May 6th, 2009
This new Mind Meld post is over at sfsignal.com, of course. Be encouraged to go read all the responses over there and leave comments. Here was my response:
I haven’t watched a lot of recent TV shows, or seen every movie that’s come out. I’ll focus on some of the serious movies and TV shows that are especially good or bad with the science and consistency. For the most part I’ll ignore comedies and shows that are really unabashed fantasy.
First, the movies with realistic science. The king is 2001: A Space Odyssey, with every scientific detail meticulously rendered, from artificial gravity to human exposure to vacuum, to the silence of space. Other films with realistic science include Contact, Gattaca, Predator, and Minority Report (if we ignore the future-seeing psychics). Contact enjoyed the technical expertise of Carl Sagan in the way 2001 benefited from Arthur C. Clarke. I love Predator for its realistic portrayal of high-tech camo and alien vision in the thermal infrared, with the plot turning on these points.
There are more movies with bad science than good. Armageddon averages over an error per minute, and the opening minutes get so many things so badly wrong I couldn’t believe anything in the whole film. Utterly ridiculous. The Core is the geological version of Armageddon. I didn’t even watch Sunshine since the premise was so unbelievable: the sun has stopped burning (?!) yet humans can restart it with a manned mission (?!) to deliver nuclear weapons to restart it. Dumb, dumb, dumb. I understand they had a science consultant to handwave something plausible, and I read an article about this, and still thought it was totally dumb. I might watch the movie if it comes on TV and I’m drunk and bored. Reign of Fire looked so cool with its dragons — I love a serious dragon movie — but they’re supposed to eat ash? ASH? After all the chemical energy has been extracted by burning? And the entire species had a ridiculous evolutionary niche and reproductive cycle that was completely implausible. XXX had a set of binoculars that could look through walls, and when that scene happened a new low of stupid had been set. But rising to that challenge is John Woo’s Face Off, which features a face transplant that somehow renders perfect copies that make it impossible for people to tell the difference between John Travolta and Nicholas Cage. I don’t think anyone needs to see their faces to tell them apart. Oh, the James Bond movies, like XXX, have often slid into silliness with Q’s gadgets.
As for television, my first thought was that I couldn’t think of any tv shows with consistently good science. After some more thought, I still couldn’t. I’ll list some shows that often try and sometimes do a good job, although non consistently in my opinion. Battlestar Galactica has some intrinsic flaws, such as the way Vipers zip around solar systems in hours or less without very much fuel, but the ships also fly through space silently and vacuum is treated realistically. CSI has ridiculously sophisticated expensive tests available and occasionally makes some gaffes (e.g., giving the acceleration due to gravity as a velocity), but has plots revolving around science and logic. ER gets its medicine and procedures correct, everything very realistic for a hospital show. The Big Bang Theory is a comedy, but they do a good job avoiding science errors and do provide some clever jokes. Star Trek, for all its boner episodes (like when Spock’s brain was stolen, or the Enterprise was almost hit by a chunk of white dwarf star), does try and sometimes gets things right.
Almost everything on TV has worse science that knocks me out of my suspension of disbelief. For a while I enjoyed Heroes as a fantasy, but they kept pushing the science side so hard I finally had it. Almost everything on the show fails to make sense when any thought is applied. I found Northern Exposure similarly implausible as the science-oriented character, the doctor, failed to believe fantastic events week after week (as opposed to the X-files where Scully evolved into a believer, with good reason). The rogue moon of Space 1999, flying past a different alien world every week, made no sense whatsoever. The Six Million Dollar Man should have torn his body apart about six million times. And finally, a fan favorite, Firefly, had terraformed moons and some sort of planetary system that still makes no sense to me, and as an astronomer and science fiction writer I can’t even figure out how to make it all plausible.
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The Sunshine science adviser was Brian Cox, a high energy particle physicist, a Royal Society research fellow, and a prof at the University of Manchester (my alma mater). He works on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, and is a personable-looking bod who has done a bunch of BBC Horizon documentaries on gravity, stars and time, and the LHC, and was keyboard player in D:Ream (“Things Can Only Get Better”).
There was an interview in the BSFA’s Matrix with Cox about what he did on Sunshine (Issue 183, 2007). It doesn’t seem to be online, but as I recall he did head off even less plausible ideas (something about dropping the Moon into the sun rings a bell).
“A Q Ball is eating the Sun from the inside out” http://www.sunshinedna.com/?p=236
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Cox_(physicist)
Yeah, I remember reading an article about the science consulting when the movie came out, and was not convinced. I do believe Cox could have prevented something worse. I mean, as I understand it, they brought him the ridiculous premise and asked him to make it plausible, which is asking a lot. A lot of movies and tv shows have science consultants, and it’s not their fault when the creators insist on a silly idea.
Sunshine’s an awesomely bad movie, from an otherwise usually very good director and production team. It should either be avoided for being one of the worst movies ever made, particularly in terms of a complete abdication of sanity, or watched for the same reasons. A movie full chock full of ‘what the f**k where they thinking!?’ moments. Like when the solar plasma breaks into the ship and the guy … *touches* it while it flickers around him.
Think Disney’s The Black Hole, but with better fx.
but there are some positive things in Sunshine, as well as the pace of the movie and the music are quite interesting. Finally, if I recall correctly, they also had silent space
Mike, can you comment on everything that is wrong with the Q-Ball plot?
Rogerio, no, because I didn’t watch it. To be fair, I’d have to do that. But Q-Balls are certainly very very very speculative with no evidence whatsoever to believe they exist (no supersymmetric theory has observational evidence to support it). Moreover, we don’t see evidence for type G stars or other low mass main sequence stars exploding anywhere else in the Milky Way, so this would have to be a ridiculously rare event, happening at a very special time (when we’d have the tech to do something about it but not easily). And summaries I’ve read suggest that the crew is there only to “deliver a bomb.” Why have a crew??? And how can any bomb the size of spacecraft “ignite” a star? Ludicrous. Maybe the bomb is supposed to destroy the Q-ball somehow? I don’t know from the summaries. But it sounds totally stupid to me unless it’s a magic bomb that can’t be delivered by unmanned rockets. I’ve heard that there are other, smaller scale problems — Gary’s comment about the plasma breaking in and people touching it sounds awful, for instance.
I should stop. I’d really have to see the thing to comment fairly. But it just sounds so very, very dumb. A human-made bomb hand-delivered to reignite the sun? Suns don’t go out. Bombs don’t have to be hand delivered. No human-made bomb I can imagine would have the slightest effect on a solar mass of stuff.
In Star Dragon, I had a much larger effort to exploit a gravitational instability to have a much smaller effect than reigniting an entire star.
And for the record, current theoretical particle physics these days is about as close to magic and religion as science has ever been.
I read Nicholas’s link above and have some insights. First, I still think it’s very silly hand-waving “physics” for this stuff. A lot of people don’t believe supersymmetric particels are “likely” to be found by the LHC. The Stellar bomb is some kind of dark matter bomb set off by something like half the world’s uranium. This seriously sounds like made-up physics rather than reasonable speculation. Even if we give this part a pass, why a human crew to deliver it??? How does the bomb survive to reach the heart of the sun??? How would we tell that this particular scenario is what is happening???
OK, going to refrain from more comments without watching. Maybe they’ve patched this better than I assume.
The movie Tycus was a particularly bad movie. Best line:
“The comet has entered the Earth’s atmosphere and will strike the Moon in eighteen hours.”
“Maybe they’ve patched this better than I assume.”
They haven’t.
There’s more accurate science in Flash Gordon than in Sunshine.
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