History Main / UnscientificScience

* The ''Franchise/ProfessorLayton'' series loves this trope when it comes time for DoingInTheWizard. Any plot that relies on "supernatural" happenings will be debunked in a fashion that makes even ''less'' sense than, say, a vampire. It's blatantly lampshaded in ''VideoGame/ProfessorLaytonVsAceAttorney'' as Phoenix boggles at the "rational" explanation for the witchcraft.

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* ''Series/{{Firefly}}'' leans towards [[MohsScaleOfSciFiHardness Hard sci fi]]: it averts the unrealistic trope of FasterThanLightTravel, but it also has to be a SpaceOpera with dozens of inhabitable worlds. Its solution is to set the show in a solar system where one very large star has four other stars rotating around it. That kind of star system is quite possible in reality (indeed, there are singular planets that rotate around ''multiple'' stars), but it would almost certainly lack ''any'' [[{{Terraforming}} terrestrial planets you could even start to terraform]], and that's not getting into the wild variations of temperature and gravity that such a star system's worlds would have to face.
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* In the direct-to-TV film ''Film/{{Momentum}}'', the protagonist is a physics professor who is also secretly a [[MindOverMatter telekinetic]]. Two cops are investigating a series of bank robberies performed by people doing seemingly impossible feats. After he foils a convenience store robbery and is caught on camera, they come to ask him a few questions. They randomly bring up telekinesis. He points out that he's not an expert on anything like that. So they ask him in his capacity as a physics professor... because physics professors are supposed to know about things like that, apparently. His answer involves something about the telekinetic making a connection on the "cellular" level to the object he or she is moving. This guy needs to be fired immediately for saying stuff like that. The only way this could be reasonable was if it was limited to organic matter, which would exclude a vast majority of what they might want to use telekinesis on.

* In a well-intentioned but misguided attempt to bypass WillingSuspensionOfDisbelief and the RuleOfCool, the explanation for how GunKata works in the movie ''Film/{{Equilibrium}}'' is that experts were able to review thousands of gunfights and calculate the most likely trajectories of enemy fire, allowing a practitioner to dance around speeding bullets without getting shot. While the psychological aspects of this are vaguely plausible in that a large part of many functional martial arts involves similar exploitation of predictable instinctive human behaviors and blind spots, the problem is that these patterns change with a person's level of competence (and overlooks that shooting has very few technical "rules" to exploit compared to many martial arts; the "most likely trajectory of return fire" in reality is always ''towards the target''). Even when going by the movie's premise, the most dangerous individual to a practitioner of Gun Kata would have attended ImperialStormtrooperMarksmanshipAcademy: their incompetence [[AccidentalAimingSkills means the area they hit might accidentally overlap]] with the zone where the Gun Kata practitioner knows no person with eyes should be aiming. As noted on the academy's trope page, this is often TruthInTelevision, but real experts who have actually studied real shootouts unanimously conclude the only effective way to survive a gunfight is to [[BoringButPractical get behind the best available cover and hope for a miracle]].

A subtrope of HollywoodScience and a relative of VoodooShark.

* Played with and mixed with DoingInTheWizard in SouthPark's episode Bloody Mary. A Marian statue begins bleeding out its ass, and is held to be a miracle. The Pope does what the real world Catholic church does and investigates. He concludes it's no miracle because the ''stone statue'' is bleeding out its vagina, and "chicks bleed out their vagina all the time."

* The ''{{Literature/Animorphs}}'' series has a couple. The biggest one is in ''The Mutation''. The Nartec apparently used to be people who mutated after their island 'sunk'. This makes no sense. The explanation? [[ILoveNuclearPower Radiation sped up their mutation]].

