What is your biggest science pet peeve in movies?

[Mjp1050]

Dinosaurs. Whenever I see dinosaurs placed in the modern day I want to punch the screenwriters.

If dinosaurs had survived to the modern day, then they would have had 65 million years to evolve into something distinctly non-dinosaurish.

 

EDIT: I am aware that birds are descendants of dinosaurs. I am referring to when a T-rex or triceratops is shown living in the modern day, as if their evolution had stagnated.

Edited June 13, 2016 by Mjp1050
clarification

[cubinator]

18 minutes ago, Mjp1050 said:

Dinosaurs. Whenever I see dinosaurs placed in the modern day I want to punch the screenwriters.

If dinosaurs had survived to the modern day, then they would have had 65 million years to evolve into something distinctly non-dinosaurish.

 

Birds are what dinosaurs look like today. But the real problem is that if the dinosaurs had not gone extinct, the little mammals wouldn't have had the opportunity to spread and evolve into humans. 

[todofwar]

Was watching X men First Class again today and it had one thing that I've seen a few times. At one point they ask Beast if he can fly the jet, and he says he designed it. Pretty sure no one designs a whole jet by themselves, but whatever let's let that slide. As far as I know aerospace engineering and piloting are two separate skillsets, I doubt the team that designed the Blackbird could actually fly the thing, that's why you have pilots. 

This gets to the annoying tendency to lump all scientists together into one super scientist who can do engineering, biochemistry, knows allot about physics, and can of course hack any computer system. In real life you specialize. And whenever anyone says they have "multiple PhD's" I want to punch someone, if you get more than one PhD you probably need to move on with your life, unless your so engrossed by science you can stand being at or just above the poverty line for five years per PhD. 

[vger]

1 hour ago, Mjp1050 said:

Dinosaurs. Whenever I see dinosaurs placed in the modern day I want to punch the screenwriters.

If dinosaurs had survived to the modern day, then they would have had 65 million years to evolve into something distinctly non-dinosaurish.

 

The biggest problem with dinosaurs in the modern day is the atmosphere isn't dense enough anymore to support creatures that large. But I'm pretty sure most of the "lost world" kind of films were made before we even knew about that.

But I see no reason to assume that dinosaurs would have evolved into something else. Crocodiles have been around for 200M years, and they barely changed at all, even through catastrophic climate change and extinction events.

22 minutes ago, todofwar said:

This gets to the annoying tendency to lump all scientists together into one super scientist who can do engineering, biochemistry, knows allot about physics, and can of course hack any computer system. In real life you specialize. And whenever anyone says they have "multiple PhD's" I want to punch someone, if you get more than one PhD you probably need to move on with your life, unless your so engrossed by science you can stand being at or just above the poverty line for five years per PhD. 

This doesn't just happen with science. All you have to do these days is be good enough to be borderline famous at SOMETHING, and people will let you do anything. If you're skilled at beating people up, it means you can also be trusted to recommend a good barbecue grill. If you're good at acting, it means you'd be a great fashion designer. If the only thing you're good at is being caught naked on camera, you're good at all sorts of things that require a lot of brainpower too. And you'll be given more opportunities to do these things than people who spent years studying to do so.

Edited June 13, 2016 by vger

[Andem]

16 minutes ago, todofwar said:

Was watching X men First Class again today and it had one thing that I've seen a few times. At one point they ask Beast if he can fly the jet, and he says he designed it. Pretty sure no one designs a whole jet by themselves, but whatever let's let that slide. As far as I know aerospace engineering and piloting are two separate skillsets, I doubt the team that designed the Blackbird could actually fly the thing, that's why you have pilots. 

This gets to the annoying tendency to lump all scientists together into one super scientist who can do engineering, biochemistry, knows allot about physics, and can of course hack any computer system. In real life you specialize. And whenever anyone says they have "multiple PhD's" I want to punch someone, if you get more than one PhD you probably need to move on with your life, unless your so engrossed by science you can stand being at or just above the poverty line for five years per PhD. 

But I have 2 PhDs... 

[todofwar]

4 minutes ago, Andem said:

But I have 2 PhDs... 

