What is your biggest science pet peeve in movies?

[Bill Phil]

18 minutes ago, todofwar said:

My other big one is DNA. It's not actually a twisting ladder, the space filling model looks nothing like that. And it's a molecule, it's not going to look all bumpy and gritty. This was especially frustrating in Cosmos, made me stop trusting everything that show said. 

Huh? You're mad at that? It is a twisting ladder but you're not going to see any atoms. Heck, atoms don't actually "look" like anything.

[SargeRho]

10 minutes ago, Bill Phil said:

I think that's less important than the inertial compensators which defy physics.

I don't actually mind inertial dampeners, under the idea that any sufficiently advanced tech is indistinguishable from magic. Maybe they have some sort of energy field that grabs everything in the ship and drags it along, eliminating measurable acceleration.

But ships literally stopping in space is ridiculous, both intuitively and scientifically. 

[ModZero]

22 minutes ago, p1t1o said:

Ooh, that goes strongly against my grain, seems very anthropomorphic, any source data? Specifically on the DNA-as-close-to-optimal and protein chirality? Sounds interesting.

Not while at work on a tablet, it's in there in those discussions on that blog, but that's thousands of comments over 3 or 4 posts, so a bit too much work digging it out ;-) it's full of knowledgeable people, but the context is recreational dispute on a writer's blog, so don't base your diet on this ;-)

[p1t1o]

1 minute ago, ModZero said:

...but the context is recreational dispute on a writer's blog, so don't base your diet on this ;-)

A definite red flag, to be sure, but it'll give me something interesting to google for a while 

[todofwar]

21 minutes ago, p1t1o said:

Ooh, that goes strongly against my grain, seems very anthropomorphic, any source data? Specifically on the DNA-as-close-to-optimal and protein chirality? Sounds interesting.

 

And since I'm on DNA:

No? What does it look like? Literally every model I have seen looks like a twisty ladder:

But you'll notice no space between "rungs", it's major and minor grooves, the rungs themselves are more a pair of flat disks than two rods coming towards each other, etc. This one is largely forgivable, but it also creeps up in shows trying to be scientific and now everyone is picturing it all wrong. And of course people treat it like a macroscopic object, with it breaking apart and at least once it released dust as it broke. It's a molecule, there's not going to be any bumps or grit on it because you're not going to randomly deposit protons or something on it.

[RainDreamer]

20 minutes ago, Bill Phil said:

Heck, atoms don't actually "look" like anything.

Which reminds me that movies always portray atoms using the orbital models.

[kerbiloid]

Many strange things from sci-fi become absolutely clear, if assume that Sci-fi Multiversum physics is based on aethereal theory.
Their engines work like aethereal turbojets.
When engines are off, the drag force of aether slows down and stops the ship.
Sounds of other ships and explosions propagate not in vacuum but also in the sci-fi aether.
Onboard gravity is provided by the air conditioning system: ceiling fans just make a wind of air and aether, pressing things down to the floor.
Energy generators are rotated by the aether flow, while engines are being cooled with it.

So, we would either reject obvious facts which we can see with our own eyes (stopping ships, souds in vacuum, so on),
or just accept the aetheral theory as the most simple and compact hypothesis describing the Sci-Fi Universe.

P.S.
Forgot that.
....
4. In sci-fi atoms are always colored balls

 

[p1t1o]

Just now, todofwar said:

But you'll notice no space between "rungs", it's major and minor grooves, the rungs themselves are more a pair of flat disks than two rods coming towards each other, etc. This one is largely forgivable, but it also creeps up in shows trying to be scientific and now everyone is picturing it all wrong. And of course people treat it like a macroscopic object, with it breaking apart and at least once it released dust as it broke. It's a molecule, there's not going to be any bumps or grit on it because you're not going to randomly deposit protons or something on it.

Well honestly, how molecules "look" is a fantasy question, so some interpretive depiction are ok in my book. But totally agree on the latter point about "dust". Isn't there an episode of StarTrek Voyager where they look at some DNA under a sci-fi microscope and it has a starfleet barcode printed on it?

I know its trek so it gets a pass on most accuracy but that was way over the top!

[Bill Phil]

14 minutes ago, SargeRho said:

I don't actually mind inertial dampeners, under the idea that any sufficiently advanced tech is indistinguishable from magic. Maybe they have some sort of energy field that grabs everything in the ship and drags it along, eliminating measurable acceleration.

But ships literally stopping in space is ridiculous, both intuitively and scientifically. 

If you accept inertisl dampeners, and they're ability to instantly change a particle's velocity with no acceleration then why can't a ship stop?

