Physics

In this blog we will briefly discuss Interstellar's black hole, the history of black holes, and some interesting facts about them. Interstellar's Black Hole In the movie, there was a huge black hole that was carefully and quite breath-takingly depicted. At the time, we did not actually have an image of a black hole, so this is pretty much what it was imagined to look like. One issue with the way the black hole worked in the film was how the astronauts went to a planet that was so close to it. I have a hard time believing a planet could even exist so close to a black hole, because its gravity would be so strong it would essentially rip a planet apart. Even if a planet could exist so closely, there would have to be such a strong gravitational field that it would crush you if you tried landing on it, according to the movie's time dilation estimates. In the movie, every hour spent on this planet is seven years on Earth. Time dilation would definitely occur here, but there

Thor: Ragnarok is a Marvel movie about one of the Avengers, Thor, desperately trying to save his home planet, Asgard. Within the film, Thor is imprisoned across the universe and is forced to fight his former ally, the Hulk. The scene where Thor and the Hulk fought was an iconic part of this movie and actually portrayed very interesting physics concepts... did they properly portray them? Not necessarily, but we will get to that in a minute. Newton's 3rd Law Isaac Newton came up with three fundamental laws of motion that are essential to the subject that is physics. Specifically his third law of motion says that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. You can replace the word action with force and understand that every force has an equal and opposite force. An example of this shown incorrectly in this specific movie scene is when Thor hits the wall. When Thor is thrown into the wall, it is obvious the wall took serious damage, but Thor shook it off as if nothi

Contact  The science fiction film, Contact, is a good movie that gives a glimpse of what life of an astronomer actually looks like. The science in the movie is fairly accurate, and the processes are pretty spot on. Overall I would rate this movie PGP, and that is because the movie is right about a lot; however, when portraying the twin paradox, the movie was far off.  Ironically, they actually mentioned how the twin paradox would really work in the middle of the movie, then by the end of it, they showed the opposite.  Twin Paradox Think about twins (or any two people of the same age, really). We are going to send one on a long journey in space, at the near speed of light, and keep the other one on earth. Now fast forward to when the twin returns. The person who stayed behind will have aged significantly more than the one that left. So, they may have once been the same age, but they will no longer be. Why is this? Time dilation. It is a result of the perspective of a statio

Philip Plait, an american astronomer, wrote a book on bad astronomy, and came up with the top ten ways astronomy is incorrectly portrayed in movies. In this post, I will be explaining his top ten, and using scenes from the movie The Martian as examples.  Plait’s “Top Ten Examples of Bad Astronomy in Major Motion Pictures.” 1. Sound In Space Ahh! Sound. Something most space movies incorporate, disregarding the fact that... There is no sound in space!  I am going to give the movie makers the benefit of the doubt and say that yes, they do indeed know this, movies are just boring without sound.  The issue is, it is just unrealistic.  This is where The Martian went wrong...waves need a medium to travel through, and space is empty.  2. Dense Asteroid fields  Although this does not occur in The Martian, it is a cool thing to know. A lot of movies portray asteroid belts as very dense, and have spaceships trying to make it through thousands of asteroids without getting hit

Before we get into my argument on the topic, Lets define Weapon of Mass Destruction A weapon of mass destruction (WMD) is nuclear, radioactive, biological, or chemical weapon that can kill many people and destroy man-made and natural structures... hence the name! The Morality of The Weapons When talking about the morality of WMD, it is easy to think about the intention behind the use of the weapons, rather than the actual development of the weapons; however, my point here is to not get too distracted by how they are used, because they can be used in several ways. Am I particularly for the use of such weapons?  No, quite frankly I am in all means a pursuer of peace.  That being said, I genuinely believe that the development of this weaponry was near inevitable, and was not completely lacking, morally speaking.  The WMD were in no means developed in order to recklessly kill, regardless if that is how they are used or not. I strongly am confident that the science behind