Hollywood Science - Television Tropes & Idioms

"Every time you bring real-world physics into Hollywood, God kills a catgirl. So please, think of the catgirls."

Anonymous

When it comes to science and history, we can't expect the writers to get all the facts right. Maybe we should be able to expect this, but such expectations will lead to disappointment.

Actual scientists and scholars will get snooty and annoyed by this — sometimes justifiably so, although to be fair, good story will always trump good science.

Hollywood Science is common in bad Science Fiction, but does not generally apply to cases where the writers step outside the bounds of known science by applying generous quantities of phlebotinum to circumvent the normal rules. Often times, there's a Movie Scientist to help explain how it works.

If it's an intentional change from Real Science, it's not Hollywood Science. Thus, for example, the claim that the pyramids are much older than Pharaonic Egypt in Stargate SG-1 is not Hollywood Science. However, the scene in the Stargate movie where they track a probe sent through the gate, moving at faster-than-light speeds, by radio — that's Hollywood Science (actually, given that the radio signals were coming through the gate, perfectly justified. Needs A Better Example).

It's not always a bad thing. See Artistic License.

Types of Hollywood Science include:

As Science Marches On, mistakes can result from discoveries made after the show was written. In these cases, we must forgive the writers, since they had no way of knowing. Thus, I Want My Jetpack and The Great Politics Mess Up are not really Hollywood Science.

Examples:

open/close all folders

Film

When footage of the space shuttle in orbit is shown (unless Stock Footage provided by NASA is used), the shuttle is almost always shown orbiting "right side up" with its cargo bay doors closed. In reality, the shuttle always orbits with its underside away from the Earth (because that's the side where the heat shielding is strongest), with its cargo bay doors open (because the radiators are on the inner surface of the doors). Curiously, one of the few shows or movies ever to get this right was The West Wing (where the shuttle was imperiled by an inability to open its cargo doors).
Bullets and falling objects frequently disobey the laws of physics. See Blown Across The Room, Variable Terminal Velocity and Bizarre And Improbable Ballistics.
Almost anything where someone or something is in danger of falling into a black hole. A black hole produces the same gravity as a normal object of the same mass and distance. It only can produce higher gravity than a normal object when you get closer to its center of mass than you can for a normal object. (Without going inside the object, where the gravity from parts of it starts to cancel out.) You can still fall into a black hole like you can fall into the sun, but the idea of a black hole as a sort of space vacuum cleaner is right out.
- If you're outside the event horizon, you can escape if your engines are strong enough. Once you cross the event horizon, nothing whatsoever can get you out, period. Physics acts differently inside a black hole. Not that there'd be much "you" left at that point.
Montages used to demonstrate the effect of global events often show it being approximately the same time of day around the world.
Armageddon is loaded with Hollywood Science, to the extent that it has become something of a Running Gag on the Bad Astronomy website. Some can live with it, some can't.
An incredibly horrible example from Bad Boys 2: A truck carrying some cars is traveling at very high speed. One of the cars falls off but is still attached to the truck by a chain. It hits the ground and digs in, thus acting like an anchor. Said truck's rate of acceleration actually seems to increase!
A good example of bizarre Hollywood logic can be found in the movie Batman and Robin, where one of the two villains has a diamond-created laser-powered cooling system necessary for his survival. Laser cooling Does Not Work That Way. It is for cooling groups of atoms from "cold" to "damn cold," please pardon the imprecision of that expression. It wouldn't work for anything like the setup in the movie.
- Laser cooling was partially used to supercool the rubidium atoms for the Bose-Einstein condensate experiment by Wieman and Cornell down to near 0 K (170 nK degrees actually).
In Batman Begins, the microwave device intended to vaporize all the water in Gotham City is turned on with people standing right next to it. Keeping in mind that people are 80% water, this is just one of the more obvious reasons why the city-threat plot device is implausible.
- They did say the microwave device was a weapon, and would as such almost certainly be a focused beam, and when they turn on the device, the beam is directed downwards, away from the people standing next to it. But turning it on inside a massive steel tram car is an exercise in absolute stupidity.
  - Considering that the device is in a tram car above the ground, vapourizing water from pipes under the ground, while there are lots and lots of people standing on the ground... Well, you can figure out the rest.
While we're on the subject of Nolanverse Batman, The Dark Knight's "sonar phone" Deus Ex Machina has caught much flak for its...let's be nice and just say "implausibility."
A Beautiful Mind features a scene in which John Nash explains his "Nash Equilibria" his big discovery that eventually won him the Nobel (Memorial) Prize in Economics. He explains it as "there are 4 guys at a bar, there are a bunch of ok looking brunettes and one hot blond. If everybody hits on the blond she will be turned off by the attention and turn all of them down, but then all the brunettes will be turned off by the fact that the guys are only hitting on them after the blond and thus the guys will all go home alone, but in the movie the "Nash Equilibrium" is to all make an agreement to snub the blond and go for the brunettes and thus for all of the guys to get laid." The problem is that a Nash Equilibrium is when no parties can improve their own situation by acting independently which the solution from the movie does not fulfill as any of the guys who was going to hit on the brunette could at the last moment switch to hitting on the blond. The real Nash Equilibrium is to agree before hand for one of the guys to hit on the blond with all the other guys to agree to hit on brunettes.
