Hollywood Physics

"but my experience is many of the students believe what they see on the screen."

I don't find this hard to believe at all. Look at the way history has been changed by Hollywood.

Ficticious tales loosely based on history intermixed with imaginative tales has been ongoing since long before Homer. The problem really isn't the tales, it is that people believe the tales to be historical and the authors of the tales present them as historical facts. The authors typically are not sound historians and do not understand the concept of historical facts, they understand what entertains the common man and earns them their keep, e.g. William Shakespeare. I am sure that many people in the 16th and 17th centuries believed Richard III or Henry V to be historically accurate, probably even Romeo and Juliet. Hollywood just presents these tales in a different media, and many more tales get published to many more people. I think the issue is not that movies make people stupid, more over that the laziness of lower level educators means these people were not adequately informed to begin with and fell back on the only source of information available to them.

"The problem really isn't the tales, it is that people believe the tales to be historical and the authors of the tales present them as historical facts. "

And that is the point. And the authors or narriators who say this enough times, the audience and themselves begin to believe it true.

Sounds like some dictators of country's. "propaganda"

And some don't have to be dictators

Bah humbug!

Next thing you know, the'll be telling us that a shotgun which gives the user a firm recoil won't throw a man through a plate glass window when he's shot! .

Still it was was very kind of those nice Americans to get that Enigma machine and break the code for us...

GRRRRRR! Check out this thread!

http://cr4.globalspec.com/thread/3889/Anyone-See-the-Movie-Deja-Vu

(Actually, I think I reference the movie physics site here as well)

some people call that entertainment? For one to sit though it you have to literally let you mind go blank.

On a somewhat related subject, were some movies come from. One has to stay away from sci-fi books. As interesting as they use to be for me growing up. These are written by actual scientist, physicist and engineers. They take the truth and twist it for reading entertainment.

Its worse, trying to remember the whether you learned or if it came from a scifi book.

(stop reading scifi)

And about the Enigma machine... your welcome

I was commentating to my self about the sad state of affairs on TV regarding the quality of entertainment then I noticed a category "What I learned from the Movies".

So knowing that life problems do not get resolved in a couple of hours and the artistic rather than factual quality of the content, what is the actual learning accomplished here, and where is it applied?

I used to favor SCIFI and martial arts entertainment along side of educational. Now some politics with financial news along side of educational is preferable. I wonder or not, where the SCIFI went wrong. I think it was when the artistic license of the set designer let them start using static electricity devices to perform a function. The only electronic spark based functional piece of equipment I have ever seen and handled was my Grandpa's Ham Radio "Spark Gap Transmitter". That was a sheer home made mechanical piece of history that probably wound up in the scrap heap when he passed on.

Do you know of other Electronic Spark operated machinery that actually performs real work? I do not mean that buzzy medical therapy machine of the last century's 1920's either.

Check out Myth Busters on the Discovery Channel. Their mission is to debunk Hollywood FX and urban myths. Great Show.

OK! Just to prove it's not just Hollywood, take at look at this completely unrealistic car chase.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2Zf5zSAwzw

This has got to be second best only to Bullet! And it's French!