Gravity: Can Film Ever Get the Science Right? 438
dryriver writes in with a story lamenting the lack of accurate science in movies. "The relationship between science and science fiction has always been tempestuous. Gravity focuses on two astronauts stranded in space after the destruction of their space shuttle. Since Gravity's US release (it comes to the UK in November) many critics have praised the film for its scientific accuracy. But noted astrophysicist Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, had several issues with the accuracy of Gravity's portrayal of space. Through a series of posts on Twitter, Tyson — who later emphasized that he 'enjoyed the film very much' — highlighted various errors. He noted the Hubble space telescope (orbiting at 350 miles above sea level), the International Space Station (at 250 miles), and a Chinese space station could never be in line of sight of one another. On top of that, most satellites orbit west to east, yet in the film the satellite debris was seen drifting east to west. Tyson also noted how Sandra Bullock's hair did not float freely as it would in zero-gravity. This is arguably not so much an error in physics, but a reflection of the limitations of cinematic technology to accurately portray actors in zero-gravity. That is, of course, without sending them into space for the duration of the film. The Michael Bay film Armageddon is known for its woeful number of inaccuracies, from the space shuttles separating their rocket boosters and fuel tanks in close proximity to each other (risking a collision) and to objects falling on to the asteroid under a gravitational pull seemingly as strong as the Earth's. More than one interested observer tried to work out how big the bomb would have to be to blow up an asteroid in the way demanded in the movie. Answer: Very big indeed. Nasa is reported to have even used Armageddon as part of a test within their training program, asking candidates to identify all the scientific impossibilities within the film."
Mark Kelly had a well-written review (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Moo (Score:5, Informative)
What makes the same people eat up LOTR or the Hobbit with total suspension of disbelief...
Not all of us do! [cracked.com]
Killjoy never gets invited out with the cool kids (Score:4, Informative)
This is why nobody ever invites Neil deGrasse Tyson to the movies. It was a great movie. If your biggest quibble is that they made navigation line of sight to avoid tedious scenes full of calculating orbital mechanics, you're a killjoy.
Re:Don't care (Score:2, Informative)
Don't worry, it isn't 90 minutes of Cloony.
Bullock is very good in this role, deserving of an Oscar nomination.
From the previews I thought this was going to be "Open Water In Space". It isn't. Way better than that.
2001 (Score:3, Informative)
No noise in the vacuum of space?
Bowman's head not exploding when he has to blast himself into Discovery's airlock?
The fact Discovery has an area that rotates fast enough to simulate 1G for the sleeping crew as well as Bowman and Poole to keep from losing bone mass?
The trip from Earth to the space station (the latter of which had to rotate to also simulate 1G)?
Lensed in England by Stanley Kubrick, and still pretty damned accurate, especially since this was Arthur C. Clarke's work we're talking about here.
Re:Westerns do it (Score:3, Informative)
No, they don't.
How many westerns or crime dramas have you seen where somebody manages to outrun an explosion? Or where an explosion involving high explosives and no barrels of flammable liquid manages to end up with a giant fireball? Or where a bullet impact knocks the recipient flying backwards? Or where something as flimsy as a car door protects against a rifle bullet? Or drywall against a pistol bullet? Or the hero takes a 20-foot fall and gets up with nothing broken or sprained? Or somebody dives through a window and gets nary a scratch?
No, movies make shit up for dramatic effect. Period.
But most of them don't have someone who thinks they know it all making their own erroneous accusations of bad physics. (Not that there aren't some such errors in Gravity, but not as many as Tyson thinks he found -- and he missed some actual.)
Re:Moo (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No, because reality is FUCKING BORING (Score:2, Informative)
As someone with some experience, I can assure you that movie boxing, especially those show in ALL of the Rocky movies, bears little resemblance to real-world boxing. No real human being would be able to box for 13 rounds like they do in Rocky. And anyone would be crazy to try. They're going all-out in those movies, even more than you see in 3-round amateur stuff. You try to go in swinging like that in a real pro bout and you're going to get your ass laid out pretty fast.
Same goes for Raging Bull and plenty of other boxing movies too though. Real life boxing involves strategy, not just pounding away on each other. Even that "hugging" you're talking about is a strategy to tire out your opponent and make him carry your weight. And that's an old trick which is supposed to be stopped by the ref but rarely is.
Re:hair, faugh. (Score:3, Informative)
If you want to go see a movie, expecting to see accurate science or other reflections of reality shouldn't be one of your motives.
Oh I learned that with Al Gore's "An inconvenient Truth.. "
Re:Moo (Score:2, Informative)
"Court Martial" (and other episodes). They can't maintain orbit without engines.
Guess what, no object in orbit can maintain it's orbit without propulsion. Space isn't a perfect vacuum.