- Or, if communication is impossible, employ a mixed strategy: randomly choose either the blond or a brunette.
Many a Disaster Movie. The most ridiculous, though, is definitely The Core. Magnets do not affect energy, regardless of what the movie says. A very tiny portion of the sun's energy hits Earth. Radio signals do not penetrate thick rock. Energy and sound waves diffuse as they travel and become distorted. 1,000 Megatons of force is far too weak to restart the Earth's core. A cave with 5,000 degree heat and 10,000,000 psi of pressure would collapse. Oxygen exposed to high pressure becomes a highly unstable polymer. Many more examples exist, but these are quite egregious. Weirdly, the portrayal of the space shuttle in Earth orbit—"upside down" relative to Earth—is one of the better ones (see the space shuttle point, above).
- A few of the promotion interviews for the movie involved the man who was the 'scientific advisor' for the film, talking vaguely about how scientific the film was. One wonders what this person actually did all day.
  - Actually, he had a bit of a "it could have been worse" attitude. Apparently, the original script called for the Plot Bus to have a window.
- The most egregious of all is the premise: That a new Defense Department system has somehow stopped the Earth's core from rotating relative to the Earth. What became of the core's momentum and kinetic energy is never explained.
Some people, though, enjoy these sillier aspects of such movies, citing them as part of the fun. Deep Impact, however, was supposed to be serious, which arguably makes its inaccuracies worse. For instance, the four nuclear devices causing a clean cut in the comet (as shown in a graphic in the movie) is impossible on several levels.
- One troper's Astronomy teacher in college was a science advisor on Deep Impact. They ignored most of what he said, except for his strong warning about the ridiculousness of having astronauts hopping around on the surface of a comet as though they were on the moon (if you were standing on a comet you probably wouldn't be able to tell there was any gravity, period). The scene was altered. Of course, he also got a cameo out of the deal (balding guy in mission control, even has a line).
Skipping blithely over the biology in Evolution, there are two massive chemistry howlers in the the section where Ira Kane (played by David Duchovny) works out how to beat the aliens. Firstly, saying that arsenic is "our" (i.e. carbon-based life forms') poison doesn't really work. Lots of elements are more toxic to humans than arsenic, like, well, selenium, the aliens' poison. And secondly, the idea of a nitrogen-based life form is just whacked anyway, as nitrogen doesn't form into long chains the way carbon does. Nitrogen-based compounds... well, let's just say the shared syllable in Nitrogen, Nitroglycerine, and Trinitrotolulene is not a coincidence.
- It also depicts evolution as inevitable progress towards intelligent mammals, while a line in another part of the film correctly states that natural selection doesn't favor complex animals over simple ones. And it depicts a simple soft-bodied crawling invertebrate as having a mouth on the dorsal surface and an anus on the ventral surface, while every real-life analog is the other way around. On the other hand, it's a comedy.
- Earth-life is also nitrogen-based. The four bases used in DNA are nitrogen compounds. Nitrogen is integral to the continued existence of earth life.
- You are right, but carbon is still the "skeleton" of every molecules and polymers in Earth lifeforms. Nitrogen (and also hydrogen, oxygen and many others) attaches itself to the atoms of carbon, while in Evolution, the nitrogen would replace the carbon.
Fantastic Four (2005) has a Star Trek-esque "cloud of cosmic energy" floating by Earth's orbit, and Reed believes this type of cloud may have triggered evolution, and could have untold benefits for humanity and biological science. It looks like the writers were trying to take the hokey "cosmic radiation" origin from the comics and make it more relevant to modern science. But there really is an area of concentrated space radiation right around Earth's orbit, the Van Allen Belt, where the Fantastic Four in the comics encountered high levels of space radiation due to poor shielding. The made up glowing energy blob has less of a basis in reality than the origin from the 60's.
Godzilla. Not including the giant rampaging dinosaurs, the film series is just full of 'em. Oxygen Destroyer, anyone?
- Well, the Oxygen Destroyer could have just combined the oxygen in the air into some acidic compound. But one can only ignore Fridge Logic for the case of Micro-Oxygen (aka Oxygen Destroyer Lite).
