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Interstellar: Black Holes

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Interstellar is jam packed with interesting and somewhat confusing movie concepts. Interstellar's main concepts play around the movies center piece Gargantua. (a giant black hole). The main thing Interstellar portrays accurately is the extreme warping of space that the gigantic black hole does. In the movie we can see this physically with a sea of trapped light surrounding the emptiness which is the black hole, but also through the extreme time dilation within the holes gravity. Essentially the black hole stretches the space time around it increasing in magnitude the closer you get to it. This is what creates the varying degree of time dilation on the planets in Interstellar, depending on their proximity to the black hole. The main characteristics of a black hole are the event horizon and the singularity. The event horizon is the point in the black hole where nothing can escape unless they exceed the speed of light and, the singularity is a point in space past the event horizon
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Contact

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Contact is a movie that revolves around the first instance of human contact with aliens. These extra terrestrials transmit a blue print to a machine that can transport a human from earth to the Vega star and back. When discussing some tribulations about this machine the two main characters Ellie (Jodie Foster) and Palmer (Mathew McConaughey) discuss special relativity and the "Twin Paradox". In this conversation they discuss this concept correctly in that Ellie, traveling near the speed of light, would experience time slower than the time passing on earth, making her age at a slower rate. At the climax of the movie however, the movie portrays her actual trip wrong. Ellie's transportation lasted an apparent 18 hours relative to her, but the time passed on earth was only seconds. According to the "Twin Paradox" more time should have passed on earth than the relative time of  Ellie's trip. This could have been easily revised if they just swapped the t
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Final Project: Looper

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Looper is another Hollywood time traveling movie that attempts to blow the watchers mind with "unexpected" twists and crazy plot devices. Looper revolves around contract killers called "loopers" that are hired by crime syndicates from the future to execute victims they send back in time. These crime syndicates have to utilize this time travel technology because in this fictional future it's "nearly impossible" to hide a body due to future tracking systems. (written down it sounds much more absurd than it is) Regardless of these crazy tropes, Looper is still an entertaining movie. With intense and engaging action scenes and, it's easy to divulge into the mindless entertainment while not thinking too much about what you're seeing.  But, despite the temporary amusement, it's hard to look past some of the fundamental physics problems the movie does wrong.Much like many action movies, Looper defies the conservation of momentum constantly.
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The Martian and Philip Plait's "Bad Astronomy"

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In chapter 24 of Bad Astronomy, Philip Plait breaks down his top ten bad examples of astronomy in movies and TV.  1. Plait's first example is one of the most common concepts done wrong in Hollywood movies. This mistake is that their is sound in space. In order for sound to travel it has to have something to go through. On earth we are able to hear because the vibrations that produce sound are transferred from the atoms in the air to our ears. So in space, because their is nothing for the vibrations to be transferred to, no sound would be able to be perceived in space. We see this violated in The Martian when Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is blasting out of Mars' atmosphere. 2. Example 2 doesn't apply to The Martian because it deals with the perception of asteroid fields in movies being extremely dense and that isn't a problem that appears in the movie. 3. In this example Plait uses the example of space crafts making sharp turns in order to redirect the trajector
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Weapons of Mass Destruction

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The creation of weapons of mass destruction has been a troubling moral concept since the creation of the first atomic bombs in the 1940's. Personally, I believe the construction and research of these weapons is morally wrong. I think the creation of extremely powerful weapons that pose a threat to humanity as whole is objectively bad from a positive moral stand point. The creation of weapons of this nature bring up many moral quandaries like, why or when would a weapon of this magnitude be a viable option in world conflicts. Although the actual construction of the weapons poses no direct threat its the implication and use of the weapons in a foul way that is troubling. We see this directly in history after the drop of the two bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, where countless innocent people lost their lives and the world was then sent into a frenzy of creating nuclear warheads in fear of their countries safety.   
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Global Warming

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Global warming is an issue that plagues the general public's mind's daily. By definition global warming is the gradual increase in the temperature of Earths climate. This statement brings up some questions of how, and why it is actually happening. NASA did a thorough breakdown of  Global Warming  that analyzes its effects and causes. Evidence : ( https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7159 ) One of the best pieces of evidence regarding global warming is the rapid rise of the sea level due to ice loss in the Arctics and Antarctica. Research conducted by NASA and the European Space Agency shows the magnitude of the ice loss, stating that ice loss in Antarctica has tripled since 2012 causing sea levels to rise at a rate faster than any time in the past 25 years. Comparing the rate of ice loss to that prior to 2012, it tripled from 83.8 billion tons a year to 241.4 billion tons a year. Meaning the threat of flooding during destructive storms is increased
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Zero Gravity: Apollo 13

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What is weightlessness? The concept of being weightless is a tricky subject. Many misconceptions can alter someones perception of the topic. One misconception being that weightlessness is the lack of weight. This is wrong because in physics we see weight as the normal force acting on an object (the force the ground is exerting against the object), meaning unless there is literally no gravity, an object is technically not "weightless". This means the only way an object could experience weightlessness is if the acceleration of an object and the the affect of gravity on the object are 0. Meaning an object in free fall is technically experiencing weightlessness which inadvertently shows how astronauts on space stations are technically in constant free fall towards the planets they are orbiting.  Using Newtons 2nd Law we can conceptualize this with the gravity constant close to earth.  ΣF=ma N - mg = m(-9.8m/s^2) N = m(9.8 m/s^2) -  m(9.8m/s^2) N = 0  
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