[todofwar]

25 minutes ago, Bill Phil said:

Huh? You're mad at that? It is a twisting ladder but you're not going to see any atoms. Heck, atoms don't actually "look" like anything.

It always gets shown all wrong though. It's a double helix, but it looks more like a corkscrew than a ladder. You don't have two thin lines twisting up with rods connecting them, you have flat disks pairing up and then stacking quite tightly to each other. Than you have how prometheus showed DNA getting covered in black slime and braking, which was just it's own level of ridiculousness. I know, I shouldn't expect science out of prometheus but this is a space for us all to be pedantic about little things

Also, I know molecules don't "look" like anything but that doesn't mean all depictions are equal. We have crystal structures of DNA, we know quite a bit about how its atoms are arranged.

[p1t1o]

Ooh I've got a good one:

For some reason, the control panels on a ships bridge always have some sort of direct connection to the shields and/or hull, so that almost every hit they take results in sparks flying across the bridge and someone gets their eyebrows singed. Same result if its a light phaser blast or a multi-megaton nuke. Always a little feedback through the bridge controls. Thats just bad wiring.

 

3 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

4. In sci-fi atoms are always colored balls

Of course, everyone knows that protons are blue and neutrons are red!

[SargeRho]

7 minutes ago, Bill Phil said:

If you accept inertisl dampeners, and they're ability to instantly change a particle's velocity with no acceleration then why can't a ship stop?

Because there is a difference between something stopping relative to the ship, and the ship itself stopping in space. Inertial dampeners in Stargate don't seem to affect the ship's momentum, they just ensure that everything in the ship is accelerated equally, avoiding things like tidal stresses, and your eyes getting smushed into your eye sockets.

Edited April 12, 2016 by SargeRho

[Elrond Cupboard]

2 minutes ago, SargeRho said:

Because there is a difference between something stopping relative to the ship, and the ship itself stopping in space.

That's getting horribly close to positing a preferred frame of reference.

[SargeRho]

3 minutes ago, Elrond Cupboard said:

That's getting horribly close to positing a preferred frame of reference.

No, it isn't. The inertial dampeners are a part of the ship, and they can eliminate G-forces being experienced by things in the ship.  But they can't do anything about the ship's momentum. They can stop you from flying across the deck because the engines just broke down, but they can't stop the ship from continuing on its course. At least, in this case they wouldn't violate the laws of physics.

I haven't watched Stargate in a while, so I'm not sure if the inertial dampeners can allow a ship to accelerate faster than without them, or if they just prevent the crew from becoming goo.

Edited April 12, 2016 by SargeRho

[KAL 9000]

"The ship that made the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs." A parsec is a unit of distance, so it's like saying you ran the 100-yard dash in 100 yards. Not very impressive.

And "nebulas are dangerous". Oh no, there's going to be a couple more atoms per cubic centimeter! How terrifying!

[p1t1o]

5 minutes ago, KAL 9000 said:

"The ship that made the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs." A parsec is a unit of distance, so it's like saying you ran the 100-yard dash in 100 yards. Not very impressive.

I have actually always been ok with this, the assumption is that the "Kessel run" is a thing that has a fixed distance and you are supposed to do it as fast as possible. But it could easily be something like "a trading run with X numbers of succesful trading stops", or a smugglers term for something like "evade a pursuing star destroyer" etc etc... in which case a distance is perfectly reasonable "score" to have recorded.

[stratvox]

Just now, p1t1o said:

I have actually always been ok with this, the assumption is that the "Kessel run" is a thing that has a fixed distance and you are supposed to do it as fast as possible. But it could easily be something like "a trading run with X numbers of succesful trading stops", or a smugglers term for something like "evade a pursuing star destroyer" etc etc... in which case a distance is perfectly reasonable "score" to have recorded.

I've always thought it had to do with the amount of space that one had to travel through outside of hyperspace. Doing the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs means you jumped from dangerously close to the starting star to dangerously close to Kessel, thereby minimizing the opportunities for detection by the Empire's trading taxation enforcers.

 

[HebaruSan]

4 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

Another offender, of course, is when technobabble is used that COULD mean something but doesn't. How hard is it to find a nerd and figure out that watts are a unit of power, not energy (or, worse, force or torque)?

Ooh, that reminds me. Someone at the hardware store this weekend had a shirt that said on the back, in a nicer format than I can approximate on this forum:

P = F * d / t

There may also have been a pun. (He didn't move from that spot the entire time we were in the store, so there must have been something really puzzling on those packages of batteries.)

