I knew someone just like Lazlo - but not as smart. He slept on the couch in the MITSFS library.
When I visited Oxford I met one of the people who pulled off the McDonalds hack when he was an undergrad. This, for those who don’t remember it, involved printing many, many copies of a sweepstakes entry form, perfectly legal since they forgot to say it couldn’t be computer generated.
Now you listen to me, Jesus…
Also, a cameo of the late great Severn Darden!
My computers at home are named lazlo, chrisknight, and hathaway.
Notice what is written on the chalkboard during the final shot of that montage, where the professor is replaced with a tape player: “Listen carefully, math on tape is hard to follow.” I actually had one physics prof who essentially did this, except he had his graduate assistant (who apparently knew squat about statistical mechanics) copy his notes onto viewgraphs and project them on the overhead, then read them verbatim while the prof was off on a conslutting job. Most people just started checking his notes out of the library and copying them rather than attending lecture. That was my last semester in the physics program, for a number of reasons not withstanding the almost complete disinterest of most of the faculty in teaching.
Stranger
Has anyone ever tried the vending machine trick?
I like touches like:
Although Kent is a complete tool they don’t make him dumb (didn’t he build the targeting mirror?) and knows he can ruin an expriment with a smudge of grease.
Chris shorts out the building’s circuit breakers to ‘get a charge’ what other film bothers with that sort of thing?
Chris’ explanation of how the chemical LASER will work actually makes some sense. I’ll have to watch it tonight to check that, it’s been a while.
You guys have pretty much hogged all the quotes. . .
I often still use this: Always… no, no… never… forget to check your references.
Either no one ever gets it, or people just like to ignore me.
I haven’t seen the movie in ages, but its presentation of Nerd Life struck a chord – a lot of MIT culture was pretty similar.
I’m definitely a geek, though. A part of me was screaming that the scam of using frozen discs to defeat the vending machine probably wouldn’t have worked, and that there was little point i n keeping a dewar flask in the freezer when the contents were well below zero degrees Fahrenheit. You’d get a break in the melting time, but not stop it.
Same here, I use.
I don’t work well under pressure.
and variations on
I file it under H for [something utterly unrelated]
no resposes to date.
That’s one of my favorites as well, but the whole movie is one big awesome quote. The line about Socrates is simply the best, but some of my other favorites are:
“Why do you wear that toy on your head?
Because if I wear it anywhere else, it chafes.”
“Coming? It’s not even breathing hard.”
“Do you run?
Only when chased.”
“How’s it feel to be frozen! Ice is nice!”
“Someday I hope to be two of them.”
“Okay God, Lemme have it!!!”
Would you be prepared if gravity reversed itself?
M: Why does he keep going into our closet?
C: Why do you keep into our closet?
M: To get my clothes, but that’s not why he keeps going in.
C: Of course not Mitch, he’s twice your size. <pauses, as Mitch stands there looking confused>.
Really Mitch, think before you ask these questions; 20 points higher than me? thinks a big guy like that can wear his clothes?
It’s even funnier as I type it out.
BTW, can anyone here make sense of “it is possible to ionize (or something) excited bromide in an argon matrix; it’s an exomer”?
An [url-Excimer - Wikipedia]excimer. Basically, you created your lasing medium in the excited state, rather than pumping in energy directly into the cavity from an external source like a neon tube, an electrical current, or a pump laser, and then activiate it somehow (or let it spontaneously fall as the constituant molecules decay via one or two routes to the ground state, emitting photons as they do). Excimer lasers were all the rage in the 'Seventies and early 'Eighties because you could, at least in theory, develop a much higher throughput without being limited by an input/output balance or the default equilibrium state. Put simply, in deference to Kent, it’s like adding a turbocharger onto your laser to compress more “fuel” into the lasing medium and get more higher power throughput.
In the movie, they’re actually freezing the excimer in the excited state, so it’s sort of like mixing hydrogen and oxygen together and then freezing it, preventing it from going off until you put a match to it, then when powered, the excimer melts, dumping all the energy in a very short pulse. I don’t know if or how well this would really work. 5MW is a huge output even now, and I’m guessing the heat generated would basically melt their unrefrigerated apparatus, and quite possibly a good portion of their lab. (They’d also all have massive sunburns from standing so close to the UV beam, leaded glass shield or no.) Excimer lasers are usually big, bulky things, too, with massive power sources; it probably wouldn’t fit in the weapons bay of a B1B, but that’s reasonable dramatic license. It’s clear that the script was actually vetted by people who had some clue about the appropriate terminology and then-current research, which is pretty impressive for a teen comedy. If only the makers of, say, The Core had availed themselves of the same…but then, I guess without the science misapprehensions they wouldn’t have had a film left.
