Thursday, October 27, 2016

Kicking "Angels and Demons" while it's down

First, the ever entertaining Cinema Sins:

Now for some science. Let's assume that the stolen vial contained 1 gram of antimatter. Then, the explosion would release $E = mc^2 = (0.002) \times (3 \times 10^8)^2 = 1.8 \times 10^{14}$ Joule. At 4.184 petajoule per megaton of TNT equivalent, that is an explosion of roughly 43 kiloton.

(The more observant readers will notice that there's two grams in the energy computation. That's one gram each matter and antimatter.)

The operational ceiling of helicopters is around 25,000 ft, but the helicopter piloted by Ewan McObi-Wan Kenobi is nowhere close to that altitude when he jumps. An air burst of 43 kiloton even at say 10,000 ft would create a lot more damage than shown in the movie. (For comparison, Hiroshima's burst was at the yield-optimized height of 2,000 ft and with a yield of about 15 kt.)

So Ewan McThe Ghost Writer would probably be a carbonized carmelengo rather than a usurper to the Vatican throne. And probably so would the faithful in St. Peter's square and the Cardinals in Busch Stadium The Sistine Chapel.

- - - - Fait divers - - - -

Here's the page that CERN put up to address the errors in the movie.

Nikolaj Lie Kaas, who plays the assassin, plays the corrupt CEO of the energy company in the recent Danish series "Follow The Money." I guess he's typecast as the sociopathic type now.

I claim extra nerd points for using RStudio to do the computations (was already open; it's pretty much always open these days):