degree of “one to the fourth power”.
(cue Woody Allen as a child in Annie Hall, wincing when his classmate said 9 + 3 was 14, or something like that.)
It’s been a little while since I’ve seen the movie, but I thought they were heating the office by hacking into the building’s own climate control, and the little black box you describe was a sensor of some sorts.
Mtgman, in Sneakers the heat wasn’t coming from Robert Redford’s little box - that was just taking the temperature of the room. If I recall correctly, River Pheonix’s character had hooked up the Sneakers’ van to all the building’s sensors/computer networks or whatever, and they were raising the temperature using the climate control functions of the building, so to the heat sensors it would have looked normal. I think the box was just so that Redford knew when it was hot enough to enter.
I hate to pick nits on 2001, because I love it so but some things always kinda bugged me…
The scene where David Bowman blasts out of the pod into the emergency airlock. I know it’s an erroneous notion that a man will simply explode during rapid decompression, but I would think some kind of major superficial trauma would be expected. I could be wrong, but he seemed to hold his breath before the door blew off. This would be a bad idea, not the least because his lungs would surely rupture and he’d probably get some nasty air embolisms and other obvious complications from that. But like I said, I could be wrong.
Also, perhaps the pod was constantly thrusting to puch against the side of the Discovery, but if it was not, I should think that the force of the explosion and all that air whooshing out should have blown the pod rapidly in the other direction. Given this, I’m not sure where Dave would have ended up. True, he could be sucked out of the pod with the outrushing gas, as the movie depicts, but an explosion that apparently blew the door to bits would also send the pod flying away so fast, I’m not sure his forward momentum from the expulsion of air would even cancel his reverse momentum; it seemed he was anchored on the pod somehow as he crouched. This could just be a limitation of the special effects, as it would be difficult to do wire work. Realistically, Dave would just be floating there, crouched in a ball, the door blows one way, the pod, I would think, would go the other way, and hopefully he’d get carried out by the force of the rapidly escaping air. If not, and he touched no part of the pod, he’d just float there in space, right?
Yeah, now that I think about it, the pod must have been somehow stuck in its position, or the scene just doesn’t make any sense.
But again, go back to my criteria: Does the movie work without this “blooper”? The answer, in my opinion, is unequivocably “yes”. So just put the movie on Mute during those two seconds.
Or you can simply assume that Storm was just wrong. Characters are allowed to be wrong in movies, you know. You’ve never had a school teacher say that Columbus was the first to say Earth was round?
Though in Armaggedon, the Rock magically misses the earth if blown in two before a certain line(Suprisingly close to the earth) Yeah, sure, right, whatever.
I find the movie much more bearable if you watch it as a comedy.
Original Star Wars comic book 1977 or 1978…issue 4 or 5 I think.
Someone wrote in to the editor about the ‘12 parsecs’ thing claiming “I’ll bet Solo can run the mile in 100 yards, too!”
The editors (IIRC) said they’d checked on high and said it was a sign of Solo’s lack of knowledge about space flight and that’s why Obi-Wan gives Luke that look. He knows Han is just a lying dirtbag at that point.
It’s certainly not a great movie, but I don’t see anything wrong with that. Surely drawing the line to scale would be counterproductive, nor does it being out of scale detract from that particular plot point. Additionally, I also don’t see anything wrong with calculating a termination line that you must complete your mission before, if you can determine the angle at which the pieces will separate.
This has made it to my list of favorite SDMB quotes.
Thats the whole point of the Marvel universe. They don’t live in Metropolis They live in New York and LA etc. Of course its not our NY or LA but its supposed to be a lot closer than the DC universe (at least in the 60s when these titles were first created). And please don’t forget, its a frickin comic book.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Loopydude
I hate to pick nits on 2001, because I love it so but some things always kinda bugged me…
The scene where David Bowman blasts out of the pod into the emergency airlock. I know it’s an erroneous notion that a man will simply explode during rapid decompression, but I would think some kind of major superficial trauma would be expected. I could be wrong, but he seemed to hold his breath before the door blew off. This would be a bad idea, not the least because his lungs would surely rupture and he’d probably get some nasty air embolisms and other obvious complications from that. But like I said, I could be wrong.
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Thist may not come across particulary well in the movie, but in the book it mentions him exhaling to avoid that sort of thing.
I believe that Clarke based his use of spacemen-in-vacum on actual NASA reports. He rote up a detailed paper supporting this scene, since he knew it would be questioned. He’d used it before (Earthlight, The Other Side of the Sky), and it would show up afterwards in his work (It’s discussed as an option, although not used, in The Fountains of Paradise). In these works, he does counel exhaling as you exit the spceship into vacuum. NASA apparently experimented on animals to see what would happen in such extreme decompression, and the resul was a whole lot less traumatic than it’s made out to be in movies like B]Total Recall** and Outland.)
No, I think you need to rewatch. When BG came out this error mpressed itself upon all of us grad students, and the stupidity of it was the topic of discussion for days. “centos” were units of time, but “microns” were definiyely a measure of distance. we figured that some screenwriter for the series recollected that fact, but forgot how small they were.
Considering that they had previously complained that the big rock in space had suddenly started spinning unpredictably (and interfering with communications or something), no, no angles would have been possible.
I read in a book based on the making of 2001, that according to Clarke, the scene where he inhales in the movie was the one day Arthur was absent from the live shoot.
Still, it’s a relatively innocent mistake given that it’s the most believable sci-fi film I’ve seen.
In Total Recall the protagonists end up outside on the surface of Mars or something (it has been a long time since I saw the movie) and their faces start to expand in cartoonish ways, e.g. their eyes bulge out extensively. Bu then then after something happens their faces reutrn to normal. Hmmm, no tissue damage at all, the eyes perfectly normal. Whew, that was close.
ALso, in Airplane 2 the shuttle is heading towards the sun and then skids to a stop. I mean how serious can I take that move at that point.
