Physics in Movies Gets A Poor Grade

In space no one can hear you scream, but that doesn’t keep film directors from having a dramatic “whoosh” on the soundtrack whenever a spaceship flies by or breaks up. Now the excellent Intuitor educational website catalogs these and other movie science blunders in the Movie Physics Ratings database. Great discussions of flashing bullets, exploding cars, machine guns with endless clips of bullets, crashing thru windows and the resulting falls to the ground, visible laser beams and too-audible sounds. In general sci-fi movies take terrible liberties with the science they show; the most accurate movies reviewed were the political drama Seven Years in Tibet and the Tom Hanks gangster movie The Road to Perdition.