bad physics of Total Recall

On the airplane home from Spitzer Science Center and LIGO I made the mistake of watching the new Total Recall (2012 remake). (I also made the good decision to watch Men in Black 3 but that is not relevant to this post.) Central to the story is a tunnel through the Earth through which a train called The Fall goes from Britain to Australia in 17 minutes. Important to the plot is a gravity reversal on the journey in the core of the Earth, where the riders on The Fall are briefly weightless, and their chairs rotate from one orientation to the opposite so they are reoriented for arrival.

As everyone in first-year physics (well, for Physics Majors anyway) ought to calculate, the no-air-resistance, free-fall time for this journey (indeed on any straight chord through the Earth) is about 45 minutes (yes, identical to the time to go half-way around the Earth ballistically). That means that if riders were weightless for the entire journey the crossing would take 45 minutes.

The fact that The Fall does the journey faster than that would mean not one gravity reversal but three gravity reversals, because you would have to start the journey accelerating faster than gravity, and end the same. So the whole thing, which was obviously so highly thought out and worked out for the story, was just straight-up wrong.

I think if we ever do dig a chord-like tunnel through the Earth (the Chunnel is getting close to the relevant scale), we probably should run the trips at 45 minutes, because I think for pretty deep reasons this will be very close to minimum-effort travel times. In thinking about this, I have also thought about the relevant engineering gains and safety losses incurred if the Chunnel were operated evacuated of air or at low pressure. There were also idiotic things in the movie related to the implied air pressure, temperature, and air flow in the tunnel outside The Fall but these are more subtle. I digress.

Actually, the excellent MIB3 was even more physically unrealistic than Total Recall (bad time travel and so on), but the tone of the movie made it absolutely clear that you were expected to cut them physics slack.

vectors and their derivatives

The time derivative of velocity is acceleration, both vectors of course. But I was reminded in office hours today of just how hard it is to get across the idea that the velocity vector and the acceleration vector can point in totally different directions. And some students have trouble seeing this when a ballistic stone is going upwards along some (parabolic) arc, some have trouble seeing it when it is going down, and some have trouble seeing it at the top. That is, different students have very different problems visualizing the differences of the vectors over time.

I said in lecture that this issue was deep but I didn't emphasize it enough. I feel like it is so big it almost needs its own week!

infinite jerk

Last week I worked through some kinematics, and it led to a discussion in lecture about the jerk, that is, the time derivative of the acceleration. I was emphasizing that the velocity must be a continuous function of time (lest we have infinite accelerations and hence infinite forces), but then I realized that most people in the class (physics majors) felt that the acceleration must also be a continuous function of time.

After a bit of thought I agreed with them, but not for the reasons they wanted; indeed several were unsatisfied with my discussion: As far as I can tell, the only thing that limits the jerk is the propagation of information. When you slam on the brakes on your car, it takes a finite time for the brake shoe to come in contact with the wheel. This is not really a fundamental problem with infinite jerk (the jerk appears in no physical law), but in any real situation because information propagation (and other kinds of changes) happen at finite speeds, the jerk can never really be infinite.

blocks on planes

In class yesterday I compared two problems: the block on an inclined plane (sliding without friction) and the car sliding around an icy (frictionless), banked curve. In the latter, the challenge is to enter the banked turn at exactly the right speed that you make it out the other side without either sliding uphill or down. The nice thing about doing both these in one lecture is that they have nearly identical free-body diagrams, both of which have a massive particle acted upon by gravity and a normal force (at the same angle to the vertical if you set it all up correctly), and yet the physical situations are so different and the accelerations point in different directions. The comparison brings out a lot of conceptual material about contact forces and kinematic constraints.

The banked turn example is also hilarious, and has many nice details, such as that in general if you enter a conical banked curve and slide around to the other side without friction, you will come out with the car pointing in a strange (and non-trivial to calculate) direction.