Just saw The Incredible Hulk, the new and better one. Fun enough, but cause for yet one more lament on the ignorance of movie-makers with regard to physics. Listen, I’m not even critiquing the ridiculous supposition that “gamma” radiation could somehow transform a biological organism and not kill it outright. That comes from way back in comics history, and I’m happy enough to have the character of the green one that I will keep my mouth shut.
But there was this one scene. When Banner is on the table in the lab seeking a cure, and is deliberately shocked into becoming the Hulk. We are shown the support column of the lab table crumpling under the added mass.
Okay, enough already. Where did the mass COME from? It has to either be transferred from other mass or created from energy. That’s what it MEANS to say energy/mass can neither be created nor destroyed, a basic tenet not merely of physics but of existence. (We are not, by the way, very good at creating mass from energy so far, though it is theoretically possible).
So where does Banner gain all the mass required to be the Hulk? If it were somehow almost magically created from energy, temperatures would be freezing for miles around. Is it created from the surrounding air?
Even setting aside the problems of transmutation and allocation that would be involved, let’s just look at that least preposterous notion. At sea level, 22.4 liters of air weighs just over an ounce. Suppose Banner to weigh 170 pounds (a deal heavier than he looked in the movie), and the Hulk to weigh 770 pounds (no doubt a ridiculously low estimate), we have 600 pounds of new weight to account for. Therefore there would be 16 times 22.4 times 600 liters of air to be replaced. You can do the math, but I get 193,440 liters of air required, or 193.44 cubic meters—a volume that is roughly 18 feet on a side, or all of the air in the room and more.
Wouldn’t there have been a thunderclap? Why wasn’t everyone gasping in a vacuum?
Okay, okay, I know the glaring misconception was already implicit in the comic books. But the confounded movie didn’t have to rub my nose in it by showing that crumpling support.
I say again, I WANT to believe in these superheroes. Which is precisely why it bugs me for story-tellers to so blithely ignore such questions. Help thou my unbelief, oh ye film-makers.
Tags: Hulk
Perhaps that is the problem of jumping from sketch to film. But on the other hand, there are no rules for this kind of thing, are there? What makes it ok for magical realists to create what they do. And Picasso, what about that? Is it the topic that demands certain fidelity to science. When is it ok to break the laws of realism, and when is it not?
I’m of the opinion that it’s due to the name change. David Banner is a pretty light weight name…easy to throw around, and easy to set on a lab table with no ill effects. But once your name changes to the Incredible Hulk, well, you see what happens. That name carries a lot of weight in some circles.
Hey, d-ashes, that’s funny and I love it. Dear brd: As the politicians say, I’m glad you asked me that question. As a matter of fact, I think there ARE, if not rules, at least excellent principles for this kind of thing. I think one difference is consistency. The magical realists know what they are doing. They do not so much violate reality as offer an alternate reality. (I know at least one modern American novelist, Donald Harington, who may fairly be described as a magical realist—indeed, he was doing it BEFORE the other guys). It is hard not to feel that the movie-makers put the scene in, not because of a profound sense of wonder, but because they were ignorant of simple physics.
A good example that I have used to address this point before may be found in the wonderful John Cheever story, “The Enormous Radio.” The behavior of the radio in that story is not possible, physically speaking. But Cheever does not pose the radio as a marvel of science, as the comix and movies pose the Hulk. It is very clearly a literary device, reflecting a profound truth of human nature.
He is not, in other words, trampling physics out of ignorance (though I do not suppose him to have been highly literate, scientifically speaking). In other words, his reverence for truth shines through.
Exactly what profundity of insight may the movie-makers be said to have been aiming for in that scene? It seems pretty clear to me that they were going for a cheap wow and acting out of ignorance.
So the principle, for me, is this: I feel that genuine artists usually show reverence for the world as it is, and only contradict a part of that reality in order to give greater insight into another part of it.
I hope it is clear that I do not expect all writers to know physics. But I feel that a certain respect for things-as-they-are is likely to reduce egregious errors like the one in the movie. One may at least know what one does not know, according to Socrates. Nor do I object to what we somewhat stupidly refer to as “mindless entertainment” (not really any such thing). Nevertheless, in the absence of insight, my default expectation is physical accuracy at least.
This is my world too, and I do not grant the artists I care about an entirely free hand. Openness and responsiveness are possible without throwing up one’s hands helplessly and declaring that anything goes.
So I would say.
Also, wasn’t cubism supposed to be a conglomerate of views, each blended into the whole? In that sense, the paintings worked on a logical and physical level. Many different views that each add to a perceptive reality of god knows how many exposures to a subject. Each separate view was complete and logical in itself, and then the melding of all the separate views gives you a sense of the whole experience of the subject. Blah blah, I’m probably being obvious, but I like this idea that there’s got to be some logic to the magic, even if it’s magic. Even the very old man with enormous wings had fleas and lice in the wings. Oh, the details!