In Highlander, Brenda dates Connor's sword by its absorbency. Yes, the absorbency of a katana. In real life the metallic composition of a sword (which can sometimes give clues as to its date and place of manufacture) can be ascertained by subjecting a small sample of its metal to something called atomic absorption spectroscopy. I won't go into details (though if you insist) but the absorption in question is of light. Evidently the writers had vaguely heard of it but misunderstood what it involved, unless the katana really was made by the legendary swordsmith Andrex.
In the first Jurassic Park movie, Grant throws a dead stick at an electric fence to see if it's turned on or not. A pointless gesture, because whether wood can conduct electricity depends on how green or wet it is. A stick that's been in a rain storm will conduct just fine, one that's been dried out won't do much of anything. Just as a live plant will short out an electric fence, but dead, dry-as-old driftwood sticks like that used by Grant don't do jack.
- Where did he even get one like that on a jungle island? This may be one of the only examples where the trope could work in real life but the specificity of the film rules it out.
- Not forgetting the scene shortly (pun not intended) afterward, where the power comes on with Timmy still on the fence, and he gets a shock — despite not touching anything but the fence. In real life, current can't flow unless it has somewhere to flow to; that's how switches work.
The Rocketeer: Zeppelins do not burn like that, dammitt!
Spider-Man 2 is perhaps the most scientifically absurd movie passed off as drama in the past decade. This is mainly because its depiction of nuclear fusion is so inaccurate that even cursory research into the subject reveals huge flaws in the movie. For instance, the fusion in the movie is dangerous because the plasma generates a powerful magnetic field. In real life plasma cannot exist within a strong magnetic field, and can only be produced artificially with the help of technology that basically cancels out Earth's magnetic field in a confined space. In fact, Earth's magnetic field is the reason why plasma from the Sun just causes northern lights and occasional blackouts instead of cooking us alive. Furthermore, the movie depicts tritium, an isotope of hydrogen, as being both solid and extremely rare. (Tritium is so "rare" in Real Life that it is used to produce luminescent hands for cheap wristwatches)
- Plasmas are gases whose particles are mostly ionized. Although plasmas can have these attributes, plasmas aren't necessary hot (a plasmatv doesn't burn down the house), some are magnetic. Most particles that form the Aurora Borealis are from the earth, getting captured in the Van Allen Belt, and coming back into the Atmosphere, forming a plasma with around 100°C. One look in the other Wiki...
Total Recall has a fairly bizarre example: in the film, Mars' core is supposedly made of ice in defiance of density and temperature issues— never even mind what jettisoning the core of a planet should do when you have a space that will probably be filled by the most expedient mean possible (total collapse). Then again, it's probably All Just A Dream.
Twister: The antics of the chasers in the movie would get real chasers killed in the field. Add into this that they get some chaser terminology wrong, some of the science of tornadoes and other severe weather wrong, and that the climax is the heroes riding out a violent tornado just by tying themselves down when they would have been ground into beef by the debris is real life, it is little wonder that this movie is watched by chasers and meteorologists just to mock it mercilessly.
- Not to mention the fact that a twister can well outdistance a human on foot and thus it would be impossible for the protagonists to run away from them as they did several times. It's also fairly obvious how the speed of the twisters are changed to suit the scene's needs.
Buffalo Soldier contains a scene where someone in charge of a large-scale heroin synthesis operation warns that if the solution hits boiling point, dire consequences will occur. Conveniently enough, as we later discover during a dramatic close-up on a thermometer, it boils at exactly 100°C. (Even if it were to hit the actual boiling point of ~270°C, the result wouldn't have been nearly as explosive as shown in the film.)
Equilibrium has the concept of Gun Kata, a combat martial art whereby it is possible to determine the locations of opponents in a gunfight and their most likely lines of fire, breaking it down into a statistical formula that can be memorized to allow the Grammaton Cleric to evade incoming fire and shoot back at his opponents without looking. Needless to say, this doesn't work in Real Life, as actual gunbattles are based around cover, maneuver, and lines of sight, and can be extremely unpredictable and chaotic. They are virtually impossible to control, let alone analyze for statistical study, and the vast range of variables inherent to a gunfight simply cannot be predicted.

