The most baffling scientific inaccuracy you've seen in fiction?

I once read an Uncle Scrooge comic written by some Italian hack, where Scrooge builds a space rocket and goes exploring to find a planet full of gold or whatever. However, his rival Rockerduck sabotages the communications on the spaceship, so the ducks end up lost in space.

And this is where the total and utter raping of all physics and logic starts:

1) The ducks are flying through space, and need to find somewhere to dock so they can resupply while waiting to establish communications with Earth again. They spend hours looking out a window, but all they see is pure black. It takes them hours to see the first star in the space.

2) They run into the Northern Star, which spells salvation for them. They ducks don't land on a planet orbiting the star, though, but instead just land on the star itself, which is depicted as a giant ball of ice.

3) When they finally manage to get a comlink with Earth, the ducks tell where they are, and Gyro Gearloose advises: "You are in the Northern Star! That's north from Earth. Just fly south and you'll make it here."

I mean, there's Artistic License, there's Willing Suspension of Disbelief, and then there's insulting the intelligence of ten-year-old kids.

Was it at least at night?

edited 25th Mar '12 8:42:45 AM by SantosLHalper

Partially science, partially the writers showing their American-ness too much. In one of Disney Channel's Zenon movies, the titular character lives in some sort of space station and ends up moving to Earth. In a chemistry class, the teacher tells the students to heat their beakers to certain temperature, and Zenon overheats the glass to the point where it explodes. She explains she did exactly as the teacher said, "(whatever number) degrees Celsius!" The teacher's flippant response? "Here on Earth, we use Fahrenheit."

...not when you're taking scientific measurements, you idiotic teacher who should be fired. And what about any country that isn't the U.S.? They all just abandoned the metric system?

edited 25th Mar '12 8:48:15 AM by 0dd1

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Holy shit you're right why would a science teacher...

Read my stories!

It is painful to think about.

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Not to mention, depending on how the scene played out, the beaker would be cooler or the same temperature as usual.

The emotions of others can seem like such well guarded mysteries, people 8egin to 8elieve that's how their own emotions should 8e treated.

That Scrooge story sounds excellent and I want to read it now.

to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee

If I remembered the temperature we'd probably know...

EDIT: The second bit of dialogue here!

edited 25th Mar '12 9:03:20 AM by 0dd1

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Yeah, no, if she turned it up to 100 degrees Fahrenheit by accident, it's actually half of Fahrenheit's boiling point (212 degrees).

The emotions of others can seem like such well guarded mysteries, people 8egin to 8elieve that's how their own emotions should 8e treated.

Oh, no, Fahrenheit was what she was supposed to do. She heated it to 100° C instead.

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So then you're telling me that the equipment used Celsius as a marker when on Earth they use Fahrenheit? And the teacher only specified the degrees, not the unit? Yeap, more holes than before.

The emotions of others can seem like such well guarded mysteries, people 8egin to 8elieve that's how their own emotions should 8e treated.

More holes than Swiss cheese indeed.

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I may or may not have changed a few things.
Also, why the hell would a beaker explode at the temperature for boiling water...?

Hmm... most baffling scientific inaccuracy in fiction...
The movies 2012, Independence Day, Day After Tomorrow, The Core, and War of the Worlds 2005.
All of them. Every single part. Although those are mostly filled with logic / common sense errors, not strictly science errors.

And to say I was nervous... it wouldn't be quite enough.

Down here we us farenheit, Pi is just 3 and Evolution is just a theory. Yeehaw!

EDIT. Oh yeah, stupid science done stupidly. Lets see, I think its the part from that one Movie "Sound of thunder" wHere killing a butterfly for some reason ends up altering evolution in such a way repto-mammals become a thing and baboonosaurus end up dominating the world. Now, I am not gonna go into details on how a baboonosaurus is a stupid idea in itself (trust me, it is) but I am going to get into another angle. If killing one humble butterfly is shown to have such powerful consequences and you guys know about it, then WHY IN THE NAME OF FUCK ARE YOU HUNTING APEX PREDATORS AND IMPACTING THE PREHISTORIC ECOSYSTEM YOU DICKS.