Now I'm curious, as someone who is four years into their first PhD, what compelled you to go back for number 2?

[OrbitalBuzzsaw]

Why doesn't anything burn up on reentry?

[RainDreamer]

24 minutes ago, OrbitalBuzzsaw said:

Why doesn't anything burn up on reentry?

Because you are not travelling at mach 25 in hollywood logic. You just going up very high and gently lose gravity, and reentry is just a gentle fall. Maybe at terminal velocity at most, but not orbital speed.

[Andem]

28 minutes ago, todofwar said:

Now I'm curious, as someone who is four years into their first PhD, what compelled you to go back for number 2?

Well, after my first one, (Philosophy) I considered the applicability of it outside of being a professor. In a mindset of crisis, I set everything up to get a second PhD in psychology. So, unfounded panic was what compelled me.

[Hary R]

10 hours ago, todofwar said:

Was watching X men First Class again today and it had one thing that I've seen a few times. At one point they ask Beast if he can fly the jet, and he says he designed it. Pretty sure no one designs a whole jet by themselves, but whatever let's let that slide. As far as I know aerospace engineering and piloting are two separate skillsets, I doubt the team that designed the Blackbird could actually fly the thing, that's why you have pilots. 

Funny thing is, you said that in a forum about a game where you design build and fly your own space ship. Interesting right.

 

[Just Jim]

13 hours ago, Mjp1050 said:

Dinosaurs. Whenever I see dinosaurs placed in the modern day I want to punch the screenwriters.

If dinosaurs had survived to the modern day, then they would have had 65 million years to evolve into something distinctly non-dinosaurish.

 

 

12 hours ago, cubinator said:

Birds are what dinosaurs look like today.

Slightly off topic, but I wonder if Alfred Hitchcock knew he was actually writing a dinosaur movie when he did "The Birds"  

Edited June 13, 2016 by Just Jim

[RenegadeRad]

GUYS! This is what annoys me -

When a "smart", "nerd" and "genius" protagonist cannot understand simple science statements which another "scientist" or "geek person" says to them, and then they explain the protagonist like explaining something to a 5 year old. Cringe.

Like when the black guy explains Cooper how wormholes work, Cooper knew relativity so well, how the hell did he not know about how wormholes work?

In Ant Man, Hank Pym explains "It decreases atomic relative distance, you will go subatomic" and Scott asks "what", I mean what the hell, you have a masters in electrical engineering and you don't know what those simple statements mean?

I know it is to explain the audience, but not everyone in the audience is mentally retarded...

[cantab]

14 hours ago, Mjp1050 said:

Dinosaurs. Whenever I see dinosaurs placed in the modern day I want to punch the screenwriters.

If dinosaurs had survived to the modern day, then they would have had 65 million years to evolve into something distinctly non-dinosaurish.

 

Well some of them did, and we call them birds.

But it's not implausible for a species or clade to exist for a long time with little morphological change. After all if it's well adapted to its ecological niche and that niche remains present and competition stays away, why would the clade go extinct? Such clades are known as "living fossils" and there are many examples.

[Green Baron]

This reminds me of another one, hope it hasn't been mentioned before:

In one of the star trek series (vovager ?) they met a race of, well, dinosaurs living in space that evolved on earth and went into space (ok, total nonsense so far). When they wanted to know where exactly these saurians derived from they told the computer to extrapolate the genome/outfit/whatever back 65My and ... voilá ... stood a dinosaur from late cretacious times. This is beyond total nonsense, it implies somehow that evolution has a direction and can be calculated.

These are the moments that i think: more education to the people !

:-)

 

[Nikolai]

2 hours ago, Green Baron said:

In one of the star trek series (vovager ?) they met a race of, well, dinosaurs living in space that evolved on earth and went into space

That pales in comparison to an episode of TNG ("Genesis") in which different crew members "devolved" into species that were supposedly ancestral to their lineage.  One human became a spider, and Data's cat Spot became an iguana!

Edited June 13, 2016 by Nikolai

[razark]

16 minutes ago, Nikolai said:

That pales in comparison to an episode of TNG ("Genesis") in which different crew members "devolved" into species that were supposedly ancestral to their lineage.  One human became a spider, and Data's cat Spot became an iguana!

