“Contact” is a great movie because it deals with the religious, philosophical, and scientific aspects of an extra terrestrial encounter where as a movie like “Independence Day” is more about weapons, battles and explosions. It was also relatively accurate with scientific principles, of course with the exception of a few scenes. Unfortunately, there is a huge mistake at the end of the movie that deals with time dilation within Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity. Dr. Eleanor "Ellie" Arroway claims to have been gone for about 18 hours while everyone else on Earth claims that she was only in the “core” of the machine for a fraction of a second as her pod fell straight through. For both her and the observers to be right, the movie would have to break the laws of special relativity and the pod would have to travel much faster than the speed of light, as shown in the calculations below. I put the dilated time (Δt) as 0.1 seconds because they said she was only in the core for a “fraction of a second.” I put Δt₀ as 64800 seconds (equivalent of 18 hours) for what Ellie claims to have experienced. In solving for “v”, you can see the answer does not exist because you would have to take the square root of a negative number. This means the pod would be going faster than the speed of light (1.9426x10¹⁴ meters per second). For this problem to agree with out current understanding of physics, namely Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity, only one perspective can be correct.

Let’s assume for a second that the outside observers (the ones in the control room) are correct and she was only gone for a fraction of a second. We have to assume she was traveling less than the speed of light, otherwise the math breaks down like it did in the first problem. I set her velocity as 299,792,457 meters per second (one meter per second slower than the speed of light). As you can see in the calculations below, even if she was gone for a tenth of a second, traveling that close to the speed of light means that more than 165 days would have elapsed on Earth before she returned.

Now let’s assume that Ellie was correct and she really was gone for 18 hours and her camera did in fact record 18 hours of static video. After working out the calculations, you can see that the dilated time is ENORMOUS in this scenario. We end up with 9.257x10¹² seconds (equivalent to more than 2933 CENTURIES!!!).

So the question is, how would I revise the script. I would probably re-write it so the aliens sent them drawings for a warp drive machine. This way, Ellie could travel with space instead of through a worm hole, and there would be no problems with time dilation. 

In 2008, theoretical physicist, Dr. Michio Kaku published a book entitled, “Physics of the Impossible.” This non-fiction book is described as “A Scientific Exploration Into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel” in which Dr. Kaku has, in a sense, taken all the cool, science fiction technologies that movie producers have used over the years, and sorted them into three classes of “impossibility.” Class 1 would be technologies that are impossible today, but do not violate the known laws of physics. Class 2 is technologies that are impossible today, and walk a fine line with the laws of physics, right between what’s improbable and impossible. Finally, Class 3 is technology that completely violates the known laws of physics, and thus, cannot exist.

This is relevant because two of arguably the coolest pieces of technology used in the Star Trek films are based on concepts that Dr. Kaku has classified in his book. Teleportation and Time Travel are concepts that might once have been thought to be complete science fiction nonsense, but are actually not out of the realm of possibility.

To start, I’ll discuss the idea of “warp drives.” As it stands, warp drive would actually be a class 3 impossibility because the current laws of physics state that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Warp drive is needed because the interstellar and intergalactic federations exist such vast distances from each other. There would have to be a way for characters to transport quickly from one place in the universe to another, otherwise the majority of the movie would be spent with the characters waiting while traveling through empty space. If this were the case, then characters in other parts of the galaxy would live their entire lives, and eventually die, just waiting for other characters to arrive, who by the way, would also be dead by the time they got there. Now, if you’re a viewer who can suspend your own disbelief that objects can’t travel faster than light, there is still one fundamental problem to deal with. Assuming you could travel faster than light to arrive at your destination in a timely fashion, even thought you get there faster, the person or group of people who were waiting for you will not have been traveling at warp speeding, meaning they lived all the minutes and hours you had the convenience of skipping over. The creators of Star Trek decided to ignore this physical concept and portray warp drive the way they did because without it, there would have been no franchise (and if there was it would probably would have sucked).

While there are numerous problems with “warp drives”, time travel is not out of the question. The idea of time travel has to do with Albert Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity. Under this theory, there are two postulates. The Relativity Postulate, stating that the laws of physics are the same in every inertial reference frame. As a consequence of this, there is no preferred reference frame and no concept of absolute time. The second postulate is the Speed of Light Postulate, which states that the speed of light in a vacuum in any reference frame is always the same and as a consequence of this, there exists what’s known as time dilation. This is what makes time travel possible. In a sense, we are always time traveling, just based on the activities we do on a daily basis. For example, if you drive on the highway for 10 hours at a constant speed on 80 miles per hour, you arrive at a point in time that is fractionally ahead of others at your destination. The same applies to people who fly on airplanes or spaceships. However, the difference in time is so unbelievably small that it’s negligible. Not to mention that everyone is always traveling somewhere, so eventually it all evens out. To travel noticeably into the future, one would have to achieve unimaginable velocities; speeds far greater than any man made object has ever traveled. In doing this, said “time travelers” would experience less time compared to people not traveling at that velocity, and thus arrive at a point in time where others have lived longer than you; in other words, arrive “in the future.”

