I Would Take This Class

Okay, if you hadn't figured it out yet, I'm a geek. One of two magazine subscriptions I currently carry is to Popular Science, and I found a beauty of an article in the FYI section of the August 2004 issue.

The University of Central Florida is offering a class called Physics in Films. The professors, Costas Efthimiou and Ralph A. Llewellyn, use popular movies as a means of teaching scientific principles.

For example, the movie Armageddon is one common subject. The professor teaches the students about conservation of energy, conservation of momentum, and the effects of nuclear weapons. Using this background information, he then explains to the students why a single nuclear weapon could never produce a powerful enough explosion to deflect a Texas-sized asteroid away from a planet almost 8,000 miles wide. The math suggests that what would really happen is that the asteroid would indeed be split in half (as in the movie), but that the end result would be two asteroids, each about half the size of Texas, hitting the Earth simultaneously about 400 meters (or about 1/4 mile) apart. Ouch.

Professors Efthimiou and Llewellyn made a couple of interesting observations. The first is that a lot of people in America don't know the answers to some fairly basic scientific questions: how long does the Earth take to go around the Sun, did dinosaurs and humans ever live on Earth at the same time, and so on. The second is that students seem to enjoy movies with bad science more that those with better science. For example, Deep Impact, which has "superior physical realism", almost always scores lower with students than Armageddon.

Professor Efthimiou also plans to look at The Core in an upcoming class. His initial assessment: "I don't think Hollywood will ever make a movie that has worse science than this one."

References:

Moyer, M. Popular Science. August 2004, pp. 86-88.