Physics in Film

Armageddon is an action movie with Bruce Willis which means it has to have perfect physics, well not quite, but it did pose an interesting question; What would we do if an asteroid was going to hit us? Well, NASA has you covered with a bunch of different techniques to prevent a true Armageddon. First off, NASA is always on top of monitoring space to make sure that if an asteroid had a trajectory that would even come close to earth, they would investigate. To spot asteroids, many pictures are taken, more specifically, a few pictures are taken of a static shot of space a couple minutes apart, then a computer will scan for any moving objects. After an object is spotted the trajectory is calculated with the given data. After that, there are many ways of dealing with an asteroid, but what I will be talking about is Asteroid Laser Ablation, which is basically shooting the asteroid with a really big laser. The whole purpose of the laser is to heat up part of the asteroid so hot tha...

In my opinion, Eraser is a typical action movie, and along with being a typical action movie, it has action movie physics, which don't always line up with the truth. In Eraser, the major plot device is a handheld railgun that shoots aluminum close to the speed of light (yes, I know this is ridiculous but just roll with it) and it is shot like any standard gun, but whoever is shot goes flying back. c = Speed of Light = 2.998*10^8 m/s vib = Initial Velocity of Bullet = approx. 2.5*10^8 m/s vfb = Final Velocity of Bullet = 0 m/s mb = Mass of Bullet = approx. 5.0 g vit = Initial Velocity of Thug = 0 m/s vft = Final Velocity of Thug = ? m/s mt = Mass of Thug = approx. 80 kg for the purposes of this problem assume all momentum is conserved in a perfectly elastic collision If all of the momentum had been conserved (which it hadn't, because if you check the clip, the bullets don't slow down after hitting the thugs, but if it stayed at the same velocity, we wouldn...