Secondly, I would like to discuss teleportation. In Star Trek, the transporter is used to beam characters from the ship, down to planets, and back. The transporter is necessary because it allows characters to move quickly where otherwise they would have to use a smaller space ship, or some sort of a re-entry capsule. I don’t believe teleportation is as much of a necessity as warp drive in the movie because we still see the characters getting around using small space ships and pods; but nonetheless, it looks cool.

According to Dr. Kaku, teleportation is a Class 1 impossibility. But how could this be class 1 when time travel is class 2? Especially given that I just stated that everyone is technically time traveling every day. The fact is, everyday, we teleport information. Think of a fax machine. When sending a fax, the machine takes information in one location, and sends it somewhere else, and an exact copy of that information can be reproduced in a location other than the original. Seems easy enough, so why not start shoving people into fax machines? If we set aside the obvious limitations of that problem, the real issue is that fax machines are not designed to transfer matter or energy. In order to send a person, or an object, you would technically be sending a 3D fax, where the atoms of one item would be completely disassembled in one location, and transferred to another location where they would be reassembled in the same exact manner as the original. In a sense, it’s not so much a physics problem as much as it is an engineering challenge to design a machine that allows for that to happen. 

everything wrong with Star Trek (2009)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiQ9piVgtWM

This video does a good job of putting into perspective how small we actually are.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6X47B9x670E

1.     I think the scientists faced similar moral problems. In “Fat Man and Little Boy”, the scientists weren’t just building a bomb to end a war. Most of them where aware that they were developing technology that could end the world. Oppenheimer knew that there was other use for the technology besides building bombs, and I believe that is why he ultimately decided to finish the project. In “Godzilla”, Serizawa faced similar problems. Like the developers of the atomic bomb, he wasn’t entirely certain as to how much damage his weapon would cause. He was also concerned with the political ramifications of his invention.

2.     I think they waited to show Godzilla in America because it was mocking our development of nuclear weapons. In a sense, Godzilla is like an allegory to the Manhattan project, just like “Animal Farm” is to the Russian Resolution and the Stalin era. Godzilla attacks Japan (like Japan attacks Pearl Harbor), and a scientist believes he can destroy the threat, but the weapon may have more negative ramifications than positive ones. In both cases, the scientists deploy their weapons, and have to deal with the aftermath. I think the moral of the first Godzilla movie is that we (The United States), had no right to use such a weapon on Japan, because there were other ways of resolving the problem.

3.     My opinion on nuclear weapons hasn’t really changed after watching either of these films. I believe the bombs have uses that can be productive in certain situations. For example; if we ever have to destroy a meteor headed for earth, or destroy an extra-terrestrial species threating out planet, powerful nuclear weapons are the only chance we stand against those kinds of threats.  I also believe nuclear power is one of the better solutions to the energy crisis, if we can find a way to safely dispose of the waste. Basically, I think it was only a matter of time before someone, somewhere discovered the potential of nuclear power, and I’m glad that we were the first ones to do it.

4.     The science of the Godzilla monster is utterly ridiculous. It is suppose to be 100 m tall and between 20,000 and 60,000 tons (depending on which film you watch). Nothing that big could stand under its own weight, let alone walk around terrorizing a city. The biggest dinosaur to ever live was the Argentinosaurus, which only weighed 100 tons. When talking about a biological organism that size, you also have to think about things like blood pressure and circulation. His heart would have to be an enormous diesel engine to maintain blood flow to all of his limbs. So just based on those few fundamental issues, nothing like that could ever exist.

5.     The name “Oxygen Destroyer” is kind of a paradox because neither matter, nor energy can be created or destroyed. It can however be transformed. For the oxygen destroyer to actually exist and operate, it would have to take oxygen and convert it to some other, really bad substance to be affective as a weapon. Even nuclear weapons don’t just create energy from nothing. They convert mass from a reaction (or several reactions) to enormous amounts of energy. 

I recently watched a documentary that I believe provides reliable evidence of global warming. The film follows James Falog, an acclaimed environmental photographer, as he embarks on a quest to publicize the drastic effects of climate change. Falog felt that using time-lapse photography to depict the ramifications of global warming would be more effective that statistics and charts. He embarked on a mission known as “EIS” or the “Extreme Ice Survey in which he and his team strategically place cameras in view of glaciers; more specifically the end of the glacier where calving takes place. The cameras were set on remote timers and took pictures of the glaciers every hour during daylight for 3 years. After three years, Falog and his team put the pictures in order in a time lapse and played them forward at a rate where the audience could clearly see the retreating glaciers. We already know that the gradual warming of the atmosphere results in the melting of the ice caps and glaciers. The photographic evidence the Falog provides clearly shows the glaciers are melting at an astronomical rate; and that the problem at hand may be more severe than we originally thought.