As for my personal movie annoyance, I'll go with a variant of this...

6 hours ago, Jovus said:

Oh, hey, look, here's this unknown material we found from the alien artifact. Let's just send it back to the lab medbay and get an answer in thirty seconds.

... Certainty and ambiguity. All sorts of tests are treated as if they never have false negatives or false positives, and sweeping conclusions are drawn from tiny sample sizes. If you want the audience to experience something related to science, it should be clear how hard it is to get a clear, unambiguous result (and how long it takes, but Jovus covered that already). It's a crime that I was an adult before I saw a serious presentation of results with p-values and so forth. In many cases, the conclusion being reported would require months-long double blind tests with hundreds or thousands of test subjects. The best we get is that it's "99% likely" or "one in a million", which is probably close enough, but even that's too rare.

[SargeRho]

3 hours ago, KAL 9000 said:

"The ship that made the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs." A parsec is a unit of distance, so it's like saying you ran the 100-yard dash in 100 yards. Not very impressive.

The Kessel Run is a hyperspace route, requiring the evasion of lots of black holes and such nasty stuff. The Millennium Falcon can get pull off maneuvers crazy enough to get through it in 12 parsecs, while other ships need to take a longer route.

[KSK]

5 hours ago, SargeRho said:

No, it isn't. The inertial dampeners are a part of the ship, and they can eliminate G-forces being experienced by things in the ship.  But they can't do anything about the ship's momentum. They can stop you from flying across the deck because the engines just broke down, but they can't stop the ship from continuing on its course. At least, in this case they wouldn't violate the laws of physics.

I haven't watched Stargate in a while, so I'm not sure if the inertial dampeners can allow a ship to accelerate faster than without them, or if they just prevent the crew from becoming goo.

I don't actually have a problem with inertial dampers in a setting that posits faster-than-light travel, especially if that's based on a Star Trek style warp drive. All (yeah, bear with me here) you need for an inertial damper is an artificial gravity field inside your ship that can apply sufficient pull on the crew (and any loose or squishy bits of gear) to compensate for the push exerted by the engines. However, If you've got the space-time bending technology to make warp travel feasible, then by definition you've also got the tech to build artificial gravity fields and thus inertial dampers.

That brings me to another point when ignoring (or not) bad movie science - context is everything! If movie science can't be correct, it can at least strive for self-consistency, although mostly it fails pretty badly at that too. However, in a universe where telekinesis, precognition and FTL travel is possible, I'm really not going to get bent out of shape by 'Spitfires in space' flight physics.

[sevenperforce]

25 minutes ago, SargeRho said:

The Kessel Run is a hyperspace route, requiring the evasion of lots of black holes and such nasty stuff. The Millennium Falcon can get pull off maneuvers crazy enough to get through it in 12 parsecs, while other ships need to take a longer route.

...is the retcon.

[tater]

7 hours ago, cantab said:

Another one that has reported real-world impact: Unrealistic depictions of forensics. See, every CSI show ever. It's actually giving real juries unrealistic expectations of forensic evidence. Quite likely criminals have been let free, and innocent people jailed, because of unrealistic films and TV.

My wife would add every medical show, ever. We never watch them, and if even a scene appears in a movie or show it's almost always as wrong about medical care as Star Wars is about physics (the only entertainment exception would be any of the zdoggmd videos on youtube... some, like Doc Vader even I get, but she was watching the others with another surgeon and they were crying they were laughing so hard---worth a look if any of you are medical people).

 

Unrelated, another pet peeve of MINE is cannon balls that explode (in any pre-mid 19th century context other than mortars).

[SargeRho]

2 minutes ago, tater said:

Unrelated, another pet peeve of MINE is cannon balls that explode (in any pre-mid 19th century context other than mortars).

I think exploding cannon balls are actually the fault of practical effects, since they use pyrotechnics to simulate the impacts. Otherwise, agreed.

[kerbiloid]

5. A command "Fire!" given to the archers.

[Nuke]

7 hours ago, benzman said:

Futuristic computers that, when they display text on a screen, make a noise like an old teletype machine.  e.g. the first 'Alien' movie.

they wanted people in the late 70s to know it was a computer, and up to that point all computers were portrayed with clicking relays and blinkenlights. this continued well into the 80s (wargames). trek used centralized computer systems for most of its run, despite the fact that network systems had already taken off. to be fair its something we are kind of going back to with all the cloud services and big datacenters. when we get quantum computers they are going to be too big and expensive to run at home, if you use them it will mostly be a cloud service.

Edited April 12, 2016 by Nuke