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!!!SCIENCE MOMENT!!!

BEWARE THE SCIENCE FROM THESE TITLES OF THE

1950s - 1960s - 1970s - 1980s - 1990s - 2000s
1960
VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED
 
1961
VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA
THE DAY THE EARTH CAUGHT FIRE
 
1962
THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE
1963
CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED
1964
THE LAST MAN ON EARTH
 
1965
 
 
1966
 
1967
 
1968
PLANET OF THE APES
THE LOST CONTINENT
1969
COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT
JOURNEY TO THE FAR SIDE OF THE SUN
EUREKA! 16 MOMENTS OF SCIENCE AND COUNTING!
The Scientist
Why would a real science magazine want to interview a couple of Horror Thriller guys? Megan Scudellari interviews Feo Amante and Kelly Parks (of THE SCIENCE MOMENT) in The Scientist magazine's online website. Kelly and Feo talk about the Science Moment in Science On The Silver Screen, which takes a look at the Science in Horror Thriller movies and separates the Science from the merely SciFi.

The Scientist was awarded the prestigious Azbee Award for "Magazine of the Year" presented by The American Society of Business Publication Editors.

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1960 - 1969!

Village of the Damned
Kelly Parks
SCIENCE MOMENT BY
KELLY PARKS
VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1960)
Alien invasion stories invariably imagine the invasion to use methods that are just extensions of our own. The spaceships carrying the off world hordes are just futuristic versions of Naval troop ships, etc. But this movie is unique in that it imagines a method that doesn't involve any physical vehicle or object. Instead some kind of force is projected that allows someone somewhere to manipulate humans on the genetic level and create a humanoid variant loyal to that someone. An invasion by proxy, if you will. And I can no more imagine how it's done than a jungle tribesman of New Guinea could imagine how television works. Not only wouldn't he know - there is nothing in his world view that would even serve as a basis for guessing or extrapolating how the magic picture box might be made to work. Which means I have no science objections to this example of Clarke's Law: "A sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic."

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
Kelly Parks
SCIENCE MOMENT BY
KELLY PARKS
VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA (1961)
Could the Van Allen belt catch on fire? Absolutely not. The Van Allen belt is a region in the Earth's magnetic field that traps sub-atomic particles from the solar wind (electrons in the inner belt, protons in the outer belt). Radiation is higher than normal inside the belts but it's still the hard vacuum of empty space. There's nothing there to burn.

The Day the Earth Caught Fire
Kelly Parks
SCIENCE MOMENT BY
KELLY PARKS
THE DAY THE EARTH CAUGHT FIRE (1961)
I understand the real purpose here is to express the fear people felt about nuclear testing. These bombs were huge and scary and still a relatively new thing. Who knew what the consequences would be? Before the first nuclear weapon was detonated in 1945 there was some real fear that the heat of the explosion would ignite the atmosphere, incinerating all life on Earth (Now THAT would be The Day the Earth Caught Fire!). But could very large nukes actually change the tilt of Earth's axis or even change Earth's orbit and send our home world spiraling into the sun?

No. Not even close. Not even a little tiny bit. On a human scale a nuclear explosion looks like a huge event of immense power, but from the Earth's point of view it's the tiniest of unnoticeable pinpricks. The Earth is a huge body and the amount of energy it would take to alter its axial tilt in a single shove is more than humanity has ever produced in all of its history put together. If we tried to do it on purpose and detonated all of the 10,000 or so nukes the Russians and the U.S. own all at once, it still wouldn't be enough to nudge a body as massive as Earth. And actually changing Earth's orbit so it was heading for the sun would take many orders of magnitude more energy. That being said I will point out that the movie does a good job of showing the kinds of climate shifts you'd get if an event like this did occur. The writers were much better climatologists than physicists. But if the Earth's axis shifted by 11 degrees as they describe it would be immediately obvious to even amateur astronomers, because constellations from the southern hemisphere would suddenly be visible. There would be no denying it.

The Manchurian Candidate
Kelly Parks
SCIENCE MOMENT BY
KELLY PARKS
THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962)
Our science today is political science, which is why I want to tell you about something called the Venona Project. This was a highly classified (and highly successful) effort in the 40's and 50's to break the encryption of Soviet cables. From these intercepts (later confirmed after the fall of the Soviet Union) we know that there were many Soviet agents in the administrations of FDR and Harry Truman (the best known being Alger Hiss), that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg really were spying for the Soviets and that many of the people Joe McCarthy accused of being Soviet agents actually were Soviet agents (More details are available here: nsa.gov/venona/index.cfm).

Keep this in mind when you judge this era.

The Soviet Union took the cold war very seriously and made a strong effort to infiltrate our government. The few who knew about Venona back then couldn't mention in public how they knew that there were communist agents (that would have compromised the operation), which made them seem to the public to be overly paranoid. They were not.