If memory serves, this question of appearing and vanishing mass was something that the folks at Marvel attempted to address in the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, a series of comics that featured origins, histories, statistics, and pseudo-scientific explanations of characters’ powers and abilities. It’s not only the Hulk who posed this diliemma—there’s also Giant-Man: Where does his mass come from? And what about Ant-Man: where does all his mass go? (Giant-Man and Ant-Man are the same guy, too, God bless comics.)
The explanation most commonly proffered was that, koff koff, mass was drawn from (when characters grew) or shunted to (when characters shrunk) another dimension.
This explanation, as you can imagine, raises more questions than it answers, and so as far as I know was rarely addressed in the comics themselves. At some point someone more adept in the pseudosciences may have given it another go, but if so I haven’t read it.
Reading that explanation as a kid taught me the meaning of “shunt,” so it has that going for it.
I still haven’t seen the new Hulk! I need to.
Professor Fury, your knowledge is always a delight. In an odd way, the clumsy attempt to account for the vagaries of mass is reassuring. At least somebody recognized there was a problem.
Yeah, have often thought of Giantman/Antman in this connection (Pym, is it? Henry Pym?). Suppose it was seeing the error in the movie that triggered me to finally say something. Is it depressing that I don’t feel it to be worthwhile critiquing the comic books? Do I EXPECT them to be dumb?
Naaahh. There’s just so MANY of them, and they all do it.
And—again, oddly—I would accept the shunted-in-time explanation. At least they would be TRYING to explain. And time is more nearly fair game, since we do not have a very good understanding of it. One may suggest time-travel without violating what we know of physics (though it does rather stretch our current understanding).
“More adept in the pseudosciences.” I like that a lot. Laughter is the best corrective.
Yup, Henry “Hank” Pym. He was also Yellowjacket, Goliath, and, briefly, Doctor Pym, Scientific Adventurer.
Just ruminating here, but I’m thinking of the fact that the mass-shunt is a Marvel-specific explanation; I don’t know if DC had one for its size-changing characters like the Atom (who could control his size and density separately, so that he could hit like a ton of bricks while at 6-inches tall). The physics problems that you note in your post were actually made a major part of the plot in Gail Simone’s recent All-New Atom, in which all of the title hero’s mucking about with physics had wrecked the laws of nature—screwed up time, letting demons from alternate dimensions in, etc.
(And I think there’s a Waid or Morrison issue of JLA featuring the Atom where the League gets shrunk down to subatomic size—smaller than an oxygen atom, someone finally realizes, so what are they breathing? “Don’t think about it,” is the Atom’s advice, which seems to be a nod to the genre’s general refusal to think of such things.)
I say critique away. Expecting superhero comics to be dumb is part of how we’ve gotten into our present fix of drowning in a glut of bad superhero comics.
Yeah, I’ve had conceptual difficulties with regard to the Atom, too. A good example of the problem occurs in The Dark Knight Strikes again (a gn which manages to be both lame AND overblown, a remarkable feat), when, during an assault on an energy complex to free the Flash, the Atom “[bellysurfs] an electron” to escape. He is presented as anatomically normal, but comparable in size to the electron he rides. So what about the electrons in his body? What size are they? For that matter (this point may not matter to very many people, but I aint very many people), since we have established that from our point of view electrons may be regarded as either wave-functions or particles, depending on the situation, why is the electron represented as a hard little sphere? And since a photon of light is big enough to blast an electron out of position, what is the Atom SEEING with?
The “don’t think about it” strategy is cute, but nowhere near as skillful as Alan Moore’s knowledgeable play with the outmoded concept of “phlogiston” (which I have referred to in another post). Moore revisits a moment of scientific history, and shows himself well acquainted not merely with physics, but with the development of physics. And I have trouble with any work of art that tries to solve inconsistencies by ignoring them, by recommending that the audience not think about it. Rather like one of Sarah Palin’s winks, as far as substance or insight is concerned. Isn’t one of the more powerful functions of art to CAUSE us to think about it?
Antman/Giantman, the Atom, even the incredible shrinking man, all violate a basic principle, the principle of scaling. There are abstract theoretical objects which feature infinite scaling (we call them fractals), but nowhere in the universe have we ever found any object or phenomenon which features perfect and infinite scaling. Scaling works to a degree, within certain limits, but no process in nature can be repeated infinitely. Sooner or later there is a change of state, and different behaviors emerge. Water changes to ice. Matter can be heated only so far before it becomes plasma. And so on.
Are we a scientific age or a bullshit age? Well, okay, maybe the answer is too easy. To me we seem to belong to an age which vaunts itself as scientific, and which uses the trappings of science as earlier ages used the trappings of religion, but in which there is little real sophistication about the actual nature of scientific reasoning or evidenc
The thing is, if this stuff is an accurate description, and you consider yourself to care about the nature of reality, you can’t just ignore it.
