Bad science in fiction Hall of Shame

[KerikBalm]

37 minutes ago, DunaManiac said:

It probably is, I mean, we haven't seen it rotate have we?

If it was tidally locked, the waves would be standing still and not moving across the surface

[Codraroll]

My biggest problem with Interstellar was when they went down to that planet deep in the gravity well. To paraphrase the scene:

"This planet is deep within the black hole's gravity field, so an hour on the surface is like 25 years up here."

"Yes, when we go there for an hour, 25 years will have passed on the ship."

"25 years on the ship, that will be lonely for me. But you will only feel like you've been away for an hour."

"I've also got a Master's degree in physics like the rest of you, and we've been preparing for this mission together for months now, but want to make it clear if we're on the same page here: when an hour passes on this planet's surface, 25 years will have passed elsewhere, right?"

"That's right. One hour on surface, 25 years in space. Anyway, let's go down to the surface and check that beacon that has been sending signals to us for 25 years. I'm sure that means the planet is habitable, otherwise it wouldn't have sent signals for 25 years. It would have stopped broadcasting after, ah, an hour or so."

(They go to the surface)

"Wait, the ship is destroyed, and it happened only recently! I'd say about an hour or so! Wow, the astronaut was waiting for us for 25 years, and then disaster happened only right before we arrived!"

"Wait a second ... I just realized! One hour on the surface of this planet is like 25 years outside! The ship has only been here for an hour, even though the signals it broadcast have been reaching us for 25 years! It was destroyed almost immediately upon landing!"

"Wow, that's quite a revelation! Good thinking! Sadly, it was impossible for us to foresee this. None of us could ever know that when 25 years had passed on the outside, only an hour had passed on this planet. I only ever thought of it, like, the other way around. Anyway, there's a giant tsunami coming, we better go."

(They go back up to the ship)

"Wow, pilot, you look a lot older! What has happened, we have only been away for an hour!"

"For you, it was only an hour. For me it was 25 years."

"Wow, that's crazy. I didn't know! I'm completely surprised!"

[DunaManiac]

1 hour ago, KerikBalm said:

If it was tidally locked, the waves would be standing still and not moving across the surface

There is another explanation, the waves are so big because on this planet time has been running for trillions upon trillions of years, the wind would gradually create these waves, with no land to brake them up they would get larger and larger, until reaching the titanic proportions seen in the movie.

The reason there aren't more of them is because most of the water is held in those waves.

[tater]

Roci landing in a later episode... They added gear, fine.

Those cosine losses, though. LOL.

[DDE]

38 minutes ago, tater said:

Roci landing in a later episode... They added gear, fine.

Those cosine losses, though. LOL.

The alternative is likely landing in a pit of lava.

[tater]

One thing in the Expanse that needs to become reality like yesterday is the gesture they use to toss stuff at screens, other phones, etc.

[KerikBalm]

2 hours ago, DunaManiac said:

There is another explanation, the waves are so big because on this planet time has been running for trillions upon trillions of years, the wind would gradually create these waves, with no land to brake them up they would get larger and larger, until reaching the titanic proportions seen in the movie.

Umm no, it would not work like that, especially given how shallow the ground was, the distance of the wave... And you know, the lack of wind when they landed.

[cubinator]

7 hours ago, DunaManiac said:

There is another explanation, the waves are so big because on this planet time has been running for trillions upon trillions of years, the wind would gradually create these waves, with no land to brake them up they would get larger and larger, until reaching the titanic proportions seen in the movie.

The reason there aren't more of them is because most of the water is held in those waves.

No, the planet has experienced far less time than anywhere else in the universe. 

[kerbiloid]

11 hours ago, Codraroll said:

I've also got a Master's degree in physics

Spoiler

"He claims that he knows physics at Your degree... Should I deal with him?"

""Immediately."

