Add Homonym Attacks! #2

Add Homonym Attacks! #2

Ad Hominem: Appealing to personal considerations rather than to logic or reason.
Ad Hominem Attack: An argument that focuses on a personal attack as opposed to the subject in question.
Add Homonym Attacks!: The process by which one inserts a homophone and it bites you.
(It also serves as the title to Inside Pulse’s representative column in the world of Critical Thinking, Science and Skepticism.)


Intro:

Before we start on the column proper, I need to tell you all this, regarding recent comments by Frist and Bush. Intelligent design is not science. ID doesn’t resemble science. ID should not be taught alongside science.

You see, a lot of people will try to label science as “just another religion.” These people are, for lack of a better term, ignorant motherf*ckers. Religion consists of, according to my dictionary, “belief in and reverence for a supernatural power or powers regarded as creator and governor of the universe.”

Science, it says, consists of “the observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena. “

One is a system of beliefs. The other is a method of investigation.

Richard Feynman once said of science, “It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is– if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. That is all there is to it.”

Intelligent Design starts out with a guess, then struggles to prove it true. This is not science! Science does not require unquestionable faith. Science is all about testing what we hold true. What Newton had to say about gravity, doesn’t quite match up with our observations of Mercury. Adjustments are required. Scientific notions modify as we are able to make more accurate observations.

Intelligent design is dogma.

It is akin to me saying that, “gravity is just a theory.” It is a scientific theory, afterall. Alongside it we should teach the notion that the Earth is resting on the back of an elephant. The elephant, if you are curious, is standing on turtles. The turtles are standing on more turtles. Turtles all the way down.

I mean c’mon, the Earth is just too big to be held up by some “invisible force.”

I’m sure I could convince W to buy into this thing.

Memo
To Mr Pat Robertson: Please stop advocating the assassination of foreign leaders on your tv show. And while I have your attention, just so you know, feminism does not promote killing babies and practicing witchcraft.

Real Intro
This week, or fortnight since I only do this every other Thursday, we are going to bridge the gap between Add Homonym Attacks! and Contradicting Popular Opinion. That’s right, loyal reader, ML Kennedy is so manly that he can cross over with himself!

Concerning Space and the Movies

It’s time for us all to face facts: for the first time in recent memory, both Star Wars and Star Trek are dead. While this could be a time for mourning, instead let us focus on the positive. Perhaps now we can get a space franchise to actually resemble what life in space might be like.

You see, things are different in the vacuum of space than they are on Earth. Things are different on the moon than on the Earth. And so on. Fiction writers tend to ignore simple premises such as these, which will, in turn, lead many people to hold many misconceptions. It may also lead to idiotic notions such as the moon landing being faked, but we’ll worry about that in another issue.

Gravity, not just a good idea, but… I just can’t finish that lame joke.

Contrary to what many believe, there is gravity is space. Gravity is what holds the universe together. There is gravity every place that there is matter. Every two objects, regardless of their size, will inspire a gravitational force pulling them together.

Right now your computer screen is pulling on you and just the same you are pulling on your computer screen. The amount of force between you and it is in direct proportion to its mass and your mass, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between you.

Why can’t you feel it? Because the gravitational constant is a very, very small number. Okay, crash course in gravity time.

In more exact terms, F is equal to G m1 m2 divided by r^2 where:
F is the magnitude of the gravitational force between two objects
G is the gravitational constant (about 6.67 × 10-11 N m^2 kg^-2 )
m1 is the first object’s mass
m2 is the second object’s mass
r is the distance between the two objects’ centers of mass

Since the gravitational constant, G, is only about 0.00000000007 N m^2 kg^-2 we are unlikely to feel the effects of gravitational force caused by most things around us. (Which is probably quite fortunate.) But since the Earth is so large, the gravitational force acting between you and it is quite significant.

On Earth, the pull of gravity translates as weight. Since the Earth has a constant mass, we know the m1 of our previous equation. Since our planet is basically spherical, we can fill in the “r” of our equation and square it. Thus, the G m1 divided by r^2 part simplifies to approximately 9.8 meters per second per second. We call this “g” or acceleration due to gravity on earth. Without worrying about friction everything falls towards the earth with this same acceleration.

Using “g” leaves us with weight as being equal to an object’s mass times g. This works for Earth.

In space, for all intents and purposes there is no weight. Things are far enough away that the r^2 part of our equation becomes quite large. This makes for a small gravitational force between you and even a very large object.

In space net gravitational forces are minor and thus we are weightless.

In movies, there is almost always some sort of “artificial gravity” and almost always it is omnipresent and enigmatic. Even on alien ships the artificial gravity is pretty much Earth gravity created by some unknown means.

Aliens come from different planets. Different planets are most likely going to differ from our planet both in mass and size. Aliens would probably set their artificial gravity to mimic their own planet’s gravity.

Movie’s are reluctant to acknowledge this.

In the Star Wars movies, a moon of Endor has about the same gravitational force as a much larger planet. Shouldn’t Han Solo and crew be hopping around like Neil Armstrong? Are all these planets exactly the same size? How could it be?

