Feo Amante's !!!SCIENCE MOMENT!!! of the 1950s

1950 - 1959!

THE THING From Another World (1951)
"The Thing" may look like Frankenstein in a jump suit but in fact he turns out to be more vegetable than animal, which is fine. And he turns out to live on blood, so he's a carnivorous plant, which is also fine. But human blood (or blood from any non-whatever-planet-The-Thing-is-from life form) should have been fatal. Every form of life on Earth is based on DNA. Life that evolves elsewhere will have its own unique chemical base so our proteins would be unknown to their biochemistry (and thus probably poison) and vice versa.

True, this movie was made two years before Crick and Watson discovered DNA, but ignorance of the law is no excuse!

THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951)
When Mr. Harley questions Klaatu about his trip, Klaatu reveals that he traveled 250 million miles to get to Earth. He's coy about exactly what planet he comes from, saying only, "Let's just say we're neighbors." But given these clues his homeworld could only be Mars or Venus. Keep in mind this is 1951, before we knew just how thin Mars' atmosphere was and back when we still thought Venus was a humid, cloud covered jungle world instead of the sulphuric acid cloud inferno that it is. The movie sort of acknowledges this because when Klaatu leaves the hospital we briefly see the newspaper headline: "Martian Escapes!"

DONOVAN'S BRAIN (1953)
The science, even for the early 50's, was fine up until Cory mentions voodoo - I mean telepathy - as though it were a perfectly natural connection. Aside from that the concept here is actually sound. In fact, I'll make a prediction: Within the next thirty years it will become normal procedure in emergency rooms that if a body (which is just a life support system and mobility unit for a brain) becomes damaged beyond repair, the brain will be removed and kept alive until a new body can be grown.

FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956)
The opening narration (have I mentioned that I hate narration?) tells us that the space age begins when man reaches the moon in the final decade of the 21st century. This movie was released in 1956, just thirteen years before we reached the moon and five years before Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. As always, science fiction is rarely too imaginative. More often, it's not imaginative enough.

GODZILLA (1956)
Once Godzilla shows himself the movie scientists place him as a Jurassic creature that has somehow survived to modern times. They mention the Jurassic as being 2 million years ago, which isn’t even close. The Jurassic Era (the middle portion of the Mesozoic Eon) was from 144 million to 208 million years ago. The trilobite that was apparently living between Godzilla’s toes is even more of an anachronism. They became extinct 300 million years ago, before there was any such thing as dinosaurs.

Which is all minor quibbling compared to the fact that Godzilla is supposed to be 400 freakin feet tall and breathe radioactive fire. Unprecedented in nature doesn’t begin to describe it. But that’s okay with me. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere (see my review of GODZILLA [1998] vs. GODZILLA 2000) Godzilla is plain and simple inexplicable. He just is.

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956)
There’s no science objection to anything happening here (although a scientist from the 50’s would have disagreed). The only comment I’ll make is that the pods, just like the Alien in ALIEN, could never have evolved on their own. They must have been created as a biological weapon by some very advanced technology, giving them the ability to adapt themselves to any sentient beings they come across.

THE PHANTOM FROM 10,000 LEAGUES (1956)
The "Phantom" is only shown in water less than 30 feet deep, not 10,000 leagues. That's a long way, in case you failed seamanship. A league is 3 statute miles so 10,000 leagues equals thirty thousand miles! That's almost four times the diameter of the Earth. Presumably they were thinking of fathoms but a fathom is 6 feet so 10,000 fathoms is just over 11 miles and no part of the ocean is anywhere near that deep.

EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS (1956)
This movie has lots of scientific sounding jargon and most of it is used incorrectly like you'd expect. For example the aliens tell their human captive that their ships use a powerful magnetic field to overcome Earth's gravity. That's not as impressive as it sounds. Consider that if I use a refrigerator magnet to pick up a needle then the magnet is overcoming the gravity of the entire mass of the Earth, which is pulling the needle the other way. Magnetism is a much stronger force than gravity.

Most of the science mistakes are minor quibbles like that. The only big one is how the aliens "stop time" on board their ships so your watch stops ticking AND your heart stops beating. But you keep breathing and talking and moving around with a stopped heart. That's quite a trick.

THEM (1957)
Living things are built for their size. Just making something bigger usually doesn't work.

For example, the 50 foot woman in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. If you take a 5 foot tall woman who weighs 100 lbs and somehow make her ten times her size, how much will she weigh? 1000 lbs? No, because weight is a function of volume, which increases as the cube increases (this is the square-cube law). Thus if you're ten times bigger, you have 10³ or 1000 times the volume, so she now weighs 100,000 lbs (50 tons!). But how much stress your bones can stand is a function of their cross-sectional area, which increases as the square. So her bones are 100 times stronger but she weighs 1000 times as much, 10 times more than her bones can stand. She crumbles.

That's just one example - and only the beginnings of her problems, or the problems of ants made 250 times bigger than normal.

THE DEADLY MANTIS (1957)
The only truly bad science, seen here and in many other films, is the idea that any living thing could be frozen in ice and survive. There’s lots of water in the cells of your body and if you or any other animal was frozen solid all that water becomes ice crystals. Jagged, razor sharp ice crystals, which reduce your cells to metabolic mush.