 

10 hours ago, DunaManiac said:

with no land to brake them up they would get larger and larger

There is a ground beneath them.
bottom + friction = braking the waves ond pulling the planet

13.5 bln y / 25 y * 1 h / (365.25 * 24 h) = 62 000 years.

This! The planet is still forming...

But then where did it get the massive liquid ocean and oxygen atmosphere?

7 hours ago, tater said:

One thing in the Expanse that needs to become reality like yesterday is the gesture they use to toss stuff at screens, other phones, etc.

As well as the "screw the lamp" and some other gestures in the Cloud Atlas futuristic chapters.

Edited August 2, 2020 by kerbiloid

[Jacke]

Trying to make sense of "Interstellar" will only lead to crazy theories and madness because....

16 hours ago, cubinator said:

It had to be done for the sake of the plot.

...there's so much plot manipulation and deus ex machina it's not funny.  It's an insult to science.

 

[kerbiloid]

It's just an SFX demo video for the Zimmer's OST.
It would be boring to just keep looking at the empty screen for two hours. Instead we have rockets, booms, teh drama.

[KerikBalm]

10 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

  Reveal hidden contents

"He claims that he knows physics at Your degree... Should I deal with him?"

""Immediately."

 

There is a ground beneath them.
bottom + friction = braking the waves ond pulling the planet

13.5 bln y / 25 y * 1 h / (365.25 * 24 h) = 62 000 years.

This! The planet is still forming...

But then where did it get the massive liquid ocean and oxygen atmosphere?

Regardless of the apparent time it has been experiencing, the number of orbits it has experienced should agree with the number observed by a person in orbit (cant be in orbit of the planet... Same gravity, so an orbit really high above the BH, that sure us some dV).

So if the waves on the surface come every hour, that implies a 25 year orbit.

If the orbit of the BH is something mire reasonable, then the surface would see the waves coming very very fast.

Either way, I don't think you can get out of the tidal locking problem

[kerbiloid]

Solid clouds... We forgot to mess up the solid clouds.

(Of course, they can be like snow, but like an ice island?)

[tater]

Don't get me started again on Interstellar.

Bad on so many levels (lousy plot not the least of them).

[Codraroll]

And now for something entirely different: Harry Potter.

"Wait, this is a setting with magic," I hear you say. "What type of science could possibly be wrong here, that magic can't explain?" Well, there's one thing, which even the lore (at least if The Cursed Child is disregarded) says is too problematic for magic to meddle with: time.

So, am I picking on the time travel shenanigans in the third book? No, I just re-read it, but it's not that. It's simply that the teachers don't have time for all their classes.

Hogwarts has been shown to have one teacher and one classroom for every subject. Prof. McGonagall gives all the Transfiguration classes in the Transfiguration classroom. Prof. Flitwick teaches Charms in the Charms classroom. Prof. Snape teaches Potions in the Potions classroom. And so on. Divination is eventually taught by two teachers, and Herbology is spread across multiple greenhouses, but otherwise there's one teacher and one location for every class.

Now, we're shown that most classes are usually taught to students of one or two houses at the time. Gryffindor tends to be paired with Slytherin for Potions, for instance, but Transfiguration is always done by Gryffindor alone. Same with Charms, if I recall correctly. The students usually have four classes per day, two before lunch and two afterwards. Each class usually has multiple lectures per week. There may be double-length classes that take up half the school day, such as Potions which usually has one double-length class per week.

But Hogwarts has students spread across seven years and four houses. Some classes are taught only for a few years (such as Divination, which is only mandatory for years 3-5), but others such as History of Magic or Charms remain mandatory at least through year five. For the higher-year courses, the classes are small enough that all four houses are mixed in class (such as Prof. Slughorn's Potions class), yet the number of classes per week for a student remains the same.

And that's the problem: for most subjects, the numbers don't add up. There simply isn't enough time to teach everybody.