References
D. A. Vallado, et. al. [agi.com]
Australian Space Weather Agency [ips.gov.au]
M. M. Moe et. al. [uci.edu]
Now a ship the mass of the Enterprise and low cross-sectional area, won't have a decay time on the order of hours like they show in the show but it's orbit is always decaying.
Now the JJ Abrams Star Trek is riddled with errors.
In the first one there is no way a faster than ship should have problems escaping the gravitational pull of a blackhole if it has not crossed the event horizon yet.
In the second, when the enterprise is falling to earth, all of the crew should have been weightless.
Re:It CAN be done (but not always is a good idea). (Score:5, Informative)
Worst part of the ENTIRE movie right there. forget line of sight between 3 orbital bodies that are no where near each other, forget this magical debris field, forget the floating hair, this was the worst physics scene in the movie.
Re:Unrealistic. (Score:2, Informative)
George Clooney talking for hours with a woman his age?
Pure Fantasy.
Yeah .. I watch SNL as well
Re:Moo (Score:5, Informative)
In the second, when the enterprise is falling to earth, all of the crew should have been weightless.
If they're not weightless in space, why would they be weightless in free-fall? I mean, the engines weren't working but that doesn't mean the artificial gravity McGuffin was offline.
Re:Moo (Score:5, Informative)
There's proprtionality to consider. Deep impact was made at the same time as Armageddon, and while it didn't get all the science right, it came quite a ways closer, Armageddon get's dissed because it went so far out on some very thin limbs, and somebody else at the same time made a better movie on a lower budget.
I'm pretty OK with Gravity though. The movie came out well after the last space shuttle mission, so everyone should know that bird is not still flying. Gravity is therefore set in some alternate universe where more shuttles were built and the program is still ongoing, and also so the Hubble and ISS may have been placed in more similar orbits, the manned maneuvering packs designed differently and retained longer, the Chinese decided to locate their station close to the ISS, etc.
It's like an early Tom Clancy novel. The Japanese never really built a covert nuclear weapons program, but flying an apache 12 feet above a railroad track and having AWACs style radar think it's a bullet train until it pops straight up at them might actually work all the same. Clancy may have been utterly fictitious in attributing the sorts of motives he did to the Japanese, but he made damned sure to check the top speed and operational ceiling of his helecopters, whether they could actually be deployed by sub, and many other things about them.
In Gravity, we had:
1. the death of the mission specialist by having his head punched out, with a pretty realistic injury appearance.
2. The rest of the shuttle crew's deaths by decompression, also realisticly portrayed and with the fact that they would normally not be suited up just because the bay doors were open included. Note that in that scene, most or all of the bridge instrumentation and lighting is down - which may explain one of the supposed inaccuracies - why automatic stabilizing jets didn't fire when the shuttle was first hit, as it looks like the same impact seems to have killed both the bridge crew and the electronics.
3. The use of a fire extinguisher as an improvised propulsion unit, and our heroine's having the sense to grab one rather than push it away. If it's not technically accurate as to how much thrust it would supply, at least it had a real science feel as good as a Clarke or Heinlein story.
4. A realistic fire in space, with a lengthy smouldering period as 0-G kept the smoke from leaving the vicinity of the flame, and eventual flashover as it found sufficient oxidizables to outrace the smothering effect.
5. Realistic air pressure aboard the first Soyuz design capsule (what, you thought spacecraft are pressurized to a full 15 PSI?). Hypoxia in a young healthy adult and its different symptoms from such conditions as Emphasemic Hypoxia with accompanying Peripheral or Organismic Cyanosis treated with medical accuracy. (Periods of recovering from brief unconsiousness to full mental awareness are documented in highly athletic people suffering from suddon onset Hypoxia and not normally in cases where the cause is age or illness, but that's an unusual situation with the ambiguous "religious vision" as part of it, so whether the film got that intentionally right or just hit it by accident is up to the viewer).
6. A Soyuz style capsule stabilizing heat shield down from a tumble in the same manner as a boat tail bullet as it hits denser air, (Something the original Russian designers have long bragged about it being designed to do better than the Apollo, which was in turn supposedly better than the Gemini series).
7. Debris begins to glow with heat at altitudes where the air is still to thin to conduct much sound. Realistic hypersonic decelleration booms, increasing in volume as the air begins to bite,and unshielded debris shredding and vaporizing follow, and it all happens in very accurate realtime with the visuals confirming what the craft's altitude should be as it begins grabbing real air, begins to slow and the last bits pass it by. Time for the shot is textbook standard reentry time if the guidence systems actually get everything right.
8. Just getting the fact right that the Soyuz design is meant to land on solid ground is worth a few brownie points.