What sci-fi movie was the most insulting to science?

[Myasishchev]

Well, my bad, but it wasn't clear what he was asking about, and the movie is almost sixty years old anyway.

 

[Kaziarl]

It's been a long time, years in fact, since I've seen it, so I could be misremembering. Although I seem to recall the earth stopping for a moment in more then a metaphorical sense.

I know the movie itself was more about human tendency towards violence, and that if they didn't shape up before reaching into space they were going to be put down. I could have sworn the alien, Klaatu, had stopped the earth for just a moment to back up that warning.

 

[Myasishchev]

Nah. He stopped electricity in all human machines that relied on it (through Spaceman magic) for a twenty-four hour period, exempting flights in transit and hospitals.

 

[Silvercrest]

Kaziarl wrote:

It's been a long time, years in fact, since I've seen it, so I could be misremembering. Although I seem to recall the earth stopping for a moment in more then a metaphorical sense.

I know the movie itself was more about human tendency towards violence, and that if they didn't shape up before reaching into space they were going to be put down. I could have sworn the alien, Klaatu, had stopped the earth for just a moment to back up that warning.

You've pretty much got it as far as the violence thing, but Klaatu didn't do anything like that (unless I'm misremembering).

Although I do think we'd be screwed if that movie happened.

 

[Kaziarl]

Ok, my poor memory then. At least I remembered how to spell the dudes name...

Lets see, what are some others...

Well, I suppose it depends on if you think Super Man just flew backwards really fast, or made the earth rotate backwards. It would seem to be the latter since he had to start it the right direction again. I'm sure that would cause some problems.

Then there's also the "Super Powers from the suns rays" that, while awesome for super man, always seemed a little silly from a scientific point of view.

umm... I've heard some people comment about Battlefield Earth from time to time as having a lot of whack science. Such as, IIRC, radioactive isotopes explode the aliens atmosphere or something like that. Of course considering the author, they were probably Xenu supporters anyway.

 

[Owain Taggart]

I would think that comic book movies would have a category of their own. I mean, I don't ever hold comic book movies to the same scientific standards I would for other movies as I don't expect them to be realistic.

And to touch on the latest Star Trek, I believe that's why I had such a problem with the red matter. It seemed to have come right out of a comic book and came off feeling rather off-putting when it comes to Star Trek as a result and required a different level of suspension of disbelief, which off-set the destruction of Vulcan. To me, it didn't feel dramatic. It felt like they were testing how far they could go with things in terms of Trek fans.

 

[Kaziarl]

I dunno. I didn't see Red Matter as that much more unbelievable then Proto-Matter in TWOK. And TWOK, from what I can tell, seems to be considered one of the best of the movies.

EDIT: Actually, I should rephrase that. It wasn't just Proto-Matter. It was the whole genesis effect.

 

[intrinsical]

TWoK was a story that looked at many aspects of living and dying. The genesis device served to enhanced the movie's theme by showing that even in death and destruction, new life can be born. For that, I find it easier to forgive the lack in scientific accuracy.

On the other hand Red Matter served no such higher purpose in Star Trek. It gets worse. One tiny drop of Red Matter was able to destroy an entire planet of several billion Vulcans. Yet a whole gallon of that same Red Matter only created a black hole tiny enough to destroy a single Romulan mining ship. The black hole was not even big enough to swallow the Enterprise! Does not compute.

 

[Christopher]

Regardless of what Huxley said years before Jurassic Park was made, I do remember the idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs was considered a crazy idea. Around the time the movie came out I remember discussing it with one of my teachers who said it was a ridiculous notion that a creature that had existed for so long with scales would suddenly shrink in size and grow feathers.

He was probably referring to the pterodactyl in regards to size.

Pterosaurs were not dinosaurs. The term "dinosaur" refers only to land-dwelling organisms of the orders Saurischia and Ornithischia. Pterosaurs and sea-dwelling reptiles such as ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs were separate, related groups.

Birds are a subset of the theropods, the bipedal carnivorous dinosaurs such as Velociraptor and Deinonychus (and yes, T. rex). It's now believed that all theropods, including T. rex, probably had feathers. Indeed, it's even believed that some of the raptors may actually have been flightless birds, species whose ancestors had flown but had then lost the ability and grown larger, like modern ratites except with clawed forelimbs.

And your biology teacher didn't know what the hell he was talking about, on many levels. For one thing, not all dinosaurs were large; they came in all sizes, down to creatures as small as modern chickens. There's plenty of overlap between the size of dinosaurs and the size of modern bird species. For another, feathers evolved as a specialized kind of scale, and of course mammalian hair evolved from scales as well.