Take Transfiguration, for instance. Five years with separate classes for the four houses, plus two years with students from all houses, that's 22 classes per week, even with only one Transfiguration class per student per week. With two Transfiguration classes per week, the teacher has to be present for 44 classes. Yet the calendar only contains room for 20 classes in a week. Potions is supposed to teach all the 12 student groups for at least half a day each over a five-day week, and presumably a typical school week contains some shorter classes as well. And it's all done by one teacher. Something similar goes for Astronomy. Classes take place at midnight, yet there aren't enough midnights in a week for all the school years, unless the teacher never takes a day off and students don't have weekends off for up to two years.

"But what about Time-Turners? They allow a person to be in multiple classes at the same time!" Hence the point about each class having only one classroom. Using a Time-Turner, a person may be in several different locations at the same time, but here we're explicitly told that most classes exclusively take place in one classroom, so two classes can't be taught simultaneously. Prof. Sprout's classes occur across several greenhouses, so she might be able to pull of tricks with time-turners, but that's not an option for anybody else, and apparently Time-Turners were destroyed after book 5 anyway. Only Divination and the elected subjects would realistically be able to fit into the allotted schedule.

I think any reasonable teacher would complain about the workload, too. In addition to apparently teaching more than forty two-hour classes per week, Prof. McGonagall apparently assigns each of Hogwarts' hundreds of student several pages' worth of homework to write after every class, and she's the only one around to grade it.

 

The Harry Potter series is fun to dissect like this. The books are an absolute joy to read, but as soon as you try to run the numbers on anything, they never add up. Take for instance the beginning of the school year, with the train to Hogwarts from platform 9¾ at King's Cross station. The train leaves at 11 sharp, yet the main characters always arrive only a few minutes before 11, which seems to be a common time to arrive for most people. "Most people" in this case means hundreds of students, most of whom are accompanied by their entire living family. There could be around a thousand people arriving on that platform every September 1st, and it has only one entrance, which means somebody would have to pass through the magical barrier every few seconds for hours, somehow without forming a huge crowd on the outside or attract Muggle attention. Or maybe Harry and his friends are always the only ones to arrive just in time, while it is customary to show up at an assigned time slot between 7 and 10 AM?

 

Everything makes sense when seen through the eyes of Harry Potter, yet as soon as you start considering he's only one student among many, the given explanations for how things work quickly fall apart. J.K. Rowling has apparently admitted that math isn't her strongest suit, and I'm inclined to agree with that.

 

Or maybe it all works because magic.

Edited August 2, 2020 by Codraroll

[cubinator]

9 hours ago, tater said:

Don't get me started again on Interstellar.

Bad on so many levels (lousy plot not the least of them).

I like Interstellar because it plays out like a dream. The most realistic thing about the movie is probably the visual depiction of the black hole and exterior of the wormhole (and the idea that dumb humans backed ourselves into a corner), but it really feels like space travel in the way that I feel when I literally dream about space travel. It also embodies the collective dream that humanity has to travel the stars really well. Cooper starts out on Earth, living a simple life where no one around him really cares about looking up. Then, he's very suddenly transported into space, where he experiences various absurd alien settings with a vivid emotional reaction to what are essentially dead, silent natural processes. That's what astronauts felt when they walked on the Moon - They were emotionally moved by the motionless rocks and hills, which are fairly ordinary as far as the universe is concerned. The movie makes me feel that way too! So I think it does a good job with that, and I interpret the plot more like a dream than something that works in real life.

[Superfluous J]

4 hours ago, Codraroll said:

the teachers don't have time for all their classes.

And don't get me started on Cheers. I mean, how could 2 waitresses and a single bartender be enough to run a 2-room bar 7 days a week?

[kerbiloid]

4 minutes ago, Superfluous J said:

And don't get me started on Cheers. I mean, how could 2 waitresses and a single bartender be enough to run a 2-room bar 7 days a week?

No problem. As the bartender is single, it's not an adultery.

[kerbiloid]

All that time the entity known as "Harry Potter" was actually sleeping in his shelter under stairs, hidden from sunlight and humans, while his familiar family of Dursley was protecting his sleep.
"Familiar" - in both senses. familar to him and his familiars. Famiiar familiars. Any vampire can have familiars for daytime needs.

