Archived Discussion Main / HollywoodScience

This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.

The Bad Wolf: removed the following natter:

• This depends on one's interpretation of the theory. Roger Penrose, for instance, who is a famous and credible physicist, would have it that wavefunction collapse is a direct result of conscious observation, and this can happen because consciousness has an actual special physical status. For the completely understandable reason that you need at least a year or two of university education in maths or physics to understand even a little of quantum mechanics, though, the word "quantum" in any TV show or film is a sure omen of incoming ludicrous pseudoscientific hodgepodge.
  • Err... no. This troper studied under one of Penrose's students and has a fairly good understanding of Penrose's theory. While some other physicists do subscribe to 'consciousness has a special physical status', Penrose isn't one of them - rather, his conjecture is more like 'physical states that differ in gravitational energy collapse on a timescale determined by the energy difference and neurons have evolved to leverage this to produce the results we associate with consciousness'. A photocell works just fine to collapse the wave function in about time t, if its "on" and "off" states differ in gravitational potential energy by at least h/t. Neurons act 'spooky' because they hover around this boundary, in Penrose's view (that is, their dynamical times are similar to their wave function collapse times).

Revlid: I fail to see how Avatar is at all relevant here, given that it runs off magic. You might as well ask how logical it is to have a chalk circle and a few fancy words summon a demon.

Krid: Futurama had more mathematicians and physicists on their payroll than many universities, meaning that you can assume it's always intentional.

Keith: There is some evidence The West Wing is in an alternate timeline (aside from the changes necessary for a fictional show in the present). The most glaring revolves around elections. At several points in the show they give actual dates (generally the same as the year the show is being broadcast), but the election cycle is two years off: they have presidential elections in 2006, 2002, 1998 and so on.

Fast Eddie: Good Wild Mass Guessing article, there.

Whitewings: The statement in Tommorow People about evolution taking thousands of years is entirely accurate; speciation (which is what people usually think of when they speak of evolution) does indeed take place in only a matter of (typically) five thousand to fifty thousand years. And recently, a species of butterfly was observed to become a new species in only a few generations. Evolution can be very fast.

Fast Eddie: You know, I've lost track of what 'species' is supposed to mean this year. Too lazy to Google it. Means that the new group can't breed with the old group?

Gattsuru: Or if they can interbreed, the offspring is generally sterile, or physically can interbreed but do not do so in the wild... generally. It's not a well-established thing, and there are a lot of other definitions in use, although only the phylogenetic definition, which places a species as those with a single ancestor and highly similar physical attributes. As Whitewings noted, you can even get speciation pretty quickly, too.

Zander Schubert: I haven't seen any JAG episodes, but I guess it means having a shot during noon but have the Zulu time be five in the morning, or something like that.

Zulu time is supposed to be the time of the ships home harbour. At least it was that originally. the ship operates on the same time in doc as when they are in the indian sea. Also, we have the more modern military version of operating on an agreed standard time in all units no matter where they are. The time at the headquarter. In jag that would most likely mean that zulu time either is navy standard time, or the time used at jag hq.

Nornagest: Not putting this on the main page because it probably qualifies as a justifying edit, but the Highlander example might also be due to mistakenly generalizing a real-life dating method for obsidian tools which involves measuring the amount of water their outer layers have absorbed.

• There is no such thing, scientifically speaking, as a brontosaurus. The name was given to a genus of sauropods that a paleontologist thought was a newly-discovered genus, but was later decided to be a species of the earlier-reported apatosaurus genus, and the rules of scientific naming of species give the title to the latter. (As often cited, an incorrect skull was placed on the brontosaurus, but this actually had no bearing on the naming issue, contrary to popular belief) But that doesn't stop "brontosaurus" from being used as a synonym for "apatosaurus", for example in Doctor Who ("Invasion of the Dinosaurs": "The brontosaurus is large, placid, and stupid!"). (Their appearance in The Flintstones is really the least of their scientific problems.).
• Similarly, actual velociraptors were about the size of a dog, not the man-sized version used in the film and copied in many TV shows thereafter. The latter examples resemblance the (originally) better known close relative Deinonychus, although a dinosaur of comparable size to the film's velociraptor was serendipitously discovered sometime after.
• A comic book example that is noteworthy because of the significance of the comic in comic history: in Alan Moore's Swamp Thing #21, he claims that Swamp Thing is actually a plant, not a transformed human, and that his memories were transferred to the plant in the same way that planarian worms can learn how to run a maze by eating other planarians that did. The planarian worm experiment, however, is from 1962, and had long been discredited on the grounds that it cannot be reproduced, and what had been learned about memory since didn't fit.
• An episode of Spooks/MI5 features a terrifyingly potent virus which is a recreation of the Black Death! This editor's acne medicine could kill the black death. Not to mention that the disease still exists...

Nornagest: Cut from the A Beautiful Mind example:

** That's true in a single instance - but in multiple repititions, the others would learn to distrust the other guy who switches and cut him out of the loop.

Nash equilibria don't take that sort of recursion into account, which is why the Nash equilibrium for the Prisoner's Dilemma and related games is suboptimal. Finding the optimal solution in these cases requires more advanced game theory.

ANTI: "Just because it's a satellite doesn't mean it moves at a constant speed." - Which is actually true. So much for the laudable intellect of the average TV Trouper... Only satellites moving in perfectly circular orbits in a perfect vacuum in a simple two body problem move at constant speed. In practice though everything moves in an elliptical orbit, where it is SWEPT AREA that is constant, not speed. Moving the quote to the bottom of the page under 'real life'.