Abstract
Matter, energy, and radiation are the fundamental subjects of physics. They’re also the raw material for endless plot points in science fiction TV shows and movies, giving superheroes their powers, providing the fuel to send spacecraft through hyperspace, and creating unbreakable swords and impenetrable armor. Understanding the concepts of mass, energy, how energy affects mass, how different forms of energy are converted from one to the other, and how matter and energy are converted from one to the other, helps a scientifically-armed viewer understand what’s possible and what’s outlandish in a screenplay.
Energy is liberated matter; matter is energy waiting to happen.
Bill Bryson, Author, A Short History of Nearly Everything
Sir, may I recommend the barium hydrochlorate salad nicoise, followed by the helium-3 isotopes de la meson, and then perhaps a small radioactive fruit salad for pudding?
Arnold J. Rimmer, Red Dwarf, “The Last Day”
The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
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Notes
- 1.
That’s mostly a good analogy. Mostly.
- 2.
Called BIPM by the French—the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures.
- 3.
In the early Captain America comics, Cap’s shield is composed of vibranium—in more recent years, it’s a vibranium-adamantium alloy. In the films, it is, apparently, a product of Stark Industries.
- 4.
Charge is a fundamental property of subatomic particles that cause them to experience electrostatic repulsion when in the presence of particles with like charge, or attraction when in the presence of opposite charges.
- 5.
The very same gamma rays responsible for the genesis of the Hulk. We’re getting there.
- 6.
Rumor has it that Bohr preferred experimental physics to teaching, because students found him Bohring.
- 7.
The first people to split an atom using technological means were John Cockcroft and E.T.S. Walton in 1932, for which they received the 1951 Nobel Prize in physics. This breakthrough led to both nuclear energy, and nuclear weapons.
- 8.
A brilliant example of this, one every educator should see (it’s on YouTube), is in an episode of WKRP in Cincinnati entitled “Venus and the Man”. The character Gordon Sims (Tim Reid), whose on-air name is Venus Flytrap, paints a picture of the Bohr atom—equating sub-atomic particles to street gangs called “The Pros,” “The New Boys,” and “The Elected Ones”—that has to be seen to be appreciated, and is unforgettable. Hollywood rarely provides such effective “teachable moments” as this.
- 9.
It is slightly more complex than that. More on electron orbits later in the chapter, as well as in Chapter Five: “Radiation: An All-Time Glow.”
- 10.
HDO is sometimes called “semiheavy” water.
- 11.
Water could also be made “heavy” with different isotopes of oxygen as well.
- 12.
See what we did there?
- 13.
Or, in a very similar moment, Jack Carter preventing Henry Deacon from saving the life of Kim Anderson in the 2006 Eureka episode “Once in a Lifetime.” Despite the show’s normally lighthearted tone, this one’s a serious tear-jerker. Set tissues to battle stations!
- 14.
“Delta-V” is how spacecraft navigators say “change in velocity.”
- 15.
No he would not have frozen, nor would he have popped.
- 16.
In reality, the disparity of the mass of the two objects is so great, the energy of the impact would have simply been dissipated in the hull of the freighter as a small amount of heat.
- 17.
Although this film seems to have run afoul of some influential critics, and was a box office disaster, both authors found it quite enjoyable. While you’re waiting for your Star Wars fix, why not give this one a try?
- 18.
Superman has nothing on this guy.
- 19.
6.67 × 10−11 m3/kg s2
- 20.
“We” in this instance, mostly means “Americans.” This is an unfortunate side-effect of Americans’ refusal to go metric. From an early point in life, American students are taught that 1 kg is equal to 2.2 pounds, obfuscating that one is a measure of mass, and the other is a measure of force. What would be proper to say is that 1 kg exerts 2.2 pounds of force in Earths’ gravity. This often makes it frustratingly difficult for teachers and professors who teach basic physics in the U.S. to teach the difference between mass and weight.
- 21.
SAC, who hails from Ireland where the metric system is in use, believes that the only acceptable place for a pint is the pub.
- 22.
