Professionals Annoyed By Entertainment

[BeerMug Paladin]

After reading some of the responses, and half-typing the below response, I think I understand what makes inaccuracies in entertainment unappealing to me. If the inaccuracy is present because it's in the service of a common cliche, then it's more likely to be grating. If the inaccuracy is present, but isn't of a nature that is commonly depicted, then I have an easier time considering it as an unintentional error or a creative liberty that I'm more willing to accept for the sake of the story.

Speaking of...

His sticking point was the plot-hook at the start, never again brought up or acknowledged, where the "neutrinos are mutating" and heating up the world causing the apocalypse.

I cannot possibly express the amount of things that are wrong with that concept. And I'm merely a mechanical engineer, not a particle physicist. *shudder*

I honestly don't think anyone went in to "2012" assuming it was going to be full of scientific rigour. It's one of those things you watch for the action setpieces and turn your brain off for the rest of it.

I always thought the neutrinos mutating line was because the writer read about and vaguely remembered neutrino oscillation and figured it could be used as a plot device to justify what was going on.

[Lord Torath]

I'm one of those it's hard to watch SciFi TV/movies with. Usually I can suspend my disbelief long enough to enjoy the movie, and only start poking holes in it afterward.

Regarding the whole Ant Man thing, "How it Should Have Ended" summed it up the best:
"How did you carry that 50-ton tank in your pocket?"
"You know how it goes: mass, molecules..."
"Convenience!"
"Convenience."

There are a couple of Stargate episodes that particularly bother me:

First, the one where they wormhole through the star, introducing heavy metals to the core, and shifting the light of the star orange minutes after the team arrives on planet. First off, stars are BIG. A few hundred (heck, even a few million) tons of heavy metals are not going to make a difference in a core that is 150,000 times more massive than Earth. If it did, the change would take 10,000 years or so to be noticeable (that's how long it takes light to get from the core to the surface). Unless it caused a catastrophic change, in which case, the star would probably go nova pretty quickly. Then the solution they propose is to launch a rocket laden with, I don't know, 'anti-heavy-metals' or something to react with the heavy metals and nullify their effects, into the sun. And those 'anti-metals' are somehow supposed to travel through the sun to the core?

The other one is a Stargate Atlantis episode where the native whale-like creatures predict a coronal mass ejection (really nasty solar flare) that was capable of wiping out all life on the planet. And this is a regular CME that erupts like clockwork every 1000 years (10,000 years? I forget). Because that's how stars work, apparently. And somehow life evolved super-quickly since the time the Ancients first arrived on the planet, since otherwise it's all going extinct every millennium (or ten). The solution to the problem was almost as bad. Coronal Mass Ejections apparently originate in extremely small areas on the surface of the star, ones that can be blocked by an oversized aircraft carrier. I guess that really just gets back to "writers don't know how big space is".

[Diceomancer]

Normally the inaccuracies don't bother me too much. CW's Flash is the exception. Examples:

We're going to have you run in a circle, hit you with a single very fast photon, and that will open a wormhole.

Describing a world-ending blackhole's energy as some not particularly large number of teraelectron volts. This is less than a joule.

Running very fast down a building toward the ground in order to avoid getting hurt.

Ultraviolet cold vision.

[factotum]

I'm one of those it's hard to watch SciFi TV/movies with. Usually I can suspend my disbelief long enough to enjoy the movie, and only start poking holes in it afterward.

For me it depends on how egregious I find the error and how entertained I am by whatever I'm watching. If I'm finding it a fun ride I probably won't notice or will ignore scientific cobblers. If I'm not enjoying myself so much errors become more glaring. That also applies to plot holes, incidentally--I know I enjoyed something when the obvious plot holes don't occur to me until I'm thinking about it later, rather than while I'm watching it!

[Imbalance]

Look, all I know is that when I was a kid, I had no reason to think that Mario might not be a real plumber. By the time I got into the industry, things were a lot different than I expected. Maybe codes had changed drastically, or maybe he had been forging prescriptions for a lot longer than anyone knows.

[monomer]

For me the most amusing example of a scientist's reaction was watching the original Jurrasic Park in the cinema - at the point where they extract the blood from the amber-trapped mosquito and then produce the DNA, the friend I was watching it with turned to me and said "there's more to it than that" - it's (roughly) what she was doing her PhD on at the time...

