Bad Movie Physics

great site:

http://intuitor.com/moviephysics/index.html

Your avatar is from an Old Trek episode that gave rise to one of the two cardinal catch-phrases around my house for the longest time:

Intoned in a deep, doom-laden, heavily-reverbed voice: "And now another demonstration of our superiority!" Always comes in useful when Reichpublicans are in power.

(The other catch-phrase fave, "It's great to be fine." I'll leave the attribution as a trivia question....)

science, history, common-sense nitpicker.

I once got to talk to the FX guys on the air. Buncha special effects guys from the movies and, yes, STNG were on NPR Science Friday, along with actual physicists, talking about this stuff one of the times I actually got through. Lots of chat about various things like time travel, transluminent drives, matter transporter, inertial damping, the usual panoply of SF on the big and small screens. Practicalities, impossibilities and so forth.

But I had to weigh in on what I think is THE most persistently adhered-to bug, that they just refuse to rectify and will always always ALWAYS have in SF movies no matter what (with one exception I can think of), to wit: SOUND in outer space. I asked something to the effect of whether there would ever be a film or TV show made that didn't feature sound in the vacuum of space, and the answer was, well, you know, we just gotta put it there or people will be confused.

One film exception: 2001, of course. There may be others but that's the only one I can think of.

And is Star Trek Enterprise also an exception? I've only watched it a couple of times (mostly I don't watch TV any more), but it seemed to me they actually had some silent outer space scenes--weapons firing silently, from a camera p.o.v. outside the ship. Is that true?

We can only hope....