Science classes draw on film flaws

By Alexandra Witze
The Dallas Morning News

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DALLAS — Nobody ever called Bruce Willis a rocket scientist. But he acts like one when he saves Earth in the movie "Armageddon," blasting a huge asteroid into two pieces that safely miss the planet.

There's only one problem: It couldn't have happened that way, scientists say. The two smaller chunks — each still half the size of Texas — would have slammed into Earth only blocks apart.

Two Florida physicists have taken on "Armageddon" and other Hollywood blockbusters in a new approach to teaching science. By analyzing the big bloopers, as well as the science that movies get right, the professors hope to interest more college students in physics.

And it seems to be working: About 1,900 students have taken the "Physics in Films" class since the University of Central Florida in Orlando began offering it in 2002. And class reviews have been rave: More than four-fifths of one class surveyed said it was more interesting than the standard physical-science course.

Nationally, such innovative approaches seem to be taking off. In Texas, physics professors regularly use movie clips to illustrate topics from conservation of momentum to general relativity. In Minnesota, a university professor teaches a freshman seminar dubbed "Everything I Know About Science I Learned From Reading Comic Books."

Rating science films Physicists have some recommendations for movies to rent (or not to rent) to learn some science: Bad science movies: "The Core": Based on the near-impossible premise that Earth's core has stopped rotating, shutting off the planet's magnetic field. "Armageddon": Required a team of astronauts to blow up an asteroid into two pieces, but both still would have hit Earth in real life. "Speed 2: Cruise Control": Relied on a cruise ship slamming into a dock with a force that hurls passengers through windows — but it wouldn't have in real life. Good-science movies: "Frequency": Used in class discussions about time travel, as Jim Caviezel's character is able to converse with his dead father using a ham radio. "Contact": Regarded as a realistic portrayal of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and the consequences of first contact. "2001: A Space Odyssey": Acclaimed for being one of the few movies in which there is no sound in space, as physics dictates. — The Dallas Morning News

The classes are informative as well as fun, scientists say. At Central Florida, the movie physics course covers the same topics as the traditional physics course. Both cater to students who don't plan to major in the sciences.

"We're talking about people who are not going to be scientists, but they live in a world that is increasingly technologically and scientifically oriented," said physicist Ralph Llewellyn, who developed the course with Costas Efthimiou.

"We want them to be savvy enough," Llewellyn said, "so that when it comes time to vote for county commissioners or run for Congress, they have enough science know-how to reasonably evaluate science-based questions that come up in daily life."

But lessons go down easier with Sandra Bullock and Bruce Willis as teachers' aides.

The Florida professors ask students to watch between nine and 12 films, which can be borrowed from a campus library of more than 400 DVDs. Each movie has to have enough scenes containing important lessons about the physical sciences to make it worth watching, Efthimiou said.

Efthimiou offers "Speed 2: Cruise Control," starring Bullock, as a prime example of physics gone wrong. In the climactic scene, a cruise ship slams into a town's waterfront. As the ship slows, the people on board are thrown forward violently. But the camera keeps flashing onto the ship's speedometer. Given the speed cues, students can time the ship's deceleration and realize that it should have been barely noticeable to those on board.

Similarly, students use timers and equations to learn why Tobey McGuire couldn't really have scooped up Kirsten Dunst after the Green Goblin threw her off the bridge in "Spider-Man." In the 14 seconds shown, she would have fallen more than nine times the height of the bridge.

Of course, Spider-Man's dates weren't always so lucky. In the original comic, his first girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, is killed similarly — even though Spider-Man is able to cast a web line around her ankle before she hits the water.

University of Minnesota physicist Jim Kakalios asks students to calculate exactly why Gwen died. (Her neck, they discover, would have snapped under the force of her rapid deceleration.)

"I get the students to eat their spinach by hiding it in a superhero ice-cream sundae," Kakalios said.

Other exercises include calculating the pull of gravity on the planet Krypton. For Superman to leap tall buildings in a single bound, students find, he must have been used to many times Earth's gravity. And that would require Krypton to be so massive that it would have been unstable, inevitably blowing itself up — as it did in the comics.

Movie analyses can be a real eye-opener, said Richard Olenick, a physics professor at the University of Dallas.

"It's a shame that people don't know what's correct or incorrect," he said. "They just think that everything they see in Hollywood is true."

But not all movie physics is bad. For instance, Olenick teaches his astronomy classes using the movie "Deep Impact" — much preferred among scientists to the physics-poor "Armageddon." He and his students calculate the amount of energy released when a big asteroid slams into Earth, as well as how its effects differ depending on whether it hit on land or sea.

Not every freshman physics course will end up teaching gravitation and inertia through Hollywood, but other professors have asked the physicists to create a movie-based curriculum that could be used elsewhere, Efthimiou said.

He and Llewellyn are developing new subcategories of the class, with "flavors" including superheroes, science fiction, astronomy and pseudoscience.

"We really want to change the attitude toward science," Efthimiou said. "We want them, when they leave the class, to go and buy another science book. With their own money."

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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