Relevant SMBC.

Going back to the original post, I'm a materials engineer, and truthfully, their super-alloys (Star Trek also has Tritanium) don't bother me in the slightest. If anything, they're a little backwards, since the actual direction we seem to be going is using carbon allotropes to make basically whatever we want. We already have large 2-d graphene sheets, balls, and tubes, and it is only a matter of time (decades, centuries, millennia, who knows?) before we can just synthesize ridiculously strong carbon structures to whatever shape we want.

The one thing that does bother me a bit more is for less futuristic shows when someone needs something super strong, they inevitably use titanium, which sounds a lot more impressive than steel, but really isn't the case.

[El'the Ellie]

I love sci-fi and can tolerate a fair bit of 'magic element x', but what really gets me is when there is a simply application of math/science that the writers just assume is mumbo jumbo.

My most recent aneurysm was over the Netflix series Another Life. Note: Do not watch Another Life. It's too bad to even laugh at as a bad show. (IMO)

Now there are plenty of things that this show did that caused me to rip clumps of my hair out, but the worst was when the co-main character is projecting sound to a mysterious object to see it's reaction. He tells his technicians to drop the frequency down to one Hertz per second. Ugh.

If you don't happen to know what a Hertz is, that's fine, since it's a kind of obscure unit of measure that means 'per second'. It's useful for measuring waves, like sound or light. One Hertz per second, however, is not a thing*. It's like they knew how to measure aspects of sound, they knew what a Hertz was, and just tacked on 'per second' anyway because audiences might think it sounds more science-y. That should be a literal crime.

*Ok, yes, I suppose literally you can have a meaningful measure of Hz/s. Like if you were increasing frequency at a fixed rate, you could describe it as +1Hz/second. They were not doing this.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Relevant SMBC.

Yet if anything bothers me in Jurassic Park it's not the DNA (which is relatively close to what I try to do with my life), it's more this other comic.

The science-babble is just there to give me a movie with dinosaurs eating modern humans. It's not wrong enough to inspire a whole new generation into spouting stupid nonsense at me, and it's not getting in the way of the flow of the movie. Yes, quite some time is spend on that DNA talk/ride, but the pacing works and there would have been something else that's not dinosaur carnage in that spot if the science-babble had not been available.

Being 5 movies in with only a single half-assed Stegosaurus attack representing team herbivore goring people, now that could be something I might care about on a bad day, but not magically old DNA.

[Wardog]

As a geologist by training (but not by profession):


* A pyroclastic flow has an average speed of about 100km/hr, and potentially up to 700km per hour, and has a temperature of up to around 1000 degrees C. So no, you can't outrun it. And if you get hit by it, you're toast.


Also, not a professional thing, but ever since I took up shooting as a hobby, I get really annoyed whenever I see characters in a movie waving guns around with their fingers on the trigger and without caring about who or what they point them at. (Also, the "guns click whenever they move" trope).

[DeTess]

I actually encountered something interesting that's kinda there opposite of the usual gripes of things being unrealistic by being too big or too powerful or too fast or whatever. I was reading a sourcebook for a sci-fi rpg (Jovian Chronicles, for those interested) and it provided a neat time-line for the technological developments, starting at our own and diverging in the late 1990's. One of the first major differences was the practical application of fusion power in late 2007. 4 years later this led to the first deployment of fusion-powered spacecraft, a kind of space-shuttle-like craft which could "easily hoist nearly twenty tons of payloads into low Earth orbit and return to land near their launching point".

Something about those numbers felt off to me, and it took only one quick google search to figure out what it was; Space-X's falcon 9 can lift 17 tons into low earth orbit (23 tons if it doesn't need to come back) and return to a location close to its launch point, all without the need of a fancy fusion-powered drive. Furthermore, the first falcon 9 launch took place in 2010, a year before those fusion-powered shuttles would take off (though the 17 tons to LEO is a configuration that only started flying a couple years later). For a change, a sci-fi writer ended up underestimating what could have been possible with the advanced tech introduced as part of the premise.

