Science on Television
A scene from the TV series The Sarah Conner Chronicles: One of the characters is lying on a table bleeding to death. The doctor looks around the room for a blood donor, and the mother volunteers. Sadly her blood-type, O negative, won’t do; the patient needs his own blood-type, and that happens to be AB.
There isn’t a lot of AB to go around, only one in two hundred people in America has it, so all seems lost. Then the son steps forward. He doesn’t care about the odds, and insists that he be tested. And by a small miracle he has the right blood-type. The patient survives.
Great fiction? Possibly. Well, not really to be honest, there is better television out there. The Science? Disastrous; because a small miracle is not nearly enough for a woman with blood-type O to have a child with blood-type AB. It simply can’t happen.
Sarah Connor and her son Jon. Do they even look alike?
What amazes me is that apparently no one, from the scriptwriters all the way to the actors, caught up on the mistake. A fix would have been easy; simply give both patient and son blood-type A or B, and everything works out again.
Science gone wrong is a recurring theme on television, and I’m not referring to the popular plot device here, but the way more popular plot ignorance. For all you scriptwriters out there; here follow two areas of science where you make a particularly large number of mistakes, with a focus on how to avoid them.
Electricity
You would think that, given the age we live in, everyone has a basic understanding of electricity. You would be wrong. According to Hollywood, electricity is something that lives in metal. Touching metal filled with electricity will cause pain and sparks. Touching metal filled with a lot of electricity will give you a sparkly death. Even when you don’t touch the metal, enough electricity can still cause sparks. In summary one can conclude electricity has a lot to do with sparks.
Science agrees with the Hollywood stance that electricity ‘lives’ in metal, but takes issue with the view that sparks are the central concept behind it. Rather, so science claims, electricity is something called ‘charge’ that moves from one point to another. If this charge cannot use your body to get in contact with the opposite charge, it won’t go through it. Birds have adopted this view as well, as it allows them to sit comfortably on power cables, without experiencing physical agony and death.
Jump Buffy! Before electricity from the power cable in the bathroom moves through the water on the floor, through your high heels, through your body to … err … somewhere (turns out in the next scene it was her hair). Also, sparks!
One last note to the scriptwriters: you may want to familiarize yourself with the concept of a ‘fuse’. All houses come equipped with them, but in the designs for your fictional houses they are often conveniently forgotten. Convenient for you that is, not so much for your characters – unless they want to use power outlets to kill bad guys (with sparks!).
Momentum
Everyone, even Hollywood, knows that if a fist, foot or bullet goes fast enough, it can blow an enemy through a wall. There is, however, a loophole that is often forgotten: your macho-display with throw you back with the same force, possibly through another wall. This might cause the building to collapse.
Assume for a moment that the building still stands, and that a new, stronger bad guy steps through either hole into the arena. Hollywood dictates that the force that threw the previous bad guy (and you) through a wall, might not be enough to do the same to the new bad guy. This is because this new bad guy is stronger you see, and uses all his strength to stick to the ground.
Science is looking hard for ‘stick-to-the-ground-muscles’ to back up this theory, but so far extensive research has yielded nothing.
However, a third camp, called nerds, offers an alternative explanation: Considering the possibility of a cyborg, genetically mutated to have all the different blood types at once and bio-engineered to use the electric field of the earth as a power source for its quantum-muscles, and accepting the wave-particle duality as true, it should be possible to draw enough power through the flux capacitors to create potential field equal but opposite to the incoming blow!
The nerds eagerly call for experimentation to back up their theory.