Yes, the X-Files is back, people.

The episodes try to deal with the “fringes” of science and technology.  So you have things like communicating with the dead, sonic drill heads, etc.

The Paranormal Stuff

Technically speaking, it isn’t paranormal—it’s all “science” in Fringe—but one of the recurring themes is that one can communicate with the dead.  It seems like another brain can “tune” into another brain’s activity and make sense of it.  This is far beyond anything we know, but from what I gather, simply trying to trasmit the brain activity from one person to another doesn’t have that effect.

The Biology Stuff

This stuff grosses me out.  I mean it really grosses me out (shudder). It’s gut churning stuff they deal with, but I’m not sure how plausible some of the stuff they are talking about.  Parasites as weapons, retro-viruses, etc.  I do give credit to them in the pilot for not falling into the instant effect error.  The recovery does take time, and the after effects were visible on the victim for some time afterward.  But the rest of the biology in the show seems very suspect.  From using a human being as a walking EMP device to being a walking microwave, it all seems far too hard to believe.

The Physics Stuff

The transporter stuff aside, there was one bit that was almost believable: Project Thor.  In the episode, Arrival, a warhead burrows through the Earth’s interior to deliver a payload from underground.  There has been ideas like that bandied about, but the energy required is enormous.  Not to mention the ability to withstand heat and vibrations from the sonic drilling mechanism.  But considering the episode suggests this might be alien technology, I can’t exactly just call it a blunder.  It’s on the fringe, for certain.

The vibrating through the wall trick, though, isn’t entirely a blunder—it’s extreme speculation.  It’s been a staple of science fiction for years that one could vibrate their atoms and walk through solid matter—The Flash could do it.    But the problem is that what keeps you from walking through a wall is the electrical fields of the electrons.

When the electrons surrounding the atoms in you body come close to the electrons surrounding the atoms of the wall, it’s the electrons that push back and keep you from walking through.  Now, in theory, electrons can tunnel through this, but for most of the uncountable electrons in your body to do this?  I’m gonna say: not gonna happen.  But what if they use technology?

In this case, the suggestion was that the grid they placed over the wall somehow vibrated the particles in the wall apart such that one could walk through it.  It’s really hard to imagine suspending the electromagnetic interaction of the particles and the wall still staying in one piece.  It’s kind of incredible, but considering how many hard SF writers have used this plot device, I have a hard time calling it a blunder.

A Mediocre Fantasy Show

The problem is this show is really a fantasy show.  There is a “magic science” at work, and they want to convey the idea that this science is so advanced that it’s practically magic.  One can hardly hold such a show to strong rigour of scientific plausibility.  There’s always some magical/technical item at work to make the events happen, and since those devices are beyond our current level of knowledge, one can’t just go “Impossible! Can never happen!”  All one can say is, “As far as we understand the Universe, that doesn’t seem likely.”

The show itself is actually pretty mediocre.  They try to write for the characters and their relationships, but the characters and their actions seem very forced.  It’s hard to watch at times, the show is so forced.  But oh well, it could be worse.

The one thing that occurred to me recently, while watching the trailer again, was he takes some heavy, heavy hit.  The kind of hits that must generate massive amounts of g-force.  Um… how does he survive them?  I can’t imagine Warmachine’s punches are low-g impacts.  Nor the concussion of rockets and artillery shells.  Yet somehow, Tony Stark doesn’t even get a concussion.

The perils of g-forces are often ignored in movies.  For example, crashing a car at high speed.  Without airbags, the impact alone can severely damage your brain without causing the skull to crack on something.  It’s something to think about the next time you see people involved in 55 mph head-on crashes in movies.

1. Sunshields

OK, the basic idea is realistic and used.  Even the idea of an adaptive sun shield—where the elements angle to optimally deflect the light and radiation—is even plausible.  But what’s with the frikking wall of fire effect when the shield angles back into the light?

Also, when Cpt. Kaneda is outside and the shield angles back, I don’t recall him being attached to the ship.  I.e., he was floating there.  And since the shield is spherical I  expect he could just float there, still in the shadow of the shield.  As the ship rotated back into position, the shield would move under him, but he’d still be in the shadow.  It depends on the axis of rotation really.

2. Sun’s Heat

There’s a recurring theme that when the sun directly shines on the ship, it explodes and bursts into flame.  Radiant light would make metal melt, but why would metal explode in a shower of sparks?  Specifically, I’m thinking of the communication towers that leave and re-enter the shadow of the sun shield for, oh, about 5 seconds.  I guess they make metal alloys with some sort of explosive oxidizer and magnesium.

3. Fires on space ships

Fires on space ships have been a concern for a very long time.  If they are sending a space ship to the sun, why didn’t they have more effective fire supression systems?  Just to even handle ordinary fire situations.  It just seemed to me that if you’re going to have a flammable room, like the oxygen room, you’d maybe have planned and designed it to be sealable and let it burn itself out, or at least void the room to space rapidly.

4. What the @$! is up with that ending?

What was that at the end?  Somehow the surface of the sun and the magic nuclear reaction behind him managed to stay in perfect balance for almost a minute and he could touch the surface of the sun and thus conquer his fear.  What the fuh…?

5. Gravity returns when the airlock is pressurized.

A reader had suggested this before, but now having seen the scene.  I gotta ask: has humanity mastered artifical gravity by this time such that they can turn it on the moment an airlock is pressurized?

The Rest of the Movie

I’d like to focus entirely on the science, but this movie was pretty painful for me.  The crew seemed like a bunch of college dorm dwellers thrown into a really bad camping trip.  The crew seemed… unprofessional.  And far less trained and together than you would have expected.  They also make sure one, and only one, person can do any job on the ship.  For a crew replicating a previous failed mission, I might think they’d want to have multiple redundancies.