* ''Series/Firefly'' leans towards [[MohsScaleOfSciFiHardness Hard sci fi]]: it averts the unrealistic trope of FasterThanLightTravel, but it also has to be a SpaceOpera with dozens of inhabitable worlds. Its solution is to set the show in a solar system where one very large star has four other stars rotating around it. That kind of star system is quite possible in reality (indeed, there are singular planets that rotate around ''multiple'' stars), but it would almost certainly lack ''any'' [[{{Terraforming}} terrestrial planets you could even start to terraform]], and that's not getting into the wild variations of temperature and gravity that such a star system's worlds would have to face.

* In a well-intentioned but misguided attempt to bypass the RuleOfCool, the explanation for how GunKata works in the movie ''Film/{{Equilibrium}}'' is that experts were able to review thousands of gunfights and calculate the most likely trajectories of enemy fire, allowing a practitioner to dance around speeding bullets without getting shot. While the psychological aspects of this are vaguely plausible in that a large part of many functional martial arts involves similar exploitation of predictable instinctive human behaviors and blind spots, the problem is that these patterns change with a person's level of competence (and overlooks that shooting has very few technical "rules" to exploit compared to many martial arts; the "most likely trajectory of return fire" in reality is always ''towards the target''). Even when going by the movie's premise, the most dangerous individual to a practitioner of Gun Kata would have attended ImperialStormtrooperMarksmanshipAcademy: their incompetence [[AccidentalAimingSkills means the area they hit might accidentally overlap]] with the zone where the Gun Kata practitioner knows no person with eyes should be aiming. As noted on the academy's trope page, this is often TruthInTelevision, but real experts who have actually studied real shootouts unanimously conclude the only effective way to survive a gunfight is to [[BoringButPractical get behind the best available cover and hope for a miracle]].

* In the ''Literature/MaximumRide'' series, the gang have wings and other bird-like attributes, and Erasers are basically werewolves. This is explained by the fact that their DNA was altered. Apparently, there is one specific gene for bird wings (which there actually isn't), and there's a gene that allows humans to� transform into werewolves?

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* In the ''Literature/MaximumRide'' series, the gang have wings and other bird-like attributes, and Erasers are basically werewolves. This is explained by the fact that their DNA was altered. Apparently, there is one specific gene for bird wings (which there actually isn't), and there's a gene that allows humans to… transform into werewolves?

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* In a well-intentioned but misguided attempt to bypass the RuleOfCool, the explanation for how GunKata works in the movie ''Film/{{Equilibrium}}'' is that experts were able to review thousands of gunfights and calculate the most likely trajectories of enemy fire, allowing a practitioner to dance around speeding bullets without getting shot. While the psychological aspects of this are vaguely plausible in that a large part of many functional martial arts involves similar exploitation of predictable instinctive human behaviors and blind spots, the problem is that these patterns change with a person's level of competence. The most dangerous individual to a practitioner of Gun Kata would have attended ImperialStormtrooperMarksmanshipAcademy: their incompetence [[AccidentalAimingSkills means the area they hit might accidentally overlap]] with the zone where the Gun Kata practitioner knows no person with eyes should be aiming. As noted on the academy's trope page, this is often TruthInTelevision. Experts who actually have studied real shootouts unanimously conclude the only effective way to survive a gunfight is to [[BoringButPractical get behind the best available cover and hope for a miracle]].

* In a well-intentioned but misguided attempt to bypass the RuleOfCool, the explanation for how GunKata works in the movie ''{{Equilibrium}}'' is that experts were able to review thousands of gunfights and calculate the most likely trajectories of enemy fire, allowing a practitioner to dance around speeding bullets without getting shot. While the psychological aspects of this are vaguely plausible in that a large part of many functional martial arts involves similar exploitation of predictable instinctive human behaviors and blind spots, the problem is that these patterns change with a person's level of competence. The most dangerous individual to a practitioner of Gun Kata would have attended ImperialStormtrooperMarksmanshipAcademy: their incompetence [[AccidentalAimingSkills means the area they hit might accidentally overlap]] with the zone where the Gun Kata practitioner knows no person with eyes should be aiming. As noted on the academy's trope page, this is often TruthInTelevision. Experts who actually have studied real shootouts unanimously conclude the only effective way to survive a gunfight is to [[BoringButPractical get behind the best available cover and hope for a miracle]].