Also, apparently time explodes.

edited 25th Mar '12 11:19:57 AM by ElRigo

This entire thread is hilarious, and for the record, I'm laughing with you all, not at you. I like how the OP's complaint rightfully ignores the absurd premise of ducks operating a space craft. It reminds me of that part in Donnie Darko where Donnie is explaining to his friends why a Smurf orgy wouldn't be feasible and they just have this dumbfounded look on their faces because he just ruined their speculation. Sheer gold.

Anyway, I tend to have my biggest gripes with action-oriented fiction, especially in terms of medical science and how weapons are handled. I'm trying to think of the worst offender, but I honestly can't think of one. Guns don't have to make that damn clicking sound every you move them. That clicking sound would either be the safety being turned off (which should only be done when ready to fire) or if the bolt, slide or similar operating mechanism has been readied, in which case you should have already done if you are engaging someone. Even the Metal Gear series, for all its use of technical wisdom regarding tactics and weapons, is prone to the infamous "click" or "ching-ching" sound when the character just raised it into a ready position.

As someone else already noted, Independence Day and the Core are pretty bad. One of the absolute worst movies in terms of physics is Jumper. Self-controlled teleportation sounds great, and many writers have developed convincing ways to convey this ability in an at least semi-believable fashion, but Jumper doesn't even seem to try to rationalize those abilities. If the movie had just taken a minute or two to give the audience an explanation of how a human being could temporarily become intangible enough to bypass the electrostatic forces of objects in space, I might have enjoyed it a little bit more. The protagonist of the movie was also horrendously unsympathetic in my view, but that's an issue of character development, not science.

edited 25th Mar '12 2:31:40 PM by Aprilla

Problem with the movie is it took the premise of a short story and went too far with it. In The Sound of Thunder, stepping on the butterfly doesn't prevent the evolution of human beings - it leads to Fascism happening in North America instead of Europe, which is a bit more believable (though one wonders how, exactly the butterfly influenced only that one event and not more of history...). Also, the short story explained that they only targeted dinosaurs that were about to get wiped out by the asteroid impact, so their death would not be missed by history.

There's a ton of bad physics in hollywood movies, especially the way that they depict all explosions as enormous fireballs. Real explosives do their damage with concussive force, and have almost no flames at all. There's also classic stupidity like noises in vacuums, visible lasers in vacuums, and people sinking into lava (lava is rock, human beings aren't more dense than rock).

Probably the most ludicrous one I've seen recently is the 2012 movie. The idea that neutrinos would spontaneously interact with Earth's core, and that this would somehow lead to rapid continental drift and every major geologic disaster going off at the same time is just stupid. The sad part is they could have made a decent enough movie using any number of real life disasters - Yellowstone blows, the volcanoes below the West Antarctic Ice Sheet go off melting the south pole's glaciers and raising sea levels 70 meters, asteroid or comet impact, locust swarm, a star goes supernova next door...Hell, I would have even accepted it if they had gone with "Catastrophism turns out to be the correct theory all along" (catastrophism was an older geologic theory that was replaced by continental drift; the idea was that normally the continents stay where they are, but every couple million years they rapidly swap places with one another, in a "catastrophe"). But neutrinos not acting like neutrinos, and this somehow not frying every man woman and child on Earth's surface, is ridiculous. Since there was any number of alternatives to making up this nonsense, I'd say 2012 was the most baffling scientific inaccuracy I've seen on film in a long time.

Less baffling, but equally irksome, James Cameron. I get that the aliens from Avatar need to look like pretty little cat people because it is much easier to win the audience's sympathy that way (not that ugly aliens can't do that either with just a small amount of effort, just look at District9), but the idea that a two armed two legged two eyed species evolved on a planet where everything has six legs and four eyes is like spitting in Darwin's face. What annoys me is in interviews Cameron claims that they spent a lot of time working out the details of the alien ecosystem and paid close attention to such details as evolution, which is a blatant lie. He makes up for it, though, by addressing the fact that an alien ecosystem would likely be poisonous to humans, because of the differences in protein structures.

This is just a minor gripe and really more of an issue with terminology than with science, but Gundam and similar series have a habit of referring to laser beam weapons as rifles, especially the older series. I believe Tomino later gained awareness of this error, which led to characters referring to energy projectile weapons as beam cannons. Calling an energy projectile weapon a beam rifle is a misnomer because the physical nature of concentrated light particles would negate the purpose of rifling in firearms technology. And if you did try to fire a beam through a rifled firearm, its internal mechanisms would be torn apart.