To further complicate matters, there is also a unit pounds-mass. Few ever use this unit, so for our purposes, “pound” will always refer to a unit of force.
- 23.
In another link to Mars, a confusion in units of force led to the 1999 loss of the spacecraft Mars Climate Orbiter. Lockheed-Martin, builders of the spacecraft, rated the thruster output in pounds. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who operated the spacecraft, had been using metric units for 25 years, and assumed the values were Newtons. As the spacecraft approached Mars, it under-corrected for its final trajectory change maneuvers, passed far too deep within the martian atmosphere, and either broke up or burned up: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msp98/news/mco990930.html.
- 24.
In a voiceover in the second season CSI:Crime Scene Investigation episode “Overload,” Gil Grissom says, “Terminal velocity [of a falling person] is 9.8 meters per second squared.” That is actually the acceleration due to gravity. Terminal velocity, the fastest a person can fall owing to air resistance, is around 56 m/s (200 km/h or 120 mph). To reach terminal velocity a person must fall, roughly, 450 meters.
- 25.
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are composed largely of gas. What is the radius of a ball of gas? If you calculate the pressure of Earth’s atmosphere at sea level, then descended into a gas planet to the point where the overlying pressure was the same, THAT defines the radius for that gas planet.
- 26.
Quark was the name of a 1977 sci-fi comedy that lasted one season, as well as the name of the bartender on Deep Space Nine.
- 27.
On par with the size of a proton, whose size was recently downgraded from 0.87 to 0.84 millionths of a billionth of a meter, or 0.84 femtometers.
- 28.
Not to mention surprisingly easy to use.
- 29.
By an odd quirk of nomenclature, 1 food calorie to a nutritionist is actually 1 kilocalorie, or 1000 calories to a physicist. This goes a long way to explaining why nutritionists are more popular than physicists.
- 30.
We told you, it’s a “chicken and the egg” scenario. See Chapter Four: “Pure Energy” for a definition of a joule.
- 31.
In terms of explosive yield, a megaton is the equivalent of 1 million tons of TNT.
- 32.
UK discovery ‘starts race’ to turn light into matter: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-27470034
- 33.
There would, however, be no way for him to determine this by scanning the doomsday weapon as it fired its anti-proton beam; there would, if he scanned the target, and analyzed the gamma rays produced by annihilating protons and anti-protons.
- 34.
Bob Newhart’s character in The Big Bang Theory.
- 35.
Meaning that, unlike a proton or neutron, it can not be further subdivided.
- 36.
For that matter, the movie title adds another level of confusion complexity, the term “chain reaction” is relevant to nuclear fission—unrelated to either chemical or fusion burning.
- 37.
Apart from Trojan Asteroids and other Lagrange Point co-orbiters, see Chapter Eleven: “Braver Newer Worlds.”
- 38.
It is slightly more complex than that. More on the Pauli Exclusion Principle in the Chapter Six: “A Quantum of Weirdness.”
- 39.
Oxidation actually has a more general meaning, one that encompasses other elements and compounds beyond just oxygen, but we’ll go with just this for now.
- 40.
Actually, it releases a positron, a form of antimatter. The positron pair annihilates with a nearby electron yielding gamma radiation. Remember that matter, energy, and radiation are all inter-related.
- 41.
She also starts growing again in the chapter “Who Stole the Tarts?” for no apparent reason.
- 42.
Or Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche, intorno à due nuove scienze.
- 43.
If we have two objects with different surface areas, the one with the greater surface area would require more paint to coat it. If two objects have different volumes, the one with the greater volume would require more water to fill it.
- 44.
This includes moons as well.
- 45.
Except in freshman physics problems.
- 46.
Any reference to “tons” implies “short tons”, or 2000 lbs, as opposed to “metric tons” (which we will call out explicitly) which is the weight of 1000 kg of mass.
- 47.
From the Godzilla wiki: http://godzilla.wikia.com/wiki/Godzilla.
- 48.
- 49.
Determined by our plotting software.
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Grazier, K., Cass, S. (2015). Matter Matters. In: Hollyweird Science. Science and Fiction. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15072-7_4
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