Understanding Movie Physics: The Day After Tomorrow

Global warming is a topic of controversial debate in today's modern world. Some claim that it is a hoax, while others argue that it is a very real threat. While global warming is not as a immediate threat as it is portrayed in The Day After Tomorrow, it is still a very real threat that humanity has to deal with now before we leave Earth in a poor state for our the generations after us that they can heal.

The graph above, as researched and provided by climate researches working at NASA, show the level of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere over thousands of years. It wasn't until around the 1950's , as seen above, that the level of carbon dioxide became dangerous.

In this video, NASA researchers have created a simulations that maps out the temperatures of the Earth since the late 1800s. It is important to note that temperatures around the globe are increasing both exponentially in both time and size as it gets closer to the present and that the last five years have projected the warmest global temperature in history, with 2018 being about 2 degrees higher than what the global average temperature had been in the 1950's. It is also important to note that the global temperature increase of the world only seemed to drastically increase around the 1940s/1950s which parallels the dramatic increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Carbon dioxide is naturally in of itself a heat-conserving gas, and it is widely known that human development and innovation releases what we call greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide being a main one, into the atmosphere. With this information and the shared time frame in which both global temperatures and the presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increase, it is reasonable for us to infer, just as many legitimate scientist have, that the increasing amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere produced from humanities factories, cars, cities, etc is what is causing rising global temperature as more and more heat is captured by the gas which signifies the presence of over all climate change and global warming.

Link below is the article from NASA's climate website from which the evidence used in this article:

https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

(In order to find the video on the website, scroll down till you see "Global Temperature Rise" and then click "More". The video will pull up right below.)

Understanding Movie Physics: Apollo 13

Apollo 13 and the Definition of Weightlessness

Weightlessness seems like it has a pretty straight-forward definition, but to be honest it isn't as simple as it sounds!

In many contemporary space faring movies, such as "2001: A Space Odyssey" or in our case "Apollo 13",  the characters seems to be experiencing "zero gravity" or "weightlessness".  It is a common held notion that out in the depths of space there is no force of gravity to act on the objects floating around out there, but scientists have figured out that such a thing is impossible. It is what keeps all asteroids and planetary bodies in orbit. The gravity of a star also has incredible reach as asteroids even beyond Pluto stay in orbit around the sun. It turns out that the force of gravity can get incredibly close to zero but never reach it and that the only way for there to be total zero gravity is to get infinitely faraway from any other object of mass. 

This is where the idea of weight comes in.  The weight of an object is dependent on that object's mass and its relationship with the gravity of the planetary body that object is on or around. However what humans perceive as weight is actually a force that we call, a normal force of an object. The normal force is a force that resists the force of gravity as it is an "opposite reaction" to the initial action that is gravity, meaning that it has the same amount of force but an opposite direction and its this resistance that we perceive as weight. And the lack of this normal force is what helps define weightlessness.

The normal force of an object can only be removed if an object is sufficiently removed from a planetary that it is considered to be in free fall. Free fall is defined as a situation where the only force acting on an object is gravity. An example of this are astronauts on the ISS (which actually experiencing a very long or extended free fall but is going at fast enough speed so that it doesn't plummet to the Earth)) or for a film example is any scene in 'Apollo 13" where they are floating in their spaceship between the Earth and the Moon where the gravity is weak but strong enough to still affect them.

Therefore, in order to conclude or summarize, the only way to experience "weightlessness" is to remove the normal force of an object by putting it in free fall so the only force acting on it is gravity and that the object is at a sufficient distance away from a planetary body so that its gravitational pull is relatively small and is going at a fast enough speed to keep it from falling.

I rate "Apollo 13" a PGP level movie.

Understanding Movie Physics: Avengers: Infinity War

Avengers: Infinity War. The beginning of the end of Marvel's Infinity Saga. It is an amazing movie that immortalizes some of Stan Lee's famous comic book characters. Filled with action packed fight scenes between humanities greatest heroes and aliens, such as Thanos and his Black Order,  who seek destroy half of all life in the universe, Infinity War tests many forms of physics, but in this blog we are specifically going to look at scenes that defy Newton's Laws of Motion.

Scene 1: Doctor Strange and Levitation

One of the simpler defiances lies in the power of levitation or unaided flight. Many characters like Iron Man or Star Lord have rocket propelled forms of flight, meaning there is a force keeping aloft, however, for characters like Doctor Strange, they have no force keeping them in the air. According to Newton's Second Law, gravity acting on a living being with mass (which Doctor Strange definitely has)  while in the air means he should be falling downwards. Since Doctor Strange does not
have a downward facing force to keep him in the air, he should be falling to the ground but since that is not portrayed in the movie, this counts as a violation.

Scene 2: When He Should Have Gone For The Head.....

In this scene, Thanos has just killed Vision and inserted the Mind Stone into the Infinity Gauntlet. In an attempt to prevent the Snap, Thor flings Stormbreaker into Thanos' chest but fails to kill him. It instead gravely wounded him, but not enough to prevent Thanos from killing off half of all life in the universe.

The problem with this scence is that when Thor hit Thanos with Stormbreaker, it should have created a crater or indent in the earth of some sort but it didn't. This violates Newton's Third Law of Motion. The downward force created by Stormbreaker is enough to create a crater as evidenced by a previous scene where Thor slams down is hammer and creates one. The same thing should have happened with Thanos. The force from the impact would cause an opposite upward reaction from the ground around the impact point which leads to the formation of the crater. Even though in this scene Stormbreaker hit Thanos and not the ground, the force would have channeled through him and still have the same effect.

Scene 3: The Hulk in the Hulk Buster

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tyHcCwkT0Y  

(Sorry this one is a link! It was the only way to get this scene in!)

In this scene, Bruce Banner has been equipped with the Hulk Buster armor, a huge metal suit designed to defeat the Hulk in violent confrontation. He is running across a grassy field towards the front lines of the battle that is about to commence. But again, the physics in this scene is screwed. Much like the previous scene, this one is a violation of Newton's Third Law. It is violated by the non-existence of an impact craters. The Hulk Buster armor is a giant heavy metal contraption that is exerting a good amount of force on the ground beneath him as he his running, but no crater (aka the opposite reaction) is created which in fact should be present.