Still, that teacher's shocking ignorance aside, you're right that even actual experts in the field were long skeptical of the birds-from-dinosaurs theory. It's been a matter of controversy for the past couple of decades, and there are still scientists who don't accept it. At the time of Jurassic Park, the idea was known, but not as widely accepted as it is today.

After all, Jurassic Park had the benefit of consulting with Jack Horner, one of the world's leading paleontologists. Spielberg did take poetic license here and there, like making the Velociraptors larger and more dangerous than they were known to be (though this turned out to be art presaging life, since the larger Utahraptor was discovered shortly afterward), but the film had the benefit of cutting-edge paleontological knowledge by the standards of 1993. And yet it didn't depict its raptors as feathered, because a lot of what we know or believe about dinosaurs today wasn't known or accepted yet in 1993. The field has come a long way in 18 years.

This is the thing that has to be understood about science fiction. Science is always advancing, so even the most scientifically accurate fiction of a certain year is probably going to end up looking ignorant and foolish later on. Sometimes SF stories get contradicted by new discoveries made before they even come out. So it's important to distinguish between how accurate a story seems by today's scientific standards and how accurate it was by the standards of its own time.

I dunno. I didn't see Red Matter as that much more unbelievable then Proto-Matter in TWOK.

There was no mention of protomatter in The Wrath of Khan. The Genesis Device was introduced in TWOK, and I agree that it was entirely fanciful, but the notion that it involved some made-up stuff called "protomatter" wasn't introduced until The Search for Spock.

 

[JiNX-01]

My high school anthropology teacher was a nun.

 

[Deckerd]

No, it was pretty bad. Even then, they knew that birds were the descendants of dinosaurs.

'They' don't even 'know' that now. It's a working theory.

I remember the first time we watched The Abyss. Not usually given to staying awake during my kinda movies, the OH persevered to the end. At the end, when they all magically surfaced from the deep he shouted "that's pish!" at the screen.

On a similar note, when I was much younger I remember watching a film about adventure, evil baddies, brave goodies etc in the jungle. At one point the action centred around a pool of molten gold. Inevitably someone fell in. And sank. My Dad shouted "that's pish!" at the screen.

 

[Nerys Myk]

TWoK was a story that looked at many aspects of living and dying. The genesis device served to enhanced the movie's theme by showing that even in death and destruction, new life can be born. For that, I find it easier to forgive the lack in scientific accuracy.

On the other hand Red Matter served no such higher purpose in Star Trek. It gets worse. One tiny drop of Red Matter was able to destroy an entire planet of several billion Vulcans. Yet a whole gallon of that same Red Matter only created a black hole tiny enough to destroy a single Romulan mining ship. The black hole was not even big enough to swallow the Enterprise! Does not compute.

I think that if the black hole was large enough to swallow the Narada it was large enough to swallow the Enterprise.

Also the black hole that "swallowed" Vulcan was created in the center of the planet. It didnt have to be larger than the planet to destroy it.

 

[JarodRussell]

TWoK was a story that looked at many aspects of living and dying. The genesis device served to enhanced the movie's theme by showing that even in death and destruction, new life can be born. For that, I find it easier to forgive the lack in scientific accuracy.

On the other hand Red Matter served no such higher purpose in Star Trek. It gets worse. One tiny drop of Red Matter was able to destroy an entire planet of several billion Vulcans. Yet a whole gallon of that same Red Matter only created a black hole tiny enough to destroy a single Romulan mining ship. The black hole was not even big enough to swallow the Enterprise! Does not compute.

I think that if the black hole was large enough to swallow the Narada it was large enough to swallow the Enterprise.

Also the black hole that "swallowed" Vulcan was created in the center of the planet. It didnt have to be larger than the planet to destroy it.

I thought a black hole has no size as it's a singularity.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

I thought a black hole has no size as it's a singularity.

Whenever anyone talks about "the size of the black hole" in a movie or show, I just mentally substitute "the area of the black hole's event horizon" or "the mass of the black hole", both of which are meaningful indications of magnitude.

 

[Christopher]

I think that if the black hole was large enough to swallow the Narada it was large enough to swallow the Enterprise.

Well, of course it's a function of distance. Contrary to myth, black holes don't actively reach out and suck you in with some kind of magic supergravity -- at a distance, you'd feel no more pull from a black hole of mass M than you'd feel from a regular star of mass M. But since black holes have all their mass concentrated in a point, you can get arbitrarily close to them, and it's when you get close -- closer than you could possibly get to the center of mass of a star or planet -- that the gravity goes up sufficiently (by the inverse square law) to pose a serious hazard.

