Mister Science
Here comes a new writer into the Hullabaloo ranks. And let's get this out of the way up front, he's my nephew. But Mister Science, AKA Marc West does know his stuff. With degrees as long as your arm, we thought Marc could bring you some interesting stories. He's currently doing stories for China Radio International and 2SER, as well as having his own web space.
So I asked Marc to write a story related to our industry and he came up with the idea about science in movies. Do some of those wacky things we see in The Matrix exist?
Marc went into the matrix himself to find out....
Don't Always Believe What You See At The Movies
We’ve all watched films and thought, “that’s impossible” or “that’s unbelievable”. Sometimes movies take liberties with science, allowing things to happen that in real life are impossible, or at least unknown. Today we are going to have a look at three of my favourite science fiction films and see whether or not some of the astounding things that happen in them have any scientific basis.
The Matrix:
One of the most popular science fiction films of recent years is The
Matrix, in which Keanu Reeves discovers that artificial intelligence has
trapped human kind in a virtual world and is using it as a power source.
There are so many interesting and baffling scientific and ethical
questions raised in this film that there are thousands of Internet pages
and chatrooms devoted to the topic.
One of the scientific problems with the film is the notion that the
machines are using humans as a power source. Morpheus says to Neo that
the human race is enslaved in a power station, where it is used as a
source of bioelectricity. This is, unfortunately, rubbish as it violates
the law of conservation of energy. This is because humans need to eat to
stay alive, and the conservation of energy law states that the amount of
energy that comes out from the humans can not be greater than what is
taken in, making the power station ludicrously inefficient. Also, in
Morpheus’s speech to Neo, he states that the machines have discovered a
new form of nuclear fusion – obviously their actual source of energy,
and not the humans. However, this in itself provides hope for those who
believe in the Matrix universe. Controlling the fusion reaction is a
difficult process that requires computer control. One theory suggests
that hooking up millions of human brains creates an outstanding parallel
computing system that can act as an immense distributed processor for
controlling the nuclear reactions.
Contact:
The
movie Contact sees Dr Ellie Arrow, played by Jodie Foster, searching the
heavens for electromagnetic signs of extraterrestrial life using radio
telescopes, eventually finding a signal and using that signal to build
an immense machine that transports her, through a worm-hole, to the Vega
star system where she speaks with an alien and then comes home. The
movie is based on the novel by Dr Carl Sagan, an American astronomer,
astrobiologist, and highly successful science communicator. There are
many people in the world today doing as Dr Arrow did in the film and
search the sky for signs of intelligent life – where the movie takes a
leap is that in real life, we have yet to find any. You can even sign up
to SETI @ Home and donate some of your computing power to analysing
signals that come in from radio telescopes around the world.
Sagan wanted to make his novel as close to scientifically accurate as
possible – obviously difficult to do when dealing with such mind-blowing
topics – so he contacted the world’s foremost black hole expert, Kip
Thorne of Caltech. Thorne and associates were able to postulate a
theoretical set-up for a transversable wormhole using “exotic matter.”
To be stable, wormholes need lots of what’s called negative energy.
Quantum mechanics suggests that it exists, but we haven’t found it yet,
and we don't know whether the laws of quantum mechanics allow enough
negative energy to be concentrated to allow wormholes to exist. One
possible location for wormholes is at the centre of black holes.
Travelling through one of these might prove extremely difficult however,
since the wormhole would be so unstable that it would collapse as soon
as a spaceship (or even a ray of light) entered it. This is because
there would not be enough negative energy to hold it open.
Jurassic Park:
In Jurassic Park, Richard Attenborough and researchers find fossilised
mosquitos that had bitten living dinosaurs. Soon after, these insects
were caught in oozing tree sap that fossilised into amber. The
scientists extracted the dinosaur blood from the fossilised insects and
used the DNA in the blood to recreate dinosaurs.
Does amber old enough exist? Not from the Dominican Republic, where the
sap in the film is from. The amber from this island is between twenty
and forty million years old, far too young for the last dinosaur who
existed sixty five million years ago. There are however, a number of
sites around the world where amber old enough can be found. But even if
it exists, can we extract DNA from an insect trapped inside?
Unfortunately it appears to be virtually impossible to extract
sufficient DNA to recreate a dinosaur genome. Research has shown that
the DNA of dead organisms begins to fragment very rapidly unless it has
been preserved under unique conditions. If a piece of amber were found
containing an insect full of dinosaur blood, the blood cells would have
to be separated from the insect’s cells, difficult in itself. Next,
scientists could use a technique called polymerase chain reaction (PCR)
to replicate the DNA enough times to work with it. But since DNA
deteriorates over time, very little of the complete genome would be
left. The genome of a dinosaur is made up of billions of nucleic acids,
and we may be only able to string together two or three hundred of them,
or less than one millionth of the genome. This gives us no clue as to
the rest of the genome or how it all goes together.
But don’t give up on movie science just yet. I’m interested in seeing
how the new Spiderman movie deals with Spiderman’s special new powers
that he gets from the moon, and how the villains get their powers.