Astronomy Buff

The Physics of Spiderman 3

by Tony on May 5th, 2007

Now, before I get started, let me just say that I’m NOT one of those guys who sits in a movie theatre yelling, “Oh come on…” or “You gotta be kidding me!”.

I love science fiction and, to a lesser extent, the comic book stuff. I see all the movies and read a great many books. I think science fiction plays an important role in our overall scientific progress.

I’ve only gotten really irritated by bad scientific scripts a handful of times:

• In the first Superman movie, Superman flew around the Earth so fast that he stopped its rotation and made it rotate the other way, which somehow made time go backward.
• Malcolm MacDowell’s character in Star Trek: Generations had a gun that would stop all fusion in a star, basically turning off like a light bulb.
• The Core. All of it.
• The upcoming movie Sunshine, where the cast of characters has to re-ignite the part of the Sun that is dying.

I’m more than willing to suspend my disbelief when I watch SciFi or read a good book. I love good stories because it’s fun to make stuff up.

Nothing in Spiderman 3 was all that bad, and nothing as egregious as the list above, but it did have a lot of misconceptions, stereotypes and, well, a terrible script, especially when it came to the science stuff.

For example, towards the beginning of the film, Peter Parker and Mary Jane are laying out on a web in Central Park, watching a meteor shower. For this, I gotta hand it to Peter, that’s a great way to spend a night out with a girl, it has always worked well for me.

So as Peter makes his move on Mary Jane, unbeknownst to the hot and bothered couple, something plops down on the ground about 100 yards away in a puff of dust.

Plop. Puff of dust.

As the camera slowly pans over to the whatever-it-was, we look inside a small hole, and see a meteorite about two feet in diameter, glowing and smoking.

At this point, God bless him, my 12 year old son sitting right next to me laughs out loud. It was one of those big John-Cleese’s-Centurion-in-Life-of-Brian laughs that can be heard throughout the theatre because he knew that a meteorite that size would do a hell of a lot more to Central Park than plop on the ground.

I know, that’s not such a big deal, but I was gratified to watch my son’s reaction.

Then, a bit later in the movie, there is an escaped criminal running from police, when he stumbles upon, wouldn’t you know it, a particle physics lab. It’s just sitting there, somewhere in New York, when the bad guy, while looking back over his shoulder, falls into it. He falls into a the strangest looking particle accelerator I’ve ever seen. It looked like a big MixMaster full of sand.

Coincidentally, the particle physicists are about to start doing what particle physicists do: mix sand. Sand? I know, I didn’t know they cared about that either, but apparently the Higgs Boson is in it and can be found if you just stir hard enough.

One of the more competent physicists yells out amid a bunch of noise, “The mass of the silicon has changed!”

Apparently, the criminal had a high silicon content and his silicon must have added to the sand’s, alerting the scientists.

Sadly, another yells out, “It’s probably a bird, it’ll fly away once we get started.” Was it a silicon bird? That would be an interesting discovery all by itself. Further, the criminal must have been pretty thin to have mass comparable to a bird’s.

OK, I know I’m just being an asshole, but why don’t they have any cameras in the sand vat? Wouldn’t they want to watch what’s going on? Why are they doing this in a big, exposed hole in the ground? Why the f&*k would a particle physicist be so interested in sand? Is it because sand is made of tiny granules that remind them of subatomic particles?

I realize that this stuff was set up this way just to get the guy to turn into the Sandman, and I’m willing to go along, it just made me laugh.

I love the idea of a particle physics lab sitting in the middle of New York where all the experiments are performed in a big hole full of sand. Physicists should be more careful when they put their stuff.

Finally, there’s Peter’s physics professor. Apparently, Peter Parker is majoring in physics and he brings the stuff from the meteorite to be examined by his professor. Not batting an eye, he gets out his trusty microscope (standard issue among physicists, I guess) and starts studying it.

His conclusion? Whatever it is really “likes” Peter Parker, and…

“Don’t get any on you.”

I can sense a Nobel prize in this guy’s future.

For what it’s worth, and for reasons not really related to the above, I didn’t care too much for this movie. The script was just too contrived, some pretty incredible things HAD to happen in a certain way at a certain time to certain people to get the plot moving and everyone had to make up with each other at the end. We have to have that goddam closure, don’t we?

I’m also getting really, really tired of watching Spiderman save that screaming Mary Jane. Jeebus Peter, can you imagine what she’ll be like when you get into an argument? Talk about shrill. On the bright side though, the sex’ll probably be nice and loud.

I imagine the movie will make ton of money and people will see it several times and never notice the stereotypical comic book science. They’ll go away thinking big ass meteorites will hit us in a poof and particle physicists are looking for stuff in a big sandbox. I guess that’s just the way it is, and it really doesn’t harm anything. But, I have a blog and i wanted to say my piece.

Enjoy the movie. Just don’t get any on you…

Spiderman image credit: Wikipedia

Technorati Tags: meteor, particle physics gone wild, spiderman 3

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