I agree with complaints about Avatar, but it's too much of an easy target along with 2012. I'm not surprised that many people cite those two movies as some of the worst in terms of science in recent memory.

edited 25th Mar '12 12:24:32 PM by Aprilla

Oh yeah, that "Sound of Thunder" movie. I almost forgot about that. Yeah, that was stupid as hell. "We regularly go back in time with different groups of people to the same point in time and space, kill a T-Rex that was going to die anyway with no change at all, but one guy stepping on a butterfly that was about to get instantly incinerated by a volcanic eruption anyway made mandrillizards take over the world. Also, humans turned into weird rat things. Also, changes caused by timeline changes don't affect the future instantly, they just change things at random intervals and keep things that no longer exist in that timeline anyway."

I didn't really mind that they didn't explain the superpowers in Jumper. I just took it as what it was, superpowers. Then again, I mostly enjoyed the movie in an ironic "so bad it's good" fashion, and that part was mostly from imagining the Jumpers to be Shamans (ancestral recall ftw) and the paladins to be, well, Paladins (from World Of Warcraft). Doesn't make that much sense, I know, but I was doing it just for silly fun. Also, it was hilarious to see a bus shock get used. What mostly ticked me off about that movie, however, was how the protagonist's mother was all like "You're an abomination, I'm still going to chase you" at the end.

Which reminds me of that stupid movie "Push". And D-wars. Oh god, D-wars was absolutely amazing. But I'm going off-topic from scientific inaccuracies with that.

Avatar's Navi having 4 limbs and 2 eyes unlike everything else: Yeah, that bothered me too. I still enjoyed the movie, though, if just for the creativity of Pandora's creatures, even if they weren't that scientifically possible.

Gah... I can't really think of many blatant scientific inaccuracies outside of bad movies...
Not any inaccuracies that I think ruin the work, at least.

And to say I was nervous... it wouldn't be quite enough.

You forgot one thing with Sound of Thunder. The final piece of evidence they use to stop the time loop, it continued to exist after its original timeline was erased.

The emotions of others can seem like such well guarded mysteries, people 8egin to 8elieve that's how their own emotions should 8e treated.

The entire "Wanted" film...

Don't get me wrong, seeing Angelina Jolie with more tatts than her usual is pretty hot, but there is no freaking way one can "throw the bullet" in a curve.

I also am curious how her shoot-around-the-corner rig is even needed if she can arch bullets from a moving train. :P

Suspend my disbelief, don't hang it.

"Psssh. Even if you could catch a miracle on a picture any person would probably delete it to make space for more porn." - Aszur

Yeah, the "laser rifle" thing always bugged me too. I think on Star Wars they hand waved it as magnetic coils that stabilize the beam or something.

Well, from a certain point of view the North Star really is north of Earth. Unfortunately that doesn't help you if you don't know which way is south from it.

The physics of lighter-than-air craft in steampunk fiction also tends to bug me, especially when they start mounting cannons and armor on them.

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You clearly watched Wanted wrong. I switched off my brain in like the first minute of the film, when the narrator told about the ancient weaver conspiracy, and afterwards the fun was great.

"Atheism is the religion whose followers are easiest to troll"

I can't really think of scientific inaccuracies that made me go "NO FUCK YOU" to something. But inaccuracies in other regards. Like anything related to Buddhism or something else I know about. Like the horrors of that book Dan Brown wrote involving Japan. Dear Mr. Brown, you do not understand Japanese naming conventions or culture. Please don't write about it ever again. You are also allowed nowhere near Opus Dei or Catholicism.

edited 25th Mar '12 1:44:10 PM by Aondeug

If someone wants to accuse us of eating coconut shells, then that's their business. We know what we're doing. - Achaan Chah

Oh good god, Dan Brown. I raged quit in the middle of Angels and Demons after my friends convinced me to at least humor them. So many historical problems, so many scientific problems, just so many things wrong.

edited 25th Mar '12 1:48:38 PM by Ramus

The emotions of others can seem like such well guarded mysteries, people 8egin to 8elieve that's how their own emotions should 8e treated.

You can't even enjoy it for being bad. It's just bad. All The Da Vinci Code has going for it is an insane British man obsessed with tea. And that is all. It is the only good thing he has ever made.

If someone wants to accuse us of eating coconut shells, then that's their business. We know what we're doing. - Achaan Chah