One of the nice Christmas gift surprises this past year was a pair of books from my girlfriend’s sister!  (Thanks!) Both books deal with the physics of Hollywood movies, though from slightly different points of view:  Don’t Try This At Home, by Adam Weiner, and Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics, by Tom Rogers.  Both books are quite recent publications (late 2007), and cover quite recent movies.  I give a brief description of each beneath the fold…

Don’t Try This At Home is written by high-school physics teacher Adam Weiner, and is the more equation-laden of the two books.  It attempts to cover, more or less, a complete high school physics course using an analysis of movie scenes, and it for the most part succeeds.  There are only a few movie examples that seem rather stretched to make a point — for instance, it uses optics to examine how a bug could ‘appear’ to be so big in the movie Starship Troopers!  Overall, though, the book is well-written and enjoyable.  I especially liked its well-deserved drubbing of What the βleep Do We (k)now?, the new age propaganda film.

Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics, by Tom Rogers, is a companion piece to the website of the same name, on which movies are rated based on their dedication to good physics (GP = good physics, PGP-13 = children under 13  might think the physics is good, RP = retch, etc.).  This book, though just as rigorous in the physics, spends less time detailing the mathematics.  It’s fair to say that it has a greater emphasis on debunking the movies and less emphasis on teaching the physics than the first book.  This isn’t a criticism, incidentally, just an observation!  It is an excellent, educational read, and extremely enjoyable.

Both books savage some of the worst ‘science’ movies of all time, in particular the utterly atrocious Armageddon and the pathetic, laughable The Core, not to mention the hopelessly hackneyed The Day After Tomorrow.  I’ve seen Armageddon on television (I refused to pay for a viewing), but I may never see The Core considering how ridiculous the premise is.

I was a little saddened to see that my pet peeve movie, Chain Reaction, didn’t make it into either book (though I’ve still got a few chapters to finish in ISMP).  Not only does the movie perpetrate the unforgivable sin of attempting to make Keanu Reeves a character with some technical expertise, but it never seems to decide how the ‘alternative energy’ source works.  Is it fusion?  Is it ‘breaking up water’?  Who knows?  By screwing up both explanations, the film manages to simultaneously insult physicists and chemists.  The movie also has a chase scene which horribly mixes the two big Chicago science museums together, the Field Museum and the Museum of Science and Industry.  The chase starts in one and ends in the other!