Hollywood: It Ain't the Real World

One of John Scalzi's blogs led me to a list of 9 Laws of Physics That Don’t Apply in Hollywood. Like most of these smart pants lists it is only right about two thirds of the time. Their observations about Hollywood sound, gravity, and automobile engineering are dead on. For instance, in the real world, cars are designed not to explode after a collision. What is off?

7. Shell Shock! Exploding Artillery Shells that Blow Straight Up

In the movies "artillery shells" blow up out of the ground where the pyrotechnics guy buried the charge. In real life, artillery shells are supposed to blow up overhead and rain deadly fragments down on everyone. Supposed to. In actuality, the technology to make shells reliably explode in the air is pretty modern. For most of the history of artillery, you had to guess the time of flight of your shell and set the fuze time accordingly. It was hard to do well, so a lot of shells augered into the earth and then blew up out of the ground like in the movies. The problem wouldn't be solved until the US and UK developed the proximity fuze in WWII. The proximity fuze wouldn't be widely disseminated until the Cold War. So even in most WWII movies, artillery shells blowing up out of the ground wasn't unusual at all.

8. The Sparking Bullet ... In real life, sparks do occur when you scrape steel or other hard metals on hard surfaces (such as brick) because little pieces of brittle materials are heated to glow and fly off. The problem here is that bullets are generally made of lead because it’s dense and soft, and you don’t want the bullets scarring the steel of the gun barrel.

In real real life a lot of commercial ammunition has a steel core in the middle of the copper jacketed lead slug. This is especially true with the cheap military surplus ammunition coming from Eastern Europe. If the guy in the movie is shooting an AK-47 or other machine gun, it could very well produce sparks. This is why Ommelanden has a magnet on the wall to test for steel core ammo that will chew up their backstops (and make nice sparks when it does it).

9. Sound Travels in Space ... For instance, in space the hero shouldn’t be able to shout out instructions to the other astronauts from a spot several yards away.

While it is true that you shouldn't be able to hear space ships flying around, most space suits have these things called radios that let you talk to other astronauts just fine.

See don't you feel enlightened? Aren't I so smart?