Hogwarts was existing in his dreams, and its evoltuion just follows the Harry's emotional states. The farther, the grimmer.

The real last name (last, yes, in both senses) of those familiars stayed unknown.
Dursley is just his inner nickname given to those possessed mortals.
There was also Durmstrang, another Dur-. It was far, cold, dark, and unfriendly.

All these Dur's embodied "Harry"'s angst. He was hating Dursley, and was alarmed by Durmstrang guests.
It was a reflection of Sauron's Barad-Dur and Domus Durbentia spoken by Cabal slayed by Kaleb.

Edited August 3, 2020 by kerbiloid

[Nightside]

On 8/1/2020 at 2:32 PM, tater said:

One thing in the Expanse that needs to become reality like yesterday is the gesture they use to toss stuff at screens, other phones, etc.

It’s pretty funny to think of all the ways the actual implementation would get screwed up. 

[kerbiloid]

Not that 'science" but "computer science".

"Mars" SpaceX promo series, s01e01. The desktop of the ground team member when they are dealing with Martian rover.

Spoiler

So, while others work, somebody is doing his personal things.

[Space Nerd]

On 8/1/2020 at 10:27 PM, DunaManiac said:

Anyway's, to get back on topic, the movie Interstellar even though it was mostly hard sci-fi, I feel like the main problem with it was the delta v and maneuvers that the Endurance seemed to be able to do. To me it looked like it was propelled by  chemical rockets based on the engine bell, (correct me if I'm wrong), but It's hard to believe that that puny rocket could take it to say, Miller's planet, and anyone who has tried to go to Moho that the Delta-V requirements would be astronomical, especially by direct transfer.

Kip Throne said they used a gravity assist from a neutron star to get there in his book.

(He knew it's not realistic as the tidal forces would kill all the astronauts, but changing it to a more realistic intermediate mass black hole would confuse the movie viewers.)

I actually loved interstellar, as the black hole system is pretty cool, the science part is decent as far as sci-fi go, and has Kip Throne involved in it.

I also loved his book on the science related to the movie, and he actually said he sacrificed a lot of science details for the average movie viewers.

[tater]

1 hour ago, Space Nerd said:

Kip Throne said they used a gravity assist from a neutron star to get there in his book.

(He knew it's not realistic as the tidal forces would kill all the astronauts, but changing it to a more realistic intermediate mass black hole would confuse the movie viewers.)

I actually loved interstellar, as the black hole system is pretty cool, the science part is decent as far as sci-fi go, and has Kip Throne involved in it.

I also loved his book on the science related to the movie, and he actually said he sacrificed a lot of science details for the average movie viewers.

Except that the black hole bit ruined the plot about habitable worlds, etc. (course the rest of the plot was awful)

The water planet was basically uninhabitable because of radiation (should have been, anyway). They worry about (general) relativist effects getting near it, but then seem to forget all about that when they later get near the black hole (entering it), making the brief stay near that world trivial in comparison. The story would have at least made some internal sense with a stargate of some sort on both ends, then maybe the worlds are around a distant binary system. All the time constrains still apply, but can just be travel times.

I want my however many minutes it was back (I only watched the whole thing cause I bought the bluray and figured I needed to watch it since i paid for it).

[Space Nerd]

I remember he said the gargantua black hole has a wimpy accretion disk that mainly radiates in visible light, I don't know if he's wrong, but it seems reasonable to me.

Also I like it because there's just not that many space sci-fi movie which has that 'sciencey' feel.

[Nightside]

9 hours ago, Space Nerd said:

I remember he said the gargantua black hole has a wimpy accretion disk that mainly radiates in visible light, I don't know if he's wrong, but it seems reasonable to me.

Also I like it because there's just not that many space sci-fi movie which has that 'sciencey' feel.

Watch Contact.