The Martian is a Scientifically Sound Oscar Contender - Almost

If you have ever read a sci-fi film review on my blog, you are perhaps accustomed to the complete thrashing of the impossible events portrayed therein.  In the recent film, "The Martian", however, there will be no such thrashing - at least, not from me.  It is my favourite film of this past year, and yes, I saw "Star Wars, the Force Awakens" (and yes, it too was awesome).

The Martian is reminiscent of another great film, Castaway, in which a deserted human must survive on his own for multiple years.  Although the conditions are harsher on Mars than any island on Earth, Matt Damon's astronaut character did eventually establish contact with others, while poor Tom Hanks was stuck alone with "Wilson".

The Physics of "Gravity" and "Interstellar"

Hanukkah is a Jewish holiday celebrating a miracle whereby oil sufficient for just one day burned for eight.  Over this past week, an entirely different miracle took place: I, a father of two young girls watched two movies, none of which contained a single princess.

I really got my nerd on: I rented "Gravity" and then went to the theater to see "Interstellar".  Both films feature a lot of physics, but they could not be more different.  "Gravity" is a ninety minute expedition featuring orbital mechanics, while general relativity weaves its way through the three hours of "Interstellar".

You are probably expecting me to dissect these two films and expose all of their scientific inaccuracies.  In truth, I enjoyed both of them immensely, but would like to address one major problem with each one.

Do we Really Improve with Age?

There is no debate as to whether a person's physical well-being improves with age: it does not.  When I was ten years old, and I got a cut or a bruise, it was gone without a trace within days.  Now, at the age of thirty-one, small bumps and bruises linger for weeks, even months.  It is as though my physiology has stopped trying.

When adults confront this reality, they may look on the bright side: as we grow older, we gain experience, and get smarter.  But, is there any evidence of this?  I am beginning to notice that the longer we are around, the more resistant we become to change.  And, if this is so, then our age actually becomes a deterrent for self-improvement.  A relative of mine recently pointed out that as adults age, they simply become more exaggerated versions of themselves.  Think of the seniors in your family - you may find that there is much truth to this statement.

Why do we become set in our ways?  Many reasons.  For one, the effort to improve has a smaller return on investment as we age, as there is simply less time remaining.  Another reason is that change implies we have been doing it wrong, and, the longer we have been around, the harder it becomes to face such a reality.  But, the bottom line is that change is hard because learning is hard.  Seeing the world in a new way - accepting that something is not how you always thought it was - is daunting.  It is something that students are asked to do every day, and it is so clear to me which ones wish to accept this challenge and which do not.

"Speed", Featuring Keanu Reeves and Mechanics

The 1994 action thriller Speed introduced America to two soon-to-be movie stars in Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock.  The film contained all of the escapist elements that a summer outing to the theatre is supposed to: adrenalin-fuelled intimacy between the two leads, a smart yet mentally deranged villain, and lots of things that can and eventually do go boom. 

Yet, after the credits role, and the movie goers make their way home, the images that stick with them are not those of kissing, lunacy, or explosions, but rather the exciting set-pieces involving mechanics that are continuously on display.  From the elevator on which the film opens, to the bus, where the majority of it takes place, to the subway on which it concludes, it feels like a 116-minute mechanics course, albeit an entertaining one.  I don't know this for a fact, but I would suspect that director Jan de Bont took a physics class as a kid and enjoyed it immensely.

I suppose it is not surprising that the movie features mechanics, as its title is a key term of kinematics - speed is defined as the magnitude of velocity.  And, when an ex-cop turned psycho attaches a bomb to a city bus, he programs it with this kinematic parameter in mind: the bomb is armed once the bus surpasses a speed of 50 mph, and is set to blow should it ever fall below this value again.

If there were more class time in the Mechanics course that I teach, I would actually show Speed in class.  And, after each action sequence, I would pause the film to discuss the key concepts of mechanics on display, and even solve explicitly for some of the unknown parameters.  As this exercise is quite time-consuming, I simply encourage my students to try this activity on their own.

In the first scene alone, many aspects of mechanics are highlighted when an elevator filled with innocent people threatens to plummet to the ground.  The periods of free fall experienced by both the elevator and those inside begs several questions, like "Should the passengers float upwards?" and "Would they increase their likelihood of survival if they jumped just before the cabin hits the ground?"  I'll leave readers to consider these on their own.

When the cabin and its contents are supported by a single rope, how much tension manifests inside it?  Does the rope extend, and if so, by how much?  Why does the supporting crane above break?  I'll answer this last one: the tension in the cord creates a large moment (or torque) about the support structure.  The bending moment leads to a local stress that is larger than the ultimate stress value of the material making up the structure.

We could go on and dissect the mechanics of the entire film in this fashion, but instead, I would like to focus on two particular action sequences in some detail.  These two sequences occur on the fast-moving bus, and I always discuss them with my mechanics classes.

A Scientific Road Map

Science is my favourite realm of study.  Although physics is the branch that I am most comfortable with, I find science as a whole very fascinating.  It seems to me that science can be broken down into five categories: physics, chemistry, biology, psychology and sociology – in that order.

How do these five pillars relate to one another?  What is their connection?  Consider the following simple organizational chart.

A Scientific Road Map

Summer School

In the month of June, as most students are beginning to think about summer camp, or a temporary job, some students are beginning a new semester of school.  Whether they are retaking a failed class or trying to get ahead in their studies, summer school is not how most adolescents would like to spend their summer.