* In the direct-to-TV film ''Film/{{Momentum}}'', the protagonist is a physics professor who is also secretly a [[MindOverMatter telekinetic]]. Two cops are investigating a series of bank robberies performed by people doing seemingly impossible feats. After he foils a convenience store robbery and is caught on camera, they come to ask him a few questions. They randomly bring up telekinesis. He points out that he's not an expert on anything like that. So they ask him in his capacity as a physics professor... because physics professors are supposed to know about things like that, apparently. His answer involves something about the telekinetic making a connection on the "cellular" level to the object he or she is moving. This guy needs to be fired immediately for saying stuff like that. Only living things have cells. Inanimate objects don't even have a concept of "cellular level".

* In a well-intentioned but misguided attempt to bypass the RuleOfCool, the explanation for how GunKata works in the movie ''{{Equilibrium}}'' is that experts were able to review thousands of gunfights and calculate the most likely trajectories of enemy fire, allowing a practitioner to dance around speeding bullets without getting shot. This makes the laughably silly assumption that enemy combatants will not aim at their target to start with ([[FridgeLogic "Of course I can see him, Carl, but tradition says I have to shoot]] ''[[FridgeLogic this]]'' [[FridgeLogic way!"]]) and will continue to fire where they first pointed their weapon no matter what the target is now doing, never simply adjusting their aim a little bit to hit the guy who just pirouetted two feet over to the left. Experts who actually have studied real shootouts unanimously conclude the only effective way to survive a gunfight is to [[BoringButPractical get behind the best available cover and hope for a miracle]].

* In the ''MaximumRide'' series, the gang have wings and other bird-like attributes, and Erasers are basically werewolves. This is explained by the fact that their DNA was altered. Apparently, there is one specific gene for bird wings (which there actually isn't), and there's a gene that allows humans to… transform into werewolves? The more you think about it, the less sense it makes.

* In ''Literature/{{Twilight}}'', the vampires are supposed to be science-based. It was explained that when a person is turned into a vampire, they have all of their bodily fluids converted into a sort of venom, their eyes change color, their skin loses all pigmentation, they get flawless features (considered [[UnfortunateImplications universally beautiful]]), and their cells become crystal-like. All of this is from venom "injected" by a single bite from normal teeth (that is, no fangs). Furthermore, the description of the sparkling means that the cells must be lined with tiny mirrors. Erm...

** In "A Clone of My Own", the Planet Express Ship can travel faster than the speed of light, according to Farnsworth. When Cubert calls him out on how blatantly wrong this is, Farnsworth explains that scientists increased the speed of light. Of course, it turns out that the ''actual'' explanation is that the Planet Express Ship can achieve FTL travel by ''moving the entire universe around it'' as opposed to moving itself through the universe.

Compare NewRulesAsThePlotDemands (when the science is normally hard until this trope comes into play) and MagicAIsMagicA (when the writers are consistent about how the nonsensical science works).

* The ''{{Animorphs}}'' series has a couple. The biggest one is in ''The Mutation''. The Nartec apparently used to be people who mutated after their island 'sunk'. This makes no sense. The explanation? Radiation sped up their mutation.

* In ''Twilight'', the vampires are supposed to be science-based. It was explained that when a person is turned into a vampire, they have all of their bodily fluids converted into a sort of venom, their eyes change color, their skin loses all pigmentation, they get flawless features (considered [[UnfortunateImplications universally beautiful]]), and their cells become crystal-like. All of this is from venom "injected" by a single bite from normal teeth (that is, no fangs). Furthermore, the description of the sparkling means that the cells must be lined with tiny mirrors. Erm...