And the worst part: I thought this was just an sci-fi thriller.  No, it’s a slasher film.  The director uses some stupid tricks (e.g., 1 to 2 frame still picture inserts to create a sense of foreboding) to goose the story, and the final bit with a psycho, 3rd degree burned astronaut from the first failed mission stalking the crew and slashing/stabbing them was just too much. Considering the writer and director gave us 28 Days Later, I really only have myself to blame.

Ugh!  Thumbs down from me.

Update (13 Oct 2008):

6. Oxygen Garden

That oxygen garden may have been too small for the size of that crew:

“… let us just say that between 300 to 400 plants are needed to produce enough oxygen to keep a person alive in an hour”.

Work out the details.  Let’s assume it is possible to force anyone’s cell phone to become an echo transponder (it maybe possible for all I know).  The ultrasonic beep would have to be generated on the phone—cell phone transmissions have a notoriously low range: less than 10 kiloherz (kHz).  The human ear can usually hear up to 20 kHz, and some people beyond that.

If the cell phone speaker can manage to generate the ultrasonic beep because Batman’s software completely took over the codec, then you still got problems.  The sound goes out, and we’ll be nice and pretend it actually forms a nice sweeping cone, but when it comes back, it’s still coming through a crappy microphone and digitized by a cheap ADC.  I’ll play nice and assume Batman was really smart and came up with a nifty software hack to perform the real-time compression of ultrasound.  How does he know which direction the echo came from?

Polar diagram for a hypothetical cell phone microphone

Sonar in animals depend quite heavily on being able to tell exactly where a sound came from.  For bats and some birds, it’s the pair of ears on their head.  For whales, they use their lower jaw and ears.  These mechanisms allow them to precisely figure out direction as well as distance.  A cell phone has a very limited ability to detect direction, not enough to give the detailed pictures in the movie.  The microphones on cell phones are designed to be very responsive in a narrow band in front of it and almost deaf to anything outside of that band.  So at best you’ve got a spotlight, but all you get back are a bunch of echoes that tell you nothing of the shape or direction. The microphone still can’t tell what angle the echo came in at.

The one part about that plot device that came close to reality was monitoring all that cell phone traffic for someone’s voice: there are rumors that the NSA’s ECHELON program can pick out voices of “parties of interest” from thousands of calls.  Of course, I’m sure that’s just tin-foil hat thinking.

But one thing made me laugh during the movie was the Hulk’s weight.

I know, I know — it’s a comic book.  But being a science geek, I can’t help but notice this stuff.:-)

At first, it seemed obvious that the Hulk was heavier than Bruce Banner.  Then a scene on a medical table clinches it when Banner does his transformation, and the table buckles underneath him.  A table which can usually handle 200+ kg easily.  But where the hell does that extra mass come from?  The movie makes it quite clear it’s gamma-radiation fueled metamorphosis, but still:  gamma radiation to mass?

One kilogram of mass is the equivalent of 8.98755179 × 10¹⁶ joules (or roughly 19 megatonnes of kilogram of TNT).  Assuming 100% effeciency in conversion of course.  (HA! As if…)  But to get 1 kg of mass, that means Bruce Banner, weighing in at 128 lbs (according to the Marvel database), absorbed at least 1.5 × 10¹⁵ grays of radiation (1 gray = 1 J / kg).  Doesn’t mean much, huh?  Let’s change the numbers around ala Wikipedia to sieverts (Sv) so we can look up the effects.  From what I can tell:

1.54798125 × 10¹⁵ grays * 1 (for Gamma radiation) = 1.54798125 × 10¹⁵ Sv ≈ 1 547 981 250 000 000 Sv

(this is a very rough estimate based on the idea Dr. Banner received a full body dose, if we were talking about a portion of his brain, then the numbers go up… a LOT!)

According to Wikipedia, the highest known dose was in the 100 – 180 Sv range, and each of the victims died. Of course they go to great pains to emphasise how lethal that radiation dose was in the movie and comic books, but still: 1.5 million gigajoules of energy per kilogram of his body.   336 megatonnes of TNT per kilgoram of his body.  He wouldn’t have died—he would have vaporized! And that’s just to get one extra kilogram of mass.

Obviously, the extra mass must be coming from somewhere else, and it has to be denser than the air around him.  If he was absorbing air, then his net buoyancy in the atmosphere would not affect his weight—exactly like inflating a balloon doesn’t increase its weight. So I gotta ask: where does the Hulk get his bulk? (pun intended)

P.S. If Banner did have protein bars stashed on him, then his weight still weigh the same since the bars are on his person.

P.P.S. No, I don’t have better things to do—it’s too dang hot here in Vancouver to sleep!!

]]> http://sfblunders.wordpress.com/2008/07/01/hulk-extra-mass/feed/ 9 movieotaku http://sfblunders.wordpress.com/2008/06/30/wall-e-plants-in-space/ http://sfblunders.wordpress.com/2008/06/30/wall-e-plants-in-space/#comments Mon, 30 Jun 2008 04:03:46 +0000 movieotaku http://sfblunders.wordpress.com/?p=58 ]]> Fun movie, but here’s an open question:

Would the little seedling have survived open exposure to the vacuum of space. My friend thought it would have freezed solid (as I’ve pointed out elsewhere, freezing in space takes longer). I figured the water would have flash-boiled from the plant leaving it dessicated and dead first.

Any other opinions?

I was thinking we should call it “An Inconvenient Singularity”.