[gomipile]

I actually encountered something interesting that's kinda there opposite of the usual gripes of things being unrealistic by being too big or too powerful or too fast or whatever. I was reading a sourcebook for a sci-fi rpg (Jovian Chronicles, for those interested) and it provided a neat time-line for the technological developments, starting at our own and diverging in the late 1990's. One of the first major differences was the practical application of fusion power in late 2007. 4 years later this led to the first deployment of fusion-powered spacecraft, a kind of space-shuttle-like craft which could "easily hoist nearly twenty tons of payloads into low Earth orbit and return to land near their launching point".

Something about those numbers felt off to me, and it took only one quick google search to figure out what it was; Space-X's falcon 9 can lift 17 tons into low earth orbit (23 tons if it doesn't need to come back) and return to a location close to its launch point, all without the need of a fancy fusion-powered drive. Furthermore, the first falcon 9 launch took place in 2010, a year before those fusion-powered shuttles would take off (though the 17 tons to LEO is a configuration that only started flying a couple years later). For a change, a sci-fi writer ended up underestimating what could have been possible with the advanced tech introduced as part of the premise.

It could still be impressive if it does it with much less total launch mass. If that ends up making launches cheaper too, then it could be worthwhile.

I guess the implication is that it could re-launch very quickly, like a commercial aircraft. Which would also be impressive and potentially lucrative.

[deuterio12]

I actually encountered something interesting that's kinda there opposite of the usual gripes of things being unrealistic by being too big or too powerful or too fast or whatever. I was reading a sourcebook for a sci-fi rpg (Jovian Chronicles, for those interested) and it provided a neat time-line for the technological developments, starting at our own and diverging in the late 1990's. One of the first major differences was the practical application of fusion power in late 2007. 4 years later this led to the first deployment of fusion-powered spacecraft, a kind of space-shuttle-like craft which could "easily hoist nearly twenty tons of payloads into low Earth orbit and return to land near their launching point".

Something about those numbers felt off to me, and it took only one quick google search to figure out what it was; Space-X's falcon 9 can lift 17 tons into low earth orbit (23 tons if it doesn't need to come back) and return to a location close to its launch point, all without the need of a fancy fusion-powered drive. Furthermore, the first falcon 9 launch took place in 2010, a year before those fusion-powered shuttles would take off (though the 17 tons to LEO is a configuration that only started flying a couple years later).

How much does falcon 9 costs (including the fuel) compared to that sci-fi fusion rocket? If the fusion rocket was plain cheaper to build and/or consumed less/cheaper fuel, that alone would still be a pretty massive advantage.

For a change, a sci-fi writer ended up underestimating what could have been possible with the advanced tech introduced as part of the premise.

It's actually pretty common.

In particular no sci-fi writer expected small computers to be everywhere nor data storage/transter to be so efficient. A specific example, some sci-fi novel where there were already human colonies in other planets, and an elite spy boasts about a super-expensive storage device that fits inside his boot and could...Fit hundreds of megabytes! While nowadays pens the size of a finger able to hold multiple gigabytes are handed out as promotional gifts by companies everywhere.

Cyberpunk writers thought we would need to drill holes inside our body to connect cables to use advanced technology but wireless and touch controls are where is at it now.

Steampunk thought we would be relying on big slow steam engines but we developed a bunch of better and lighter engines since then.

Or mobile phones in particular.

[factotum]

Also, not a professional thing, but ever since I took up shooting as a hobby, I get really annoyed whenever I see characters in a movie waving guns around with their fingers on the trigger and without caring about who or what they point them at. (Also, the "guns click whenever they move" trope).

I've seen a video of two guys playing around at a shooting range, and one of them points his fully loaded and ready to fire pistol at his friend as a joke. The range security guy immediately takes the gun away and escorts them both off the premises.

[Brother Oni]

Also, not a professional thing, but ever since I took up shooting as a hobby, I get really annoyed whenever I see characters in a movie waving guns around with their fingers on the trigger and without caring about who or what they point them at. (Also, the "guns click whenever they move" trope).

Interesting factoid I picked up while browsing reddit - apparently during the 80s and 90s, trigger discipline in the US military was generally 'if your safety's on, it's fine to have your finger on the trigger and your weapon pointed at someone'.

After the early 2000s, it was much more in line with current 'finger's always off the trigger unless you're about to shoot and never point your weapon at something unless you plan to kill it'.