The film can be found on Netflix. The link provided goes to the IMBD page.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1579361/

In “The Day After Tomorrow”, they discuss the idea of desalinization disrupting the North Atlantic current, which is scientifically accurate. The North Atlantic Current is a flow of water in the Atlantic Ocean that delivers warm water to Europe. The ocean regulates the climate, so if it changes, the climate changes. If enough fresh water is dumped into the ocean, it could technically disrupt this current, and it theoretically, it could happen rather abruptly once the “tipping point” is reached. However, it’s highly unlikely that the world as we know it would suddenly plunge into an ice age in the time span of a week. The main idea of the movie is good, but like most movies, the idea is exaggerated because moviegoers like drama and suspense. The down side of this is many people may actually start to believe that something like this could actually happen. In a sense, they’re not wrong. But what Hollywood doesn’t tell the public is that there is still plenty we can do to change our ways, and prevent such events from actually happening.  

I think “The Day After Tomorrow” brings awareness of global warming/climate change to an audience that might not otherwise be interested in it. Obviously it depicts the most extreme scenario possible, but it makes people think twice about how their lives impact the environment.  

2001: A Space Odyssey is a film about a series of encounters between humans and mysterious, yet advanced machines built by an unknown alien species that are affecting human evolution. The characters in the film go on a space voyage to Jupiter tracing a signal emitted by one of these machines. You would expect the physics in this movie to be good considering it’s a “science” movie and you’re not wrong. However there are some areas where you can find bad physics. In general, the film does a good job of respecting the laws of physics. In this review, we’ll look at good and bad examples from some scenes that happen on the spacecraft during the voyage.

Good Physics:

When the stewardess is walking with the “grip shoes” up the circular wall and then on the ceiling. This scene is scientifically accurate because; since there is no gravity, there is no sense of direction. This means that being “upside down” is irrelevant due to the fact that there is no difference between upside down and right side up in space. The stewardess would feel completely normal either way. As for the “grip shoes”, there is no scientific reason why they couldn’t work. They would allow her to stay planted in the surface. Although there is no normal force or artificially gravity, the grip shoes keep her from floating off the surface every time she pushes off to take a step.

When the astronaut is jogging around the giant circular section of the spacecraft, it is an example of good physics because of centripetal force. He does not need “grip shoes” here because this section of the spacecraft is actually spinning to create the illusion of gravity. In reality, its not gravity that he’s feeling, it’s an inward force that the floor exerts on the man as a result of the craft spinning in a uniform circle. Just like in the other scene with the woman and the “grip shoes”, since there is no real gravity, there is no sense of direction. So “upside down” does not technically exist. Wherever that man is in that section of the spacecraft, as long as he was touching the floor, he would feel normal thanks to the artificial gravity

In one of the camera shots of the spacecraft cruising through space, we see that the engines are off. This is scientifically accurate because the ship wouldn’t need to have its engines on to maintain speed. There is no friction or air resistance in space so the ship can technically coast to its destination once it has reached a desired speed. Many movies with space ships always show the ship with the engines always running (probably because it looks cool to have blue flames coming out of the back of the spacecraft). But in reality, all that would do is cause the craft to accelerate indefinitely, making for a rather unsafe trip.  

The last scene I will analyze is my favorite for two reasons. This is the scene when the person comes out of the pod and into the spacecraft. There is good physics in this scene because before he closes the hatch, there is no sound. This is scientifically accurate because there is no medium for the sound to travel through, which explains the dead silence. This is a concept that many moviemakers are not aware of; or more likely, tend to ignore; especially when depicting explosions in outer space.

Bad Physics:

Unfortunately, the last scene I mentioned in the good physics section also has some of the worst physics in the movie (in my opinion). One of the reasons this part is bad is because the man holds his breath while floating in the airless, pressure less section of the craft. In reality, he would explode rather spectacularly because the pressure inside of his body is much greater than the pressure outside his body.

Another scene with bad physics goes back in the scene with the rocket engines being off. If you noticed, the light is hitting the spacecraft from the left. However the right side of the craft is still pretty well lit. In reality, the side with no light source would completely pitch black because in space, there is nothing for light to reflect off of. So only the areas in direct contact with light would be lit up.

Despite the major problem in the escape pod scene, and the minor problem with the lighting, this film does a very good job of obeying the laws of physics.