Good,+Bad,+and+Ugly+Physics

=Good Physics= [] In the movie "When in Rome" there are coins tossed into a fountain found in Rome. All the coins that are thrown into the fountain sink. They sink because their densities are larger than the density of water. Copper which is the main component of a penny has a density 7.81 X 10³ kg/m ³ compared to water that has a density of 1.00 X 10³ kg/m³. Knowing these densities that explains why a penny will sink in water.

Bad Physics
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At the end of "Star Wars IV", Luke Skywalker destroys the Death Star. The death star created a large noise when it exploded. This would be impossible because sound waves have to travel through a medium. Since space is a vaccume that means that there is not a medium such as air for the sound wave to travel through. Having no medium for the wave to travel through that means that no sound could be produced. This means that the Star Wars movie was not an accurate portrayal of what would actually happen in space when a death star explodes.

[|__http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUtbfZh2hus__]

In the movie “Speed” there is a scene where a bus flies across a huge gap in the highway it is traveling on. This is bad physics because there is no angle at which the bus is being projected by. Therefore it would have never been able to make it across the gap. For example, lets say the gap in the road is 50 ft or 15.24 meters. Lets also say that the bus is traveling 70 miles per hour or 31.29 meters per second when being projected and then when it lands it is traveling 55 miles per hours or 24.58 meters per second. If you were to calculate the time it took to travel across this gap you would use the formula: d= (vf + vi)t/2 and rearrange it to solve for time: t= 2d/(vf + vi) you would find that it would take 0.55 seconds to travel across the gap. Knowing this you can take the formula: d= vi*t + ½at ², you would find that vertically the distance you would fall would be 1.5 meters. In the movie the two sides of the roads were even and if the bus was to jump across this gap it would have fallen 1.5 meters. This means that the bus would have crashed into the side of the other road, not making it across safely as it did in the movie.