I have an unusually high interest in the notion of summer school this year because, for the first time, I will be teaching a class during these hot months.

Summer courses are much like fall or winter courses.  The classrooms are the same, but tend to have fewer students in them, and are filled with much hotter air.  Most institutions I know of, mine included, have no air conditioning.  I plan on wearing sandals to work. 

I suppose the main difference between regular semester courses and summer ones is that students sitting in class during the summer do not want to be there.  Let me rephrase that ... However much a student wants to be in a classroom under normal circumstances, they want to be there in the summer less.

Why Don’t Airplanes Flap Their Wings?

The distance between the average person and their tools has grown a great deal over the past century.  There was a time when the average adult was fairly independent: they could grow and catch their own food, build their shelter, and manage their own health, albeit for their forty-year lifespan.  When the tools that were used in society were primitive, it was not difficult to understand how they worked, in a general sense.  Today’s tools are not primitive, and they continue to advance exponentially.

That being said, aircrafts have been taking flight for over a century.  The latter half of the twentieth century saw the friendly skies open up to even middle class passengers.  Air transit is now a typical form of transportation.  It is normal for a new technology to appear mysterious, even magical, to the common man.  However, one would expect the common man to comprehend the basics of a relatively old technology such as aviation.

I am fairly positive that more than 80% of the passengers aboard a given flight today haven’t a clue as to how the airplane is flying.  Perhaps they feel better chalking airplane travel up to magic.  I have news for you: the pilot is not a magician – he or she is just an operator of a well-tuned piece of engineering hardware.

The Physicist's Guide to Surviving a Montreal Winter

In the sixties, a band called “The Zombies” sang: “It’s the time of the season for loving.”  Now that December has rolled around, it’s the time of the season for freezing if you live north of the equator, and reasonably far from it.  Those of us who actually experience four distinct seasons usually agree that it is good for the soul to see our environment change.  Still, as we dump cat litter under our snow tires before giving the car yet another push, many of us would like to skip over winter.  We curse its arrival every year, and even vacation far from it when the opportunity presents itself.

Winter is very particular.  You can examine a picture of downtown Montreal in mid-February, and know with absolute certainty that you are looking at the winter season.  Snow is the symbol of winter, and after a quarter of a metre of the stuff got dumped on my walkway and driveway last week, I set out at 6:30 am to displace it.

Stephen Hawking, Rock Star Physicist

There are not that many parallels one can draw between Keith Richards and Stephen Hawking.  They are both British, they are both in their sixties, and, uh, they are both from England.  One is a theoretical physicist, and the other uses his body as an ongoing experiment, in a cause and effect sort of way.  Keith Richards is a legendary rhythm guitar player, while Stephen Hawking is today’s leading Physicist, in terms of accomplishment and reputation.  Though you could not find two more different specimens, I would argue that both are rock stars.

Good Vibrations

The vibrations that the Beach Boys were singing about were probably the kind felt emotionally for something or someone else.  Vibrations, however, exist in many forms.  Engineers are often concerned with the mechanical kind, which manifest in all kinds of structures, such as bridges and tall buildings.  These vibrations are caused by an external excitation, such as an earthquake or high winds.  Musicians are interested in transmitting sound waves, and causing vibrations in their listeners’ ear drums.  In the most general sense, a vibration can be thought of as something that moves back and forth repetitively, such as a buoy bopping up and down in a lake, a stock price during the course of a week, or a person’s mood during the course of a day.

Vibrations occur around a specific ‘average value’.  In science, this value is known as equilibrium.  If left untouched, all mechanical items find and stay in their equilibrium positions.  If a spectator at a Tennis match is twisting his head back and forth to follow the ball, his equilibrium position occurs when he is looking straight ahead.   The vibration from side to side can be thought of as the search for equilibrium. 

The Large Hadron Collider

In the Waves Physics course that I teach, the students regularly enter the lab to perform a fairly rudimentary experiment that aims to prove a certain law introduced during a lecture.  Today, for example, the students will be playing with thin, converging lenses, and proving that the image of an object may be real or virtual, depending on whether the object is located inside or outside the focal length of the lens.  This simple Optics experiment involves light, but it surprises my students to learn that man, even today, with all its fancy gadgets, does not know the true nature of light. 

We know a lot more about light than our ancestors did two hundred years ago.  We know that it behaves like an electromagnetic wave, travelling through the void of space at about 300,000 km/s.  Light was Albert Einstein’s lifetime muse, and led to his most important discoveries: special relativity, E = mc², and general relativity.  Einstein was disturbed by quantum physics, and wished to quantify light without it.  Today, physicists are struggling to connect Einstein’s general relativity to the accepted, but incomplete study of quantum physics.  They wish to develop a “Unified Theory,” or, one equation for everything.  In order to do so, they need to find and determine the behaviour of all of the elementary particles that make up the matter in the Universe.

Although the Universe is composed of the elements in the periodic table, these elements are not elementary particles.  An elementary particle, by definition, is not composed of smaller building blocks.  All atoms are composed of protons, neutrons and electrons.  Scientists today believe that electrons are elementary particles, but do not believe that protons or neutrons are.  Today, thirty-eight countries and three thousand scientists are working together, wishing to study the dozens of theoretical elementary particles, like those that may comprise a proton, by means of the most expensive Physics experiment ever developed: The Large Hadron Collider (LHC).