Science in the new movie [SPOILER]

[iguana_tonante]

Lucky enough to get invited to a press pre-screening tonight (my friends are dying from envy). Thoroughly enjoyable, a wonderful roller coaster with a great heart. A great movie, and a great Star Trek movie. Just loved it.

However, I'm a little wee disappointed in some of the "science" in it: I know this is entertainment and not The Discovery Channel, and I have no problems with some fanciful pseudo-science to get the narrative going, as long it isn't full-blown stupid. However, there are some sore points for me.

Spoiler: science in the movie

1. The destruction of Vulcan from Delta Vega. The only way old Spock could see Vulcan that big in Delta Vega's sky is that they are located in the same star system and even then only in veeeery close orbital proximity. The disk of Vulcan looks bigger than the full moon in the Earth sky. Bad.

2. The red matter. Being some sort of exotic matter, I can accept that it are prone to some weird behaviour, like collapsing in a micro black hole when kinetically excited. But the speed at which the black holes accrue matter from the surrounding space is just ridiculous.

3. Gravity wells. It just seems like Holliwood can't do black holes. Gravity is depicted as some sort of gigantic whirpool sucking everything around. Bad.

Actually, the depiction of time-travel is not bad in my opinion: obviously we have no idea on how it could work in reality, but the depiction doesn't look silly, and that's the best I can hope.

Any other?

 

[urbandk]

Totally agree about

Spoiler: black holes

black holes. how ridiculous. first, a supernova that's gonna eat up the galaxy. next a black hole that sucks it all in. black holes are sometimes the remnants of supernovae anyway. the red matter is silly and detracts from the story

i hope next time they resist the temptation to concoct a cockamamey mcguffin to explain everything. dilithium is silly enough.

 

[FlyingLemons]

Well, in bits I've read about

Spoiler: Scotty

When they find Scotty on Delta Vega and they try and solve the warp speed beaming problem, Spock Prime gives him the equation necessary (invented by Scotty in the future, I think), and Scotty responds by saying he'd have never thought of space as moving, which is consistent with current research on warp drive spacetimes and is really the only way you can cheat on the whole light speed limit thing.

 

[iguana_tonante]

Oh yeah, I totally forgot about...

Spoiler: twinkle twinkle little star

...the supernova. I suppose the sheer craziness of it just prevented my brain about thinking of it as science. A supernova will consume the entire galaxy... yeah, sure.

But, even if I might buy that a hypernova could wreak havoc in the galaxy in a blaze of glory for the sake of storytelling, it looks like the slowest supernova of all time! It explodes, expand to nearby systems (yeah, whatever), consumes Romulus, and still Spock have time to approach it and throw the red matter in it.

It just look like the writers have no idea about the distances between celestial bodies and the time-scale involved in astrophysical events. A shame, really, because it would not be too difficult to write around this problems and get a good explanation. No technobabble, just something vaguely coherent with current astrophysics.

 

[FlyingLemons]

I think this is all just the classic "Hollywood science", anyway. They've tried to make films out of hard science books such as those of Stephen Baxter, but they've all been abandoned due to the fact you need a degree in physics to understand what's going on.

However, as the Alcubierre metric and Obousy's warp stuff are a personal interest of mine, I'm just glad that they got that little bit right.

 

[urbandk]

Spoiler: supernova

It's slow and fast. Slowly consumes one system, quickly becoming a threat to the entire galaxy. I mean, it would take thousands of years.

This has always been the craziness of ST. Remember when Praxis exploded. How close was the Excelsior? It must have been damn close. Inside the Klingon solar system. Which obviously it wasn't. Otherwise it would have taken a year or two (at least) for that shockwave to hit the ship.

 

[iguana_tonante]

I think this is all just the classic "Hollywood science", anyway. They've tried to make films out of hard science books such as those of Stephen Baxter, but they've all been abandoned due to the fact you need a degree in physics to understand what's going on.

However, as the Alcubierre metric and Obousy's warp stuff are a personal interest of mine, I'm just glad that they got that little bit right.

Yeah, in general I agree with you. I have enough science at work all day long, I don't want my movies to be even vaguely reminiscent of my lectures.

But sometimes there is something so completely out-of-the-blue that I can't help but take notice and that detracts from my enjoyment of the movie, because for a moment I'm taken out of my suspension of disbelief.

And yeah, the bit with Scotty was actually quite good.

 

[FlyingLemons]

I'm the same when it comes to film - generally I can forgive bad science in Star Trek, but moments like "You need to stop thinking about Fourier transforms and start thinking about quantum mechanics" in Transformers make me start nitpicking.

When writers try and mine real terms for use rather than nonsense technobabble like "graviton manifold conduit" I think it does irk those with a scientific education as they actually know what they're talking about, and thus what is technobabble to some is exposed as nonsense to scientists.

 

[urbandk]

My fiancee has the same problem watching medical shows, where they start trying to sound technical but basically talk gibberish.

 

[FlyingLemons]

Sometimes having the knowledge means it's harder to suspend disbelief. A downside of a scientific education...

 

[urbandk]

Good thing I'm ignorant

 

[iguana_tonante]

Good thing I'm ignorant

As Cypher from The Matrix so honestly said: Ignorance is bliss.

Seriously: as I said, they are just minor quibbles, that do not detract from my general enjoyment of the movies. Actually, nitpicking about them is just adding to the fun.

So, any other mistakes that the scientifically-inclined eyes of TrekBBS noticed in the movie?