Of course, it might also make sense for everybody to just have less of this artificial gravity. Being able to jump higher is often beneficial. Older people with sore joints might benefit from weighing less. I hear tell flying is pretty cool too.

Up is a relative term with no intrinsic value.
-Dr. Manhattan

First and foremost, let’s get that out of the way. There is no universal “up” in space. On Earth, up just means towards the sky. But the direction one might point to as being “up” differs significantly whether one is in Hong Kong, Reykjavik, Boise, etc. What is “up” at the north pole is precisely “down” at the south pole.

In the weightlessness of space, up and down have relative meanings, like left and right do here on Earth.

But in movies, in almost every space battle, every ship is oriented the same way. Nobody is upside down, or sideways, or anything like that. Again, space isn’t like Earth. If the Enterprise looks upside down compared to a Klingon vessel, Shatner ain’t gonna fall out of his chair.

It would be a huge coincidence to have a bunch of ships all turned the same way.

“Tricky,” he said as they moved. “One day they will invent names of the properties of objects, such as the tendency of a thing to move once it is placed in motion.”

“Of what use would that be?” Reena asked. “Everybody already knows that that’s what happens.”

“Ah! But one might put numbers to the amount of material involved and the amount of pushing required, and come up with wondrous and useful calculations.”

“Sounds like a lot of trouble for a small return,” she said. “Magic’s a lot easier to figure.”

-A conversation between a metal horse and a sorceress in Dilvish the Damned by Roger Zelazny.

Inertia. Space is all about inertia. Without air resistance to slow things up, it’s a lot easier for objects in motion to stay in motion.

If your ship is cruising at the snail’s pace of 1000mph, turn off the engine and you will still be going 1000mph. Great for fuel efficiency!

However, when you finish blowing up that ship in front of you, you’re probably screwed. You see, when some big metal thing explodes we get flying shrapnel. In space, it’s not going to slow down before it reaches your ship. The explosion will send things flying in every direction. These bits will continue on at their initial velocities until, pretty much, they hit something or they fall into an orbit.

A cloud of smoke isn’t going to linger at the explosion site, either. You see, no air means no oxygen. No oxygen means no fire. All the debris is blown away. Kaboom! No smoke.

Speaking of space battles: a spaceship is not a fighter jet. You know how a jet has those flaps on its wings and tail to help it change direction? Those things move air changing the plane’s direction.

Those wouldn’t work in space. No air.

Spacecraft wouldn’t lean into turns. Hell, spacecraft used for these intergalactic “dogfights” wouldn’t even need wings. They aren’t planes.

If you wanted to go left, you’d pretty much have to shoot something to the right. Shoot something down to go up, forward to go back, etc. (All of these relative directions, I assure you.)

Movies ignore this too. When a ship shoots something, action reaction should occur. A stationary 1,000kg spacecraft shoots a 1kg torpedo at a modest speed of 1,000km/hr. The ship should be sent backward at 1km/hr. Simple enough? Shoot something bigger and be sent back faster.

Oh but wait, movie spaceships like to fire lasers better than torpedoes. Now on our planet, even with air, you can’t see lasers travel from one place to another, barring a lot of dust or smoke or whatever. Can you see the lasers travel in a game of laser-tag? Can you see a beam coming from your professor’s laser pointer? Probably not.

Barring a tremendous amount of space dust, you shouldn’t be able to see lasers in space.

In movies, laser beams tend to travel like harpoons towards their targets. NO! BAD! Light travels fast. 300,000,000 meters every second. If you could see laser beams, they would look like lines connecting the source and the target. The human eye wouldn’t be able to perceive movement or direction in something going so fast. So, again even if you could see the laser beams, it would be hard to determine who’s shooting whom.

Until of course, you hear the explosion. No wait! Sound is a compression wave. Sound requires matter to travel. The denser the matter the more quickly sound travels. Molecules vibrate, causing others to vibrate, and so on. In space there is no way for sound to travel from one ship to another. Explosions would happen in utter silence.

Size Matters

Movies tend to give us a skewed vision of the universe, particularly in terms of the size and distance of things. But then again so do most solar system models. So let’s straighten this thing up right now.

The Lakeview Museum of the Arts and Sciences in Peoria, IL will help me out now. They have built a huge model of our solar system where planetary size and distance is set to the same scale. They use their planetarium dome as their sun. It has a diameter of about 36 feet. Using this knowledge, how big is their model of the Earth? How far away is it from the planetarium? What do you think?

For their solar system model the scale is 42 ft. = 1 million miles. Wanna change your guesses?

This scale makes the diameter of their Earth model about 4 inches. It also places the Earth model 3/4 of a mile away from the planetarium. Our solar system’s biggest planet, Jupiter, is then only 45 inches in diameter. Jupiter’s model is a full 4 miles away from the planetarium.

Pluto is 1 inch big and 40 miles away from the planetarium.

Some Sources and Further reading

Intuitor’s Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics
http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/

Phil Plait’s “Bad Astronomy” page
www.badastronomy.com

For more info on The Lakeview Museum Community Solar System:
http://www.bradley.edu/las/phy/astronomy/about_solar.html

See you next time, when I will go back to harassing the good people of Answers in Genesis.