Example:

Spoiler: SEAL Team 8 operator teaching USS Theodore Roosevelt's Marine detachment how to board a ship, 1991

Show

[Tvtyrant]

I've seen a video of two guys playing around at a shooting range, and one of them points his fully loaded and ready to fire pistol at his friend as a joke. The range security guy immediately takes the gun away and escorts them both off the premises.

My revolver has a safety, is single action and I keep the top chamber empty to prevent misfire, and I still wouldn't feel okay pointing it at someone. The chances of something going wrong is low but the possible consequences are too large to be comfortable with.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Good thing hobbies got mentioned.

It somehow annoys me that in for instance No Country For Old Men a guy jumps into a river and suddenly he looks like he's wearing a life jacket/floatation device under his shirt and he knows he should swim feet first with his whole body as high up in the water as possible and with no trying to stand up in the current.

Now the badly hidden floatation vest is one thing, but a character actually being competent and knowing how to real world do something, giving the right example, that should be something I'd cheer on. I think the error might stem from why those characters are suddenly competent: this was the easiest and safest way to shoot the scene, said the stunt coordinator, so this desert dweller obviously knows his white water rescue. Maybe that's why I can't stand this guy knows something I know as well.

And it's not like this is a secret technique or something that only the pros know, it's basic competence. But it's basic competence in a field I wouldn't expect most characters having studied. But in reality, if they had gone rafting just ones with a good operator they'd have a good reason to know this. So it's really unreasonable elitism from my side.

(In contrast: Deliverance may be better known for its brutal hard R-rated uhhh banjo dueling, let's keep it at that, but the white water action is mostly believable as something a group of complete idiots with no instructor would do. I find that strangely satisfying.)

[Eldan]

I actually encountered something interesting that's kinda there opposite of the usual gripes of things being unrealistic by being too big or too powerful or too fast or whatever. I was reading a sourcebook for a sci-fi rpg (Jovian Chronicles, for those interested) and it provided a neat time-line for the technological developments, starting at our own and diverging in the late 1990's. One of the first major differences was the practical application of fusion power in late 2007. 4 years later this led to the first deployment of fusion-powered spacecraft, a kind of space-shuttle-like craft which could "easily hoist nearly twenty tons of payloads into low Earth orbit and return to land near their launching point".

Something about those numbers felt off to me, and it took only one quick google search to figure out what it was; Space-X's falcon 9 can lift 17 tons into low earth orbit (23 tons if it doesn't need to come back) and return to a location close to its launch point, all without the need of a fancy fusion-powered drive. Furthermore, the first falcon 9 launch took place in 2010, a year before those fusion-powered shuttles would take off (though the 17 tons to LEO is a configuration that only started flying a couple years later). For a change, a sci-fi writer ended up underestimating what could have been possible with the advanced tech introduced as part of the premise.

My favourite thing along those lines is when my friend showed me a Cyberpunk RPG sourcebook from the eighties, where on the one hand, they had brain implants that connected you to the Matrix, but also a cell phone weighing about four pounds. In the year 2000. Or maybe it was 2020.

[Khedrac]

It's actually pretty common.

In particular no sci-fi writer expected small computers to be everywhere nor data storage/transter to be so efficient. A specific example, some sci-fi novel where there were already human colonies in other planets, and an elite spy boasts about a super-expensive storage device that fits inside his boot and could...Fit hundreds of megabytes! While nowadays pens the size of a finger able to hold multiple gigabytes are handed out as promotional gifts by companies everywhere.

Cyberpunk writers thought we would need to drill holes inside our body to connect cables to use advanced technology but wireless and touch controls are where is at it now.

Steampunk thought we would be relying on big slow steam engines but we developed a bunch of better and lighter engines since then.

Or mobile phones in particular.

Steampunk isn't trying to be realisitic, it's trying to be fun.

My favourite thing along those lines is when my friend showed me a Cyberpunk RPG sourcebook from the eighties, where on the one hand, they had brain implants that connected you to the Matrix, but also a cell phone weighing about four pounds. In the year 2000. Or maybe it was 2020.

When it comes to RPGs getting their predictions of computers wrong the prize has to go to Traveller 1st Ed - computers weighing multiple tonnes than can only run 1 or 2 programs at a time (and not store any they are not running).