So if a black hole forms in the middle of your starship, the tidal stress from its gravitational pull could tear you apart, but a ship relatively nearby would be far less affected.

Also the black hole that "swallowed" Vulcan was created in the center of the planet. It didnt have to be larger than the planet to destroy it.

In theory, that's true; it would eventually suck in the entire planet. The problem is that all that infalling mass would get in its own way -- like a crowd filing into a stadium through a single door, it could only fall in a little at a time and the rest would have to wait its turn. It would probably take centuries for a black hole to swallow a planet, depending on its mass.

 

[Nerys Myk]

I think that if the black hole was large enough to swallow the Narada it was large enough to swallow the Enterprise.

Well, of course it's a function of distance. Contrary to myth, black holes don't actively reach out and suck you in with some kind of magic supergravity -- at a distance, you'd feel no more pull from a black hole of mass M than you'd feel from a regular star of mass M. But since black holes have all their mass concentrated in a point, you can get arbitrarily close to them, and it's when you get close -- closer than you could possibly get to the center of mass of a star or planet -- that the gravity goes up sufficiently (by the inverse square law) to pose a serious hazard.

So if a black hole forms in the middle of your starship, the tidal stress from its gravitational pull could tear you apart, but a ship relatively nearby would be far less affected.

Makes sense. I guess the Enterprise was close enough to the Narada Black Hole be threatened by its pull.

Also the black hole that "swallowed" Vulcan was created in the center of the planet. It didnt have to be larger than the planet to destroy it.

In theory, that's true; it would eventually suck in the entire planet. The problem is that all that infalling mass would get in its own way -- like a crowd filing into a stadium through a single door, it could only fall in a little at a time and the rest would have to wait its turn. It would probably take centuries for a black hole to swallow a planet, depending on its mass

Its a two plus hour movie...they didnt have Centuries

 

[Kaziarl]

I think that if the black hole was large enough to swallow the Narada it was large enough to swallow the Enterprise.

Well, of course it's a function of distance. Contrary to myth, black holes don't actively reach out and suck you in with some kind of magic supergravity -- at a distance, you'd feel no more pull from a black hole of mass M than you'd feel from a regular star of mass M. But since black holes have all their mass concentrated in a point, you can get arbitrarily close to them, and it's when you get close -- closer than you could possibly get to the center of mass of a star or planet -- that the gravity goes up sufficiently (by the inverse square law) to pose a serious hazard.

So if a black hole forms in the middle of your starship, the tidal stress from its gravitational pull could tear you apart, but a ship relatively nearby would be far less affected.

Also the black hole that "swallowed" Vulcan was created in the center of the planet. It didnt have to be larger than the planet to destroy it.

In theory, that's true; it would eventually suck in the entire planet. The problem is that all that infalling mass would get in its own way -- like a crowd filing into a stadium through a single door, it could only fall in a little at a time and the rest would have to wait its turn. It would probably take centuries for a black hole to swallow a planet, depending on its mass.

And wouldn't it have formed an... oh I know I'm going to spell this wrong... Accretion disk before the planet would have actually vanished? Personally I think they missed on that aspect, a lot of the concept photos and artist interpretations of what that would look like have been absolutely stunning.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

The red matter made just as much scientific sense as the so-called "Genesis wave." If one "does not compute" neither does the other.

Is there, in fact, any good science in TWOK? Exploding planets, ships hitting the edge of a nebula with a "bump!"....

 

[Lieut. Arex]

After all, Jurassic Park had the benefit of consulting with Jack Horner, one of the world's leading paleontologists. Spielberg did take poetic license here and there, like making the Velociraptors larger and more dangerous than they were known to be (though this turned out to be art presaging life, since the larger Utahraptor was discovered shortly afterward), but the film had the benefit of cutting-edge paleontological knowledge by the standards of 1993. And yet it didn't depict its raptors as feathered, because a lot of what we know or believe about dinosaurs today wasn't known or accepted yet in 1993. The field has come a long way in 18 years.

From a practical standpoint, showing the raptors as plausibly feathered would have been nearly impossible in 1993. Jurassic Park pushed then-current CGI to its limits modeling life-like skin and scales. With the uncertainty about the evolutionary relationship and the effects limitations, it's no wonder Spielberg portrayed the dinosaurs in a more traditional fashion.

 

[Kaziarl]

The red matter made just as much scientific sense as the so-called "Genesis wave." If one "does not compute" neither does the other.

Is there, in fact, any good science in TWOK? Exploding planets, ships hitting the edge of a nebula with a "bump!"....

I wouldn't really know, but I would imagine there'd be some kind of effect passing from a vacuum into a cloud of dust and gas. Could it be dense enough to exert some kind of drag on the ship?