CamsFilmAnalysis

     Inspired by the movie Armageddon, I researched the realistic techniques that Nasa has come up with to defend our planet against asteroids. The method that stood out to me as the most interesting was the Gravity Tractor method. The Gravity Tractor method is based on the most fundamental force in nature, Gravity.  Orbits of the four inner planets and Jupiter (taken from flickr).      If you have ever looked at the orbits of the planets around our Sun, or the orbit of the Moon around the Earth, you are looking at gravitation at its finest. Following Newtons 3rd law and basic gravitation equations, two celestial objects exert an identical force of gravity on one another over space that is equal to the product of their masses divided by the square of their distance, all multiplied by the gravitational constant G. The five inner planets all exert the force of gravity on the Sun and the Sun exerts the same force on each planet. The reason why ea...

The rail gun in the movie "Eraser" creates some of the most epic scenes in the movie. The amount of power that the gun has in the movie seems to be limitless as the projectiles launched out of the gun were able to pass through pretty much any medium in their path. Well, besides a human body for some reason. Although the gun is very amusing to watch in the movie, it seems that the filmmakers forgot to encorporate momentum laws and recoil to the operation of the gun itself. Here's a quick video to show what recoil should look like: https://youtu.be/4T9uX7wN8xg?t= 9 To be fair, not all guns have a recoil like the sniper rifle in the video. The amount of recoil depends on the mass and velocity of the bullet being shot, or in the case of the rail gun, the armature. The amount of recoil one should experience due to a gun is based on a fundamental concept in physics called conservation of momentum .  The total momentum of a system should always remain constant. The m...

The Mission Impossible movie series is full of action scenes where main character Ethan Hunt, played by Tom Cruise, gets himself out of many tricky situations using his weapon skills and combat mastery. He is also depicted as a math guy; seen writing physics equations in order to plan out his next move under intense pressure. Although the physics behind the movie is not the only area of critique, there are three scenes that stood out to me specifically that challenged the laws of physics. Scene One: Tom Cruise Launches into Car Video should start at 4:50 to see explosion scene In this scene I am perplexed about Tom Cruise's direction of motion when experiencing the explosion from the missile impact. Is his direction of motion physically possible?  The force of an explosion is an area vector (perpendicular to the surface of the explosive). I have drawn the area vectors below to show the direction of the force that Tom Cruise should have experienced due to...