There are a few animals that can survive such conditions because they have anti-freeze-like enzymes in their system that prevent ice-crystals from forming. But since the Mantis in the movie immediately heads for the tropics it’s clear that it didn’t live in an environment where being frozen was something to worry about.

20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH (1957)
I can say one good thing and one bad thing about the science here. First, the way Venus is described (but never shown) here is perfectly accurate for 1957. After nearly a century of study using the best telescopes and scientific minds available, it had been determined that Venus was a rain forest version of Earth, hot and humid and perpetually shrouded in clouds. Images of jungles and mists and endless rain seemed about right. Then NASA launched the first interplanetary space probe, Mariner 2 (Mariner 1 had a launch failure) in 1962. In one brief fly-by everything we thought we knew about Venus was shown to be wrong. It wasn't hot and humid, it was hot enough to melt lead and bone dry. The clouds are mostly sulfuric acid, the atmosphere almost entirely carbon dioxide and the air pressure at the surface is 80 times greater than on Earth. Oh, and no lizard men. Astronomers can do a lot but you really never know about a place until you go there.

The bad science was the Pentagon's stated interest in capturing the creature alive so they can find out why it could breathe the atmosphere of Venus and the astronauts couldn't. I'm just guessing but maybe it's because the creature evolved on Venus and the astronauts didn't.

THE BRAIN FROM PLANET AROUS (1957)
If you detected bursts of gamma rays from 30 miles away, the last thing you’d want to do is hop in a jeep for a closer look. Gamma rays are dangerous and the closer you got to the source the stronger they’d be.

You’d think nuclear scientists would know that.

E.C.MCMULLEN JR.

THE MONSTER THAT CHALLENGED THE WORLD (1957)
The explanation given for the monstrous varmints is that they are an unknown branch of the mollusk family. They MAY have been in dried out eggs from prehistoric times that MIGHT have been buried / preserved by a mud slide brought on by volcanic activity some time in the prehistoric past. Dr. Rogers admits that he can only guess as he has no way to be sure.

Rogers thinks that a recent earthquake MIGHT have broke the mud covering of the dry and ancient eggs, exposing them to the water of the Salton Sea (no evil atomic bombs!). The east side of the Salton Sea has a very active area of seismic activity even now, where bubbling volcanic mud-pots fart carbon dioxide and methane day and night.

It is also known that some snail eggs, buried by nothing more than sand, can remain dry (I'm talking completely dried out) and dormant for centuries, then hatch into living, breathing, eating, multiplying creatures when exposed to enough moisture. THE MONSTER THAT CHALLENGED THE WORLD, stretches those many centuries into a mess o' millennia for the monster's eggs. Quite a stretch of belief, but not to the breaking point. And the radiation? The level is unusually high for a human, but not fatal. For the mollusk monster, the level is a natural part of its metabolism. Dr. Rogers radiation experiments may have warmed an area of water, providing some manner of incubation, but it didn't create the varmints.

What's more, the monsters aren't growing into giants because of radiation, they're just natural giant mollusks. And they're not really out to challenge the world, explainable circumstances injected them into a period where their own natural predators are extinct, leaving their potential population explosion unchecked - so long as they have food.

THE FLY (1958)
The idea of teleportation has been a favorite of sci-fi forever, right up there with warp drive, but the details have always been glossed over and this is no exception. I’m sure you’ve heard of "E = mc2" ? This famous Einstein equation tells you how much energy you get when you convert matter into energy. "E" is energy, "m" is mass and "c" is the speed of light. If we use metric units, a full grown man masses about 85 kilograms. The speed of light is pretty close to 300,000 kilometers / second or 3 X 108 meters / second so plugging these numbers in gives us an energy of 7.65 x 1018 kg-m2/sec2 or 7.65 x 1018 Joules. In case that means nothing to you, it’s equivalent to 1800 megatons of TNT (about 90 good, old-fashioned H-bombs). Not exactly the kind of experiment you want your husband doing in the basement.

RETURN OF THE FLY (1958)
Teleportation, even as described in a bad movie like this, isn’t quite impossible. But let’s consider the technique:
This device works by scanning you and recording the position of every particle in your body, disintegrating you and sending you and your data to the receiver, which reassembles you. So for each atom in your body you need three numbers (x,y,z) to indicate location, plus another number to indicate what kind of atom it is and maybe one more to indicate the atom’s state (ionized, etc.) All these numbers represent about 20 bytes (in computerese) of information. Take that times the number of particles in your body (something in the neighborhood of 3 x 10²⁷ atoms) and you get 6 x 10¹⁹ gigabytes of information storage required each time. A good, top of the line computer (for March, 2000 -feo.) comes with a hard drive that can store about 20 gigabytes. You'd need 2.8 x 10¹⁸ computers (enough for every person on Earth to have more than 465 million computers each). Think of the download time! Each transmission would take so long it'd be quicker to walk.

CURSE OF THE FLY (1959)
Eventually (due to passport problems) Henri must teleport back to Montreal. When you talk about teleporting someone from London to Montreal, you have to worry about momentum: Conservation of momentum, that is.

At the equator the earth is spinning at almost half a kilometer per second. The farther north you go the lower the velocity but the real problem is that London and Montreal are at different latitudes and therefore moving at different velocities. The difference looks small on a map but in fact it works out to about 130 km kilometers per hour or roughly 80 mph. That means Henri would appear in the Montreal booth and immediately splat against the glass.