Movies dumbing down science: a list of egregious (and funny) offenses
Personally, I think "The Core" deserves to be mentioned more in such an article...but I guess it's less the science than the engineering (eg 'space suits' that allow great freedom of movement in an environment of a few thousand Kelvin with a pressure of a couple hundred thousand atmospheres (an order of magnitude or three more than the strength, tensile or compressive of any metal). Quick numbers: hoop stress in a cylinder is delta_p * r / 2*wall_thickness. So lets call the 'earth' suit's torso a cylinder with a radius of 1 foot (0.3 meters). Delta_p (between inside and outside) is 20 GPa (200,000 atm, a conservative estimate) and the wall thickness is 1 inch (0.025 m). pr/2t = 120 GPa. A quick search of Matweb returns no metal with a compressive yield better than, say, 2 GPa, to be generous. And metals with that kind of compressive strength are tool steels with very low ductility, not something to make a garment out of.
Friday, August 17, 2007
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