Faulty sci-fi

Illustration by Kevin Patrick Necessary

By Rekha Sharma

The double star they spot -- Alcor-Mizar -- is real. But there's a problem. Using a flashlight ruins the eye's ability to adjust to darkness. Astronomers usually tape red cellophane over their flashlights because red light doesn't interfere with their night vision while stargazing.

It's a minor point, given that young Leo spots a comet only moments later that is headed for Earth. Disasters ensue, and most audience members -- if they even noticed -- will probably never remember the error.

Hollywood filmmakers have often ignored the science underlying the sci-fi genre in ways great and small. But to those who study the laws governing the natural world, the details count when it comes to a good story.

Thomas Emmons, a physics lecturer at Kent State, said he enjoys going to movies to pick out incorrect parts.

"Hollywood doesn't pay a whole lot of attention to physics," he said. "They'll show objects taking much longer or much shorter falling from a tall height than what they should. They'll talk about an object being very massive and then show it bouncing around."

Kent State physics lecturer John Barrick said even Alfred Hitchcock made a mistake on the position of Polaris, the North Star, in the 1944 movie Lifeboat. Stranded at sea after their ocean liner sinks, the characters try to use the stars as a guide. Someone locates Polaris and points up at it. Here's the hitch: The characters were stranded at the Equator, and Polaris is only visible at the horizon there.

But these mistakes do not always occur because filmmakers are ignorant of the principles of physics. Sometimes they just choose to work around them to make a movie more interesting.

After all, what good is a spaceship without a hyper drive (sometimes called a warp drive, depending on the movie) to travel faster than the speed of light? Never mind that Albert Einstein and others theorized that nothing with mass can travel faster than the speed of light. How else could Han Solo's Millennium Falcon have outrun Darth Vader's ship in Star Wars? And the crew of the Starship Enterprise would have spent eons exploring the same quadrant of the final frontier because extensive space travel actually takes quite a long time with known technology.

Phil Plait, a former astronomy teacher at the University of Virginia and self-described "all-around science junkie" works at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and maintains the Web site www.badastronomy.com. His goal is to expose pop culture's mistakes and clarify the principles behind them. Recognizing that directors often have other objectives that conflict with scientific accuracy, Plait theorizes on his site that the white flashlights in Deep Impact "may have been plot-driven -- we'd want to see the actors' faces."

In 1979, the makers of Alien told audiences, "In space, no one can hear you scream." Merely a clever tagline to draw in audiences, perhaps?

As it turns out, they weren't just trying to scare people. Sound really cannot travel in the vacuum of space. But try telling that to a theater full of moviegoers who paid good money to hear music, laser guns and explosions instead of stark, lonely silence.

Barrick said the error of sound in space is common, as when the makers of Armageddon in 1998 inaccurately included the sounds of pipes clanging as astronauts attempted to blow up a metal asteroid. He said the one movie that got it right, though, was Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968.

In the movie, based on Arthur C. Clarke's story The Sentinel, astronaut Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) gets trapped by a murderous computer named HAL in a chamber of the shuttle that is open to space. A vacuum is thus created in the chamber, so there is no gravity and no air. As he fights to turn off the computer, the only sound is that of Dave gasping into his microphone.

"Sometimes real life is stranger than fiction," Barrick said. "Everything is perfectly silent, and it's the most eerie effect. It's a lot better to have the real effect in that case."

Although silence may have been eloquent in 2001, Emmons said other filmmakers have not followed suit because of poor audience reaction.

"2001 tried to do it according to science, and it didn't go over very well," Emmons said. "The audience was sitting there because it was all quiet. So I think now when you watch any space movie, you hear sounds in space not because Hollywood is dumb -- they just know if they do it right, people will not enjoy it as much."

Sometimes, though, science is sacrificed even when the plot of the movie depends on it because full explanations would take too long. Benjamin Norman, a graduate student in the physics department, said a perfect example was last year's hit The Matrix, about people unknowingly confined in a virtual reality universe.

"It's a wonderful movie," he said. "I've seen it a few times. The problem is that they had to come up with some way to justify having all these human beings attached to a giant computer."

Norman explained that the humans had blackened the sky, the result being that the computers could no longer run on solar energy and had to use the humans themselves as "batteries."

"The problem is that humans just don't generate energy," he said. "It comes from somewhere. Plants. Animals (who also get their energy from plants). And where do plants get their energy? The sun. Oh wait, didn't we just say that the sun couldn't be used as an energy source anymore? It gets an F in thermodynamics, but it's still fun to watch."

What about Leo Biederman, the student in Deep Impact who identified the comet during class? While it's true that amateur astronomers have discovered celestial bodies, they usually do it with high-powered telescopes that can detect objects that are much dimmer and farther away.

"That comet, if it was that bright as indicated in the telescope, would have been seen a long, long, long time before he ever saw it," Barrick said. "It just demonstrated that somebody, a technical adviser, didn't pay a lot of attention."

And Alcor-Mizar, the double star Biederman saw near the comet, was not depicted accurately in the movie, either.

"No amateur or even anybody that's familiar with the Big Dipper would see Alcor-Mizar in a telescope as that dim or that far apart," Barrick said. "They're called the eyesight star because if you have 20/20 vision with the naked eye, you can see two stars. I know that's a little quirk, but that was right at the beginning, and it wasn't very good astronomy."

Emmons said that while Hollywood errors have contributed to some misconceptions about science, students have gotten savvier in recent years because of better training in schools. He gave the example of students entering his introductory level physics course, Seven Ideas that Shook the Universe.

"Ten or 15 years ago, people were surprised when we taught them that with falling objects (in a vacuum), a heavy object and a light object would hit the ground at the same time," he said. "Now I think just about everybody knows that."

Barrick, who also teaches Seven Ideas, said the flip side to the misinformation in movies is that discussing them in class generates a lot of interest in students.

Tiffany Gross, a freshman fashion merchandising major, said her perspective of science fiction movies has changed because of the Hollywood errors Barrick has mentioned in class.

"A lot of the movies he talks about are movies that I'd seen previews on TV for and thought, 'That's not something I really want to see right now,'" she said. "Now it's like, 'Maybe you can see that!' I'm curious, though. I want to see what he's talking about. I'll probably look a little bit closer at different, little things like positioning of planets and stars."

Plait said he loves science fiction despite its inaccuracies, noting that watching bad sci-fi movies and television as a child fed his own love for science. But he cautioned against believing Hollywood's answers to nature's enigmas.

"I am not too concerned about aspects of space travel so much, but people remember what they see and wonder why we don't blow up an asteroid if it threatens us," he said, explaining that we don't have the technology to do so yet. "They also believe in ghosts, astrology and UFOs. An ignorance of science is very, very dangerous."