Literature

Live Action TV

Black Hole High seems to want to convince children that science is kind of cool. Unfortunately, "science" is taken to generally mean, "String random scientific terms together and claim this makes sense somehow."
- For example, the space around a metal ball "loses its gravitational field" therefore, it "makes perfect sense" that it would not only float, but would accelerate every time it collided with something — and this is claimed to be a "textbook" example of Newton's second law of motion.
- Also, physics seems generally flexible. This has something to do with the nearby black hole. That a nearby black hole could alter the normal behavior of the laws of physics is entirely reasonable. That it doesn't just destroy the planet isn't. And that it might alter physics in such a way that it can be trumped by one's emotional state or plot-induced personality flaws is... well... Television.
- "Probability" takes the cake. This week's anomaly inverts the bell curve, inverting "likely" and "unlikely", as a result of Marshall's writing a list of predictions for the future. The last of these is that a science club member will die. As the science club members each narrowly survive dangerous accidents, they "realize" that they are now safe, as the laws of probability say that to be so endangered once in a day is at the "far edge of the bell-curve" and therefore it is nigh-impossible for such an accident to happen twice to the same person. This ultimately leaves Marshall in mortal peril as he is the only member of the club not to be "pre-disastered", until he has his own narrow escape. All this adds up to Professor Zachary being patently unqualified to teach probability. If it worked that way, a lot of gamblers would be rich men now: the idea that one unlikely random event happening could make other independent random events less likely is the single biggest fallacy in all of probability — and all of gambling (It's called "The Gambler's Fallacy", in fact).
- Worse, even if probability worked like that, the whole idea of the episode is that the laws of probability have been inverted, so if the odds really had gotten worse, it should have made their deaths more likely.
CSI Miami: "Prey": A suspect's IP address is traced as 359.33.9.234. This is actually a new variety of Five Five Five (while intentionally avoiding private IP address, like 10.X.Y.Z, 172.16.X.Y or 192.168.X.Y). All of those examples are possible with IPv4. The exact behaviour is not defined, but most systems will do modulo 256 on all four numbers. This was used in many movies to create weird IPs that people who know just enough to recognize an address think it's bad, while those that decide to try hacking end up attacking for example 127.0.0.1
- To be fair to CSI, an IP starting 10 or 192.168 would also be problematic... those ranges are different to Five Five Five in that 555-numbers are normal phone numbers that just aren't (or weren't) used... however the private IP ranges are used, but aren't normal... and their use in the CSI scene would be just as worthy of appearing in this list (whoa, this hacker is hacking via the Internet, but from a private IP!)
- It's even worse in "Big Brother", where the last numbers of the IP addresses have four digits. Also note that IP v6 would use Base 16, where 1) 255 would appear as FF, 2) numbers are separated by colons, not periods; and 3) the numbers are based on 8-digit binary numbers (known as a byte), so IP numbers would still never rise above 255, which is 11111111 in binary.
The writers of the third season of Heroes clearly have no idea how solar eclipses work, giving us a total solar eclipse within a year of the previous one, which is visible all over the world for several hours. Oh, and it has some sort of effect on people's genes. Right.
In the Doctor Who episode "City of Death", the Mona Lisa plays a significant role as Mac Guffin, but the painting shown is much larger than the actual Mona Lisa (most people who have never seen it in person would be surprised by how small it actually is). It's also depicted as being painted on canvas, not wood. Even the My Favorite Martian episode with time-travelling Da Vinci got that part right.
- The Mona Lisa is also too large in "Mona Lisa's Revenge", an episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures — but they do mention in dialogue that the painting is smaller than most people think.
CSI is often accused of Hollywood Science; which arguable applies to the time compression more or less necessary for dramatic purposes. Early on in the show's run, the producers stated that they made the science deliberately bad, to avoid becoming a primer on evading detection for budding criminals.
In one episode of How I Met Your Mother, a character waits for a phone call at 11pm at night from Germany. Although there is a six-hour time difference between New York and Germany, Germany is six hours ahead: 11pm in New York is 5am in Germany, not 5pm.
The Numb3rs episode "Backscatter" had, in a background shot, the phrase "Email response IP address: 192.3382.1043.010.255".
- A more recent episode of Numb3rs involved a coded message whose solution was an IP address with a first octet of 275. Way to make the puzzle impossible for people playing at home, guys...
Spoofed in Odyssey 5. At one stage the Odyssey team consult an abrasive sci-fi writer clearly based on Harlan Ellison (who conceived the series). As they can't tell him the truth (that they've travelled back in time five years to avert the destruction of the Earth) the team pretend they're writing a science fiction novel. The sci-fi writer goes into detail on how cliched and scientifically implausible their 'novel' is.
Stargate Atlantis featured an episode where one of the heroes had a hard time closing a space station's bulkhead because the air rushing out kept blowing him back. We can assume that he didn't seal himself on the "You die now" side of things, so it seems that air pressure flows from low to high in the world of Stargate.
Star Trek Voyager often found itself unable to find any hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, and practically the only element guaranteed to be present in measurable quantities in interstellar space. In fact, the glowing red 'caps' on the engines are specifically stated to be hydrogen ramscoops, meaning that Voyager's crew don't even have to do any work to collect hydrogen. And yet...
- Although the Bussard Collectors (as the "red caps" are known) couldn't collect anywhere near enough hydrogen to support the energy expenditure of the ships in Star Trek - so another piece of Hollywood Science.
  - This is because hydrogen is only abundant comparatively. There's, on average, one hydrogen molecule per cubic centimeter. If you wanted to collect one gram of hydrogen per second, and you were travelling at close to the speed of light, you would need a collector larger than 300 square miles.
  - The Star Trek TNG Technical Manual explains that the deflector shields (also used to prevent collisions with small space debris) "sweep" hydrogen from a very large area into the collectors, thus it's unnecessary for them to be any bigger than that.
  - What else could Voyager be doing during the title sequence as it flies perilously close to a star (diving beneath a solar prominence, no less) except for collecting hydrogen? The TNG technical manual suggests that all starships are supplied with three years of fuel before leaving spacedock anyway, and yet Voyager is having supplies and energy issues by the second episode.
Team Knight Rider once claimed that "Liquefied nitrogen gas" was a high explosive, even though nitrogen is well-known for being functionally inert in most situations. Presumably they meant "Liquified natural gas".
- Or someone noticed the shared syllables in Nitrogen, Nitroglycerine, and Trinitrotolulene. Again.
On Veronica Mars, Veronica and her dad ring in the new year by watching the ball drop in Times Square. Three hours earlier. (It should be noted, however, that the Times Square festivities are in fact broadcast "live" on the West Coast on a three-hour tape delay.)
One episode of Star Trek The Next Generation states that the only ratio of "matter to antimatter" in a reactor is 1:1. Not only is this untrue but it's a horrendously inefficient way of using antimatter.