But to be fair, these (and anything similar from science fiction novels) are not viable examples of the issue for this thread - in most cases the authors are using the best knowledge available at the time of writing. Judging them by the years of experience and develpment since is unfair - a scientist may laugh at assumptions in a paper from 20+ years ago, but they don't ridicule them or go "that's just wrong" the way we are discussing in this thread. (E.g. Lord Kelvin calculated a maximum age of the earth based on the inside not having cooled to solid, he got the maths right but did not know about radioactivity and thus got the answer badly wrong; if you want to claim "that's just wrong" about a film set in his time then the assumption that the earth would stay hot from radioactivity would be the anachronism.)

[Liquor Box]

Pretty sure there are examples of forumites complaining when things happen in OotS that are not consistent with DnD rules.

[factotum]

But to be fair, these (and anything similar from science fiction novels) are not viable examples of the issue for this thread - in most cases the authors are using the best knowledge available at the time of writing.

Funniest example of this is an Edgar Allan Poe story I read which was supposedly set in the far future, where he'd basically just extrapolated (badly) from his own time; so people flew around in giant hot air balloons and ships were still sailing ships, but much bigger.

[Lord Torath]

Steampunk isn't trying to be realisitic, it's trying to be fun.

When it comes to RPGs getting their predictions of computers wrong the prize has to go to Traveller 1st Ed - computers weighing multiple tonnes than can only run 1 or 2 programs at a time (and not store any they are not running).

But to be fair, these (and anything similar from science fiction novels) are not viable examples of the issue for this thread - in most cases the authors are using the best knowledge available at the time of writing. Judging them by the years of experience and develpment since is unfair - a scientist may laugh at assumptions in a paper from 20+ years ago, but they don't ridicule them or go "that's just wrong" the way we are discussing in this thread. (E.g. Lord Kelvin calculated a maximum age of the earth based on the inside not having cooled to solid, he got the maths right but did not know about radioactivity and thus got the answer badly wrong; if you want to claim "that's just wrong" about a film set in his time then the assumption that the earth would stay hot from radioactivity would be the anachronism.)

In All the Wyers of Pern, the interstellar spaceships ran on DOS. But, as mentioned, predicting future technologies is hard.

[Radar]

It really depends on the movie. What I dislike the most is inconsistency. I can accept deviations from science for the sake of cool visuals or just a crazy premise of the setting (like for example political negotiations being decided through high-stakes mahjong matches), but once the ideas are set in place, you stick to them and their logical consequences. This goes for any kind of stories: SF, fantasy or whatever else.

People behaving like complete morons just to cover up some plot holes on the other hand... might be more realistic then I would ever want to admit. Still cringe-worthy though.

There's a version on youtube where he brings on the actual actor to play through the scene with him.

And as far as I'm concerned, Interstellar was horrendous. Like, they made a big to-do on making a movie where they paid attention to time dilation and working with scientists to get the look of a black hole right, mostly to get brownie points with nerdy reviewers, and then completely screwed up on science all over the rest of the movie.

Love transcends space and time indeed.

And this could have been easily salvaged with slight alteration of accents honestly. The sane interpretation is that love in not magical but it was important for actual communication. The hyper advanced humans/aliens could provide the means (gravity manipulation through time), but were unable to speak in a way modern humans would understand. Given the constrained channel of communication Cooper could only hope he would successfully reach out to his daughter because they uderstood each other so well. Also, Murph needed to have strong faith in her father in order to seek out all those hidden messeges. All that was possible due to love.

Instead, they went for sappy, cliche Hollywood sacharine fest.

But the moment that made me cringe the most was the very end. While the scene with the whole Cooper family was really strong in getting across just how much time passed, the "go save that poor defenceless women as a manly man" theme was nauseating. Hollywood ruined another great moment.


That being said, most of the movie is a real treat for a physicist. There are some deviations from reason (where are automatic remote probes? Why do they need to land in person everywhere?), but they are mostly there so that we have actual people having adventures instead of sitting in front of monitors sipping coffee, so I give it a pass. One of the neat bits of real science that even Neil deGrasse Tyson got a bit wrong were the waves on the water planet. The shape was exactly right, since those were not ordinary tidal waves: even, shallow sea and strong periodic forces result in cnoidal waves. Nonlinear wave equations are a bit obscure part of physics or mathematics, so I do not hold it against anyone.

