Elliot's Physics In Film Blog

At the climax of the movie Contact, Ellie is chosen to go through the new space traveling machine. Right before her trip, she starts a timer on her watch. As Ellie travels at close to the speed of light, we see from her perspective a long trip in which she travels through space and ends up on an extraterrestrial beach, where she is greeted by her dead father (or alien dressed as her dad, I'm not really sure). When she returns back to Earth, she checks her watch which reads that 18 hours have passed. However, she soon realizes that in the perspective of everyone else, the spacecraft "failed" and she fell straight through the device's rings into the ocean. How did this happen you ask? The twin paradox. The producers, however, got it slightly wrong. What should have happened is the people on Earth should have experienced a longer wait for Ellie's return, and Ellie should have felt like she was only gone for a short time. This is because time dilation affects all cl

      If you have seen any of the Fast and Furious movies, then you would know that they are filled with ridiculous stunts. If you have seen the whole franchise, though, then you have probably noticed that the group of thuggish street racers, inexplicably become somewhat of trained, super-agent-like, fighting machines. By the seventh movie in the series, of course, the crew basically goes from street racing for money, to becoming a super team, pulling off insanely ridiculous missions.   In Fast and Furious 7, Dom( Vin Diesel) and his crew take a trip to Abu Dhabi to recover a speeddrive. The only problem is they have to steal it from a billionaire's skyscraper penthouse. They gain access to the billionaire's house by attending his party, but like always, things go wrong. A commotion of fist fighting, and gunfire errupt, and  Dom and Brian( Paul Walker), who are in desperate need for an escape plan, figure their only option is to drive out of the skyscraper into another. Using