When you get right down to it, there really aren’t that many ways one can generate electricity. The most common way to do it, burning stuff, is part of a tradition that goes back all the way to the beginning of the human race, when our ancestors used fire for warmth. Nowadays instead of felling a tree and setting it alight in our living room, we pump oil out of the depths of the earth, burn it, use the warmth this generates to evaporate water which in turn drives a turbine connected to an electrical generator, transport the electricity hundreds of kilometres to its destination where it is converted back into heat using large resistors. Clearly, technology has made our lives much simpler.

A far more recent arrival on the energy market is wind energy, traditionally used in places where mechanical energy of some sort was need. However, with the invention of the steam engine and the realization that mechanical energy too could be extracted from the better understood process of burning stuff, wind energy fell out of grace. Recently however, it has been working on a comeback.

In wind energy’s absence a new form of energy made its entrance; nuclear power or fission to be precise. Nuclear fission and humanity got off on a bad start. A period in which humanity slowly figured out that the nice glowing quality of radium actually meant it was a supremely unsuitable material for use in paints, toothpaste and food supplements made sure radioactivity was omitted in the top ten most popular physical processes of the day.

Three nuclear explosions, two detonated by America and one by Russia, didn’t help matters either. And then there is the matter of nuclear waste, which will continue to glow long after humanity’s last light bulb has been extinguished.

However, most of these arguments are already pretty old, and are ageing further at a rapid pace. We are getting better and better at storing nuclear waste, and newer reactors produce less and less of the stuff, where older reactors never produced a lot of it to begin with. Also, modern reactors don’t do a Chernobyl, but rather sabotage their own nuclear reaction when they overheat.

So nuclear power has already grown to be quite a mature piece of technology, with more progress on the horizon still. Meanwhile, in the atmosphere, CO2 molecules are joined by more and more of their brethren each year in their holy quest to drive humans of the face of the Earth. Facing this environmental problem already is extremely challenging without placing additional restrictions on possible solutions.

Yes, ‘green power’ has made a lot of progress as well, but it is by no means perfect. Nuclear power and various forms of ‘green’ electricity all have their strengths and weaknesses, and anyone claiming some of these beat others on all counts is lying plain and simple. Also it’s notoriously difficult to predict with any accuracy what new technologies the future will bring. Nuclear power and different forms of ‘green’ power all promise a bright future filled with breakthroughs. Which of these will become reality and which will turn out to be mirages is something only time can tell.

If there ever was a point at which ending nuclear research made sense, then it lies in the past. Killing nuclear power now isn’t good for anything and, more importantly, will needlessly make our attempts at finding a solution to our climate troubles even harder than it already is. Lets get through this climate crisis on normal difficulty first, then when the next crisis comes round we can try hard.

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.

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.

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.