Physics in Film

The movie Armageddon is about a scenario where an asteroid is plummeting towards earth and NASA has to think up a quick plan to save the human race. This brings up the question of what plans does NASA have for a real world Armageddon situation. NASA in fact just recently in April of 2019 created an asteroid impact exercise to help prepare key decision makers on the "what if?" scenario. The participants discussed economical and human consequences of the impact on a densely populated area like New York City. The main point of the exercise being how they would change the trajectory of the asteroid. On the second day of the five day exercise the NASA team details how they would use three Kinetic Impactors (KIs) to deflect the asteroid causing it to bypass earth. Kinetic Impactors are large spacecrafts that are sent into the path of an object coming towards earth in order to make contact and hopefully knock it off course. In the exercise the first Kinetic Imp...

Eraser, much like many 90's action films, is jam packed with corny dialogue, over the top fight sequences and of course Arnold Schwarzenegger. The movie is enjoyable to an extent if you're able to ignore the obviously horrible physics regarding the movies main subject, the rail gun. The rail gun in the movie is a weapon designed to shoot small aluminum bullets at the speed of light. The concept of the weapon is already extraordinary but the physics applied are even more crazy. Here in the movie Arnold finally gets a hold of the rail gun and has a blast. In the scene we see Arnold rapidly fire the rail guns subsequently sending the bad guys flying while we see he takes little to know recoil. The fundamental problem here is if the bullets were to some how launch the bad guys, the force from firing the gun would also launch Arnold in the opposite direction. Applying the law of conservation of momentum we can calculate the velocity at which Arnold would go flying backwards. In ...