If you devolve far enough, do you become a sci-fi screenwriter?

[icedown]

Mine biggest annoyance is when they try to explain everything without contradicting earlier bs explanations.   Sonic screwdriver and keep it rolling.

[DDE]

3 hours ago, cantab said:

But it's not implausible for a species or clade to exist for a long time with little morphological change. After all if it's well adapted to its ecological niche and that niche remains present and competition stays away, why would the clade go extinct? Such clades are known as "living fossils" and there are many examples.

Although, realistically, they'd tend towards dwarfism. Behold this cutie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magyarosaurus

Edited June 13, 2016 by DDE

[Green Baron]

Actually my pet peeve was not just the fact that they de-/e-/re- or whatelsenotvolved about, that's just nonsense, but the fact that they calculated the process of millions of years of evolution with some sort of algorithm.

Still, it's funny :-)

 

[todofwar]

So this one is less science, but the way people envision ship to ship battles remains locked to the 18th century it seems. Weapons have ridiculously long ranges, they haven't lined up right next to each other for broadsides in over a hundred years. Even in WWI the major naval battle was described as seeing flashes on the horizon, not a ship right in front of you. And then you get space battles with two ships firing away at each other at extremely close range, which as several people on this forum have pointed out in countless threads is nothing like how an actual hypothetical space battle would go down, even assuming orbital mechanics are allowed to be routinely violated by some kind of antigravity drive. 

[1101]

5 hours ago, todofwar said:

So this one is less science, but the way people envision ship to ship battles remains locked to the 18th century it seems. Weapons have ridiculously long ranges, they haven't lined up right next to each other for broadsides in over a hundred years. Even in WWI the major naval battle was described as seeing flashes on the horizon, not a ship right in front of you. And then you get space battles with two ships firing away at each other at extremely close range, which as several people on this forum have pointed out in countless threads is nothing like how an actual hypothetical space battle would go down, even assuming orbital mechanics are allowed to be routinely violated by some kind of antigravity drive. 

Ah, but the alternative is boring to the average person, isn't it?  Space combat done realistically would look something like Children of a Dead Earth, and the average person doesn't get enough orbital mechanics to know how that actually works.

Or, you get unrealistic combat but at long ranges, such as combat in the Culture series where things get fought across solar systems, instantaneously.  Of course thats not a movie, but still.  To do such in a movie would be difficult.

A realistic space combat would be like Das Boot, along the lines of;

"I hope the enemy doesn't spot us first"

"Damn, they saw us first"

"Evasive maneuvers/Dive, etc"

BOOM!

"Wow, we survived"/or not.

[Wjolcz]

On 13/06/2016 at 3:07 AM, Mjp1050 said:

Dinosaurs. Whenever I see dinosaurs placed in the modern day I want to punch the screenwriters.

If dinosaurs had survived to the modern day, then they would have had 65 million years to evolve into something distinctly non-dinosaurish.

 

EDIT: I am aware that birds are descendants of dinosaurs. I am referring to when a T-rex or triceratops is shown living in the modern day, as if their evolution had stagnated.

Huh. I've never thought about this before. Makes sense.

But at the same time there are species that didn't change much for the last at least few millions of years. A good example is the horseshoe crab or nautilus. But then I guess they are aquatic and as long as oceans stay more or less the same they'll keep their look unchanged.

On topic: spaceships going right towards planets. You don't burn retrograde. Nah. You just aim for the planet and then do the thing.

[monstah]

3 hours ago, Veeltch said:

On topic: spaceships going right towards planets. You don't burn retrograde. Nah. You just aim for the planet and then do the thing.

I had heard so many praises about The Expanse for its realism. One of the first things I noticed was a ship burning prograde toward Ceres

[DDE]

Children of a Dead Earth does make space warfare kinda cool in its own way.

[Bill Phil]

12 hours ago, monstah said:

I had heard so many praises about The Expanse for its realism. One of the first things I noticed was a ship burning prograde toward Ceres

Tbh, though, you can do that. It's brute forcing it, and extremely inefficient. But if you have more delta-v than you know what to do with? *shrug