Stranger
One of my favorite movies. Some great lines in that film (I also use ‘Its a moral imperative’ occasionally…as well as ‘Lets take a step back…no, lets take a step forward…’).
I also wish they made more movies like this…and that some of these film makers would at least occasionally actually ASK someone with a science background to vett their scripts. Just a quick glance to see if they laugh out loud at the more stupid parts…
-XT
(have to dig this movie out of the old VCR part of our video library tonight, dust it off and watch it. I have a hankering to see it again)
I remembered one more. A sight gag rather than dialogue. When Chris is taking his final he walks out and puts his answer book on Hathaway’s deak. He then puts a apple next to it and walks out. Hathaway throws the apple in the garbage. A few seconds later, the garbage can explodes. The timing of the scene was perfect.
???
The first excimer laser I used would have fit in my Acura Integra if I folded the seats down. That’s with its power supply. The second one I used, the one I ended up using for my thesis, was bigger, but I could still have fit it in our minivan. There’s no fundamental reason for excimer lasers to be huge.
Of course, if you want to vaporize someone’s house, or even fill it with popped corn, you’ll want a bigger beast, with reserves of gas. You might be able to fit that into a plane. I don’t think it’s dramatic license. But the bigger, the better, if your goal is to create mayhem.
Nerdy nitpick: As more than one professor has pointed out, “Excimer”, short for “Excited Dimer”, is really inappropriate, since no excimer uses a dimer with identical atoms (symmetry consideratioons would forbid it). The Real name ought to be “Exciplex”, from “Excited Complex”, but that never caught on.
“Hey Laszlo, wanna see a demonstration of gravity?”
This is one of my favorite 80’s movies, too. I’m glad to hear that the terminology was plausible. It always felt right, even though I know nothing about lasers.
A couple of my favorite bits:
When they’re filling Kent’s room with knockout gas from the hallway, they’re all crouching by the door wearing big gas masks. A random guy passes by and looks at them, with this blase look on his face, like, “whatever.”
After Knight’s remote-controlled aircraft thing crashes through the window, he asks, “would you classify that as a launch problem or a design problem?”
Someone already mentioned the “always…never…forget to check your references” quote. But I love the way, when the professor says he has some advice to offer, Mitch quickly pulls out a little notebook and gets ready to write it down.
Count me in as one more who loved the movie and now has the need to pull it out of the VHS box and watch it again.
This is one of the many reasons I loved the movie. I get a bit anal about bad science in the movies, but with this movie the artistic license is pretty minimal.
Thanks Stranger for the trip down memory lane.
Sorry, I should have clarified that a high energy excimer laser would be huge. You’d need a massive power supply and some way to cool the lasing chamber and whatever optics, which would be much larger than the lasing cavity itself. The most common application for excimer lasers that I know of is performing eye surgery; these are obviously pretty small for their energy output. The power supply for the MIRACL laser (which is a deuterium fluoride laser, not an excimer) is gigantic, and although I don’t have details on it, the power supply and support systems on the YAL-1 laser for ABL nears the load allowable for the largest and highest payload version of the Boeing 747. Concepts I’ve seen for x-ray- or neutron-pumped lasers are much more compact (about the size of a large surveillence satellite) but since the energy source for these weapons is an exploding nuclear device, limiting them to essentially a single shot, their utility is limited.
True. The Wikipedia article actually talks about “exciplexes” but I’ve never seen the term used in a textbook. Looking back, I think my description of excimer lasers might be a bit misleading; it’s not as if you can mix up an excimer and then dump it into the laser cavity later on; the excimer state (comprised of molecules made from a combination of highly reactive elements and normally non-reactive “noble” gases) is very unstable and has to be produced and used immediately. Instead of just pumping up electrons or ions into excited metastable states, however, it actually creates the new molecules that have vastly higher bound energy states and therefore energy densities than normal chemical compounds. I doubt you could “freeze” an excimer; the act of freezing it would probably cause the compounds to fall back into independent ground states.
Stranger
At, or near, the top of my list of alltime great movies!
Every girl I date must eventually watch this movie. How she reacts ultimately determines how well our relationship will turn out.
I often say, when asked if I run, “only when chased.” I just never realized it came from the movie (I must be subconsciously trying to channel Chris Knight).
I also love the moment when Kent is in the house when the laser shoots through the window. His action, jutting his body forward while extending his hands behind him (presumably in the presence of God) cracks me up every time.