Oh, and with such a crazy time dillation on that planet, they would be most likely fried by radiation coming from outside.

[factotum]

But the moment that made me cringe the most was the very end. While the scene with the whole Cooper family was really strong in getting across just how much time passed, the "go save that poor defenceless women as a manly man" theme was nauseating. Hollywood ruined another great moment.

Maybe I'm dumb, but I didn't get that from the ending? I got that he was going after Brand because of love, not because he had to save her, especially since the cutaway to her showed her doing absolutely fine.

[deuterio12]

Steampunk isn't trying to be realisitic, it's trying to be fun.

Maybe nowadays, but Steampunk started as the sci-fi for its age, when the steam engine was revolutionizing the world and people dreamed about what great steam-based systems would be invented next.

Then the internal combustion engine was invented and welp, there went out all those dreams.

Nowadays teampunk still survives on the basis of "what if" scenario where steam technology kept being developed and the internal combustion engine never came to be, but back when it started, their writers weren't doing it just for fun, they were also trying to predict how tomorrow's steambased civilization would be, and none imagined the more efficient internal combustion engine would be the correct answer.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Maybe nowadays, but Steampunk started as the sci-fi for its age,

In that context the term steampunk is confusing though. The name is a derivative from cyberpunk, a genre that didn't exist when Jules Verne wrote his books.

I admit, I don't know a proper term that you can call the stories from that time to avoid confusion, but steampunk as we know it is definitely a retro/alternate history movement.

[Gnoman]

It's also the franchise where, at different points in the *same episode* (Enterprise: Broken Bow, for those wishing to check it out), we have dialogue indicating the maximum speed of the ship is around 100c (Neptune and back in 10 minutes, a comment about travelling at 30 million kilometres per second when travelling at Warp 4.4), yet it will apparently only take four days to reach the Klingon homeworld!

I'm running a Prime Directive game right now, and using the TOS warp scale instead of the far faster system ADB included. Using canon distances, even Earth to Vulcan is a matter of weeks, or months for slow ships.

[hewhosaysfish]

In that context the term steampunk is confusing though. The name is a derivative from cyberpunk, a genre that didn't exist when Jules Verne wrote his books.

I admit, I don't know a proper term that you can call the stories from that time to avoid confusion

Scientific Romance?

[sktarq]

No, what really annoys me is scenes like Star Trek: Generations, where a missile with no obvious warp capability gets from the surface of a habitable planet to its sun in a matter of seconds--and when it hits the light seen by the people on the planet changes *instantly*. That's where trying to make everything look dramatic goes over the edge into ridiculous, IMHO. This is just a general problem with Star Trek writers generally having no idea of what distances are like in space.

I could swear the reason he did that was because if he shot a missile (which looks like an I or J class hobbyist rocket IIRC) that stopped the fusion reaction at the center of the star (which since it takes thousands of years for light to get out how the hell would a missile get in?) somehow (Lithium wouldn't do that)....the gravity from the star would turn off so the magic ribbon would now go in a different curve and he could catch a lift....the gravity turning off just hurt my brain...it is not like they were doing any technobabble to talk about gravity interfence or mass suppression or googlde-****-Newton's Constant-balderdash.

How did anyone think that even remotely made the slightest bit of sense??? That's not merely ineffective, but actively counterproductive to the entire purpose of the place.

So my relative works in Pirbright (in Biosafty level 4) ... guess who has issues with lots of labwork in positive pressure suits on tv's and in movies?
also she laughs at how bad the security is in those places...


and yes on youtube you can search for "scientist watches XXX" to get the same kind of reaction videos as the professional computer graphics, doctors, or lawyers do.

[truemane]

And that why fact-checks exist.

That's not what fact-checkers do. Fact checking is primarily a journalistic activity. Cinema only cares about facts insofar as someone involved in the production thinks it's worthwhile and has enough influence for their opinion to matter.

[factotum]

...the gravity turning off just hurt my brain...

I think that can be justified by saying that turning off fusion in the star would cause an immediate core collapse supernova, and a large portion of the star's mass would get blasted off into space, thus reducing the gravitational attraction of what's left. I seriously doubt the writer put that much thought into it, mind you!