Children of the Damned
Kelly Parks
SCIENCE MOMENT BY
KELLY PARKS
CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED (1963)
Ah, evolution. Will movies ever get it right? Not so far and this one is no exception. At one point a character theorizes that the spooky children represent "man, advanced a million years" in evolution, which perpetutates the myth that evolution represents a process of advancement or increasing complexity. It does not. Evolution is driven by natural selection, a dynamic process that selects individuals best adapted to a given environment. As environments change so does the best adaptation. It's perfectly possible that the best way to adapt to an environment is to become simpler, less complex, dumber, whatever it takes. The watchmaker is blind.

The Last Man On Earth
Kelly Parks
SCIENCE MOMENT BY
KELLY PARKS
THE LAST MAN ON EARTH (1964)
John of Ephesus chronicled the bubonic plague that hit Constantinople in the late 6th century A.D. He wrote:

"In some cases, as people were looking on each other and talking, they began to totter and fell on the streets and at home. It might happen that a person was sitting at work on his craft, holding his tools in his hands and working and would totter to the side and his soul would escape."

He goes on to describe how everywhere one looked were:

"corpses which split open and rotted on the streets with nobody to bury them."

This plague killed more than a third of the population of Europe and Asia. My point is that pandemic diseases are not unknown in human history. They've happened before and will happen again. But a disease that turns you into a vampire? Unlikely, I'll admit, but I have no problem with it here. You don't become a superhuman immortal demigod like Dracula. Instead you become a deranged shambling pitiful creature that feeds on blood.

Planet of the Apes
Kelly Parks
SCIENCE MOMENT BY
KELLY PARKS
PLANET OF THE APES (1968) 20th Century Fox
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS PARALLEL EVOLUTION!
(Read anything by Stephen Jay Gould, but especially The Burgess Shale).

Of all the reasons why they should have known where they were, the most obvious is life.

Every person, every oak tree, every blade of grass should have been a clue. And let's not even get into the fact that the apes spoke perfect, 20th century English! At the very least they could have made mention of the idea that perhaps after they left Earth some one invented faster than light space travel and colonized this world a thousand years before they got there.

The Lost Continent
Kelly Parks
SCIENCE MOMENT BY
KELLY PARKS
THE LOST CONTINENT (1968)
When you want to make a movie about a weird place where interesting weird stuff happens to topless natives, they're gonna have to be topless alien natives, because even in 1968 when this movie was made, the entire surface of the Earth was extremely well mapped. There are no uncharted islands or hidden valleys or, especially, lost continents. ("Now where did I put that continent? It was here a minute ago . . . ?")

Journey to the Far Side of the Sun
Kelly Parks
SCIENCE MOMENT BY
KELLY PARKS
JOURNEY TO THE FAR SIDE OF THE SUN (1969)
Let's set aside the fact that if there's a planet opposite Earth, why isn't there an opposite Mars or opposite Venus? I'll do that because the whole premise, though interesting, is impossible. A planet that shares Earth's orbit 180 degrees away is in an unstable position. Perturbations from the other planets would draw it more and more out of alignment and there's a good chance it would ultimately collide with Earth. This would happen quickly on the geologic time scale, which means if it were there we'd know it by now (there are more science problems than this, but to tell you more would spoil the movie -feo)


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EUREKA!
SCIENCE MOMENT
is interviewed by the prestigious
The Scienctist Magazine.

"After ten years of "Science Moments," McMullen and Parks are experts on the science faux paus that plague movies."
- Megan Scudellari: The Scientist magazine


LINKS TO THE FUTURE!

RETROFUTURE
See Yesterday's Tomorrow, TODAY!

MAN CONQUERS SPACE
What a beautiful future it was.

BUZZALDRIN
He walked on the moon!
He got Neil Armstrong to take his picture!
He became an MTV Award!
He flew Homer Simpson into space and put the "Buzz" in Buzz Lightyear!


SCIENCE LINKS!

A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS
Strong math Techno-speak for the really smart Techno-Geek.

BAD ASTRONOMY
debunks the myths with clear, easy to understand facts.

BAD SCIENCE PROJECTS
The most fascinating research, experiments, and inventions in the world.
Lots of robots!

BETTER HUMANS

JUNK SCIENCE
debunks the myths and the myth makers.

MADSCI.org
Where your science questions are answered by REAL (though not necessarily mad) scientists!

NEW SCIENTIST

NUCLEAR SPACE

SCIENCEAGOGO
See Researchers, Professors, Scientists, and Science Geeks discuss chaos and particle theory (and more!) with bathroom language!
See flame wars on a doctorate level!
See Ph.D's discuss rabid liberal politics with no clue as to what they are talking about!

SCIENCE DAILY

SPACE

SPACEDAILY

TECH CENTRAL STATION

TERRESTRIAL MUSINGS
More blog for your bucK!


LINKS TO THE PAST!

NASA.gov
See history archived before your very eyes! NASA's own online mausoleum!

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