Take this from the third of the Die Hard movies, for example (Die Hard with a Vengeance?). John McClain (wow, I never noticed how close that was before), is barrelling down a tunnel on top of a truck going 45 mph just barely ahead of a flood of incoming water. He grabs a metal escape ladder just before the water overtakes the truck. Hooray! Only—
Any of YOU want to volunteer to hit a steel ladder at 45 mph?
Addenda: I referred to the theory of phlogiston as “outmoded.” The term “outmoded” suggests fashion, and is sloppy. The theory of phlogiston was not retired because it became unfashionable, but because it was proven incorrect. It was only possible to credit phlogiston so long as humans did not have enough information to tell that it was incorrect.
And just so you’ll know I am aware I make mistakes too: In my third novel, Living in Little Rock with Miss Little Rock, I gave a character, Coleman, agina. I had Coleman taking digitalis for his angina. As any medical doctor can tell you, digitalis will kill an angina sufferer in short order. The editor did not catch it, and my medical friends did not point this out till after the book was published, so my shame and error are visible for all to see.
Wow, Jack. That was a beautiful true confession in your last comment. I must confess that the misspelling of the first use of your ailment got me thinking in a whole other realm, but the next sentence clarified.
This has been an interesting discussion. One that took me two or three tries to read through. This is a problem that is more present in the comix/sci-fi realm, but exists everywhere. I am reading through Atlas Shrugged right now and am uncomfortable with this area of things. She saves herself with lack of specificity, but still, the implausibility is less than satisfying literarily.
One of the sci-fi moments from the movies that my husband and I hate is from ET when the little helpless outer space visitor is being secreted off by bicycle. Someone is hot on their heels (I forget) and voila, they can fly all of the sudden. If little ET could do this, why take a two wheeled taxi?
With the Hulk, I think you are going to have to accept the extra-dimensional explanation or give up that character entirely. Maybe with Giant/Ant man you could assume that the mass is being stored somewhere and redistributed when moving from form to form. Barack would love this and so do I.
Actually, BRD, I have a third strategy besides either giving up the character or accepting the shunt explanation, a strategy in which I am already engaged: I accept the character but complain loudly about the inconsistencies.
Your witty allusion to redistribution, however, gives me another idea. Perhaps when the Hulk bulks up from Banner, suddenly a dozen morbidly obese people become skinny. Or a dozen steroid-pumped body-builders become ectomorphic striplings.
In ET, what bothered me even more than the bicycles was what appeared to me a completely disfunctional body form. How did that thing get around? The body type was not one that evolution might have produced to suit a really unusual niche. It is hard to imagine ANY environment in which that waddling upright unshelled turtle would have been functional.
I felt Spielberg went for cute at the expense of the credible.
Hope it is apparent in my comments that I am not, like some prissy stereotype, demanding that story-tellers know everything. It is just that I feel honest story-telling requires an attitude of respect to the facts and plausibilities. One may err from ignorance, but one cannot be wilfully ignorant and then use that ignorance as a defense for errors.
Total Recall is another movie example of egregious lack of understanding: (1) Mars has roughly 3/8 the surface gravity of Earth. Nowhere in the movie is this acknowledged or is the prevalent Earth-normal gravity explained away. (2) You’re raised in a transparaent pressurized dome which can be shattered by bullets, but the citizens do not have a practically automatic inhibition against firing projectiles? (3) At the end, the couple is nearly exploded by vacuum. Putting aside the unlikelihood that anyone could sustain such damage and recover, there are two preposterous notions—that an object the size of a planet could have a core of ice, and that the entire atmosphere could be restored in a matter of minutes without the expenditure of enough energy to turn the crust to plasma.
My colleagues in physics who wish to enjoy the movie anyway point out that all this may be merely an induced virtual reality, and not Mars at all. Two problems with that explanation, for me. One, I don’t buy it. Two, even if I did buy it, it just pushes the question back a level. If the virtual reality explains the discrepancies, and the movie-makers are aware of them, why don’t they note the discrepancies, use them as clues?
While thinking about this issue, I thought about H.G. Wells and War of the Worlds. I was reminded that the Martians in his book has developed their advanced technology without the use of wheels.
I do like it when writers attempt to leave certain basic presuppositions, scientific or otherwise, behind and then develop a culture or creature that exists in that new framework. It is especially nice when it serves a purpose of commentary on existing social conditions. (Was Wells really making commentary on British colonization of Africa?)
One of my favorite sci-fi books is LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness where standard sexuality is not eliminated but allowed to find dual expression in a single being. When these kinds of things are done poorly, it is very grating. But when done well, it is oh so good.
By the way, I think that Spielberg created ET like he did so that he could include yet another scene where the contents of a refrigerator could be spilled on on the kitchen floor.
brd: Yeah, Left Hand of Darkness is good. I always wondered why, if the Martians were so advanced, they had never thought about germs. Didn’t occur to me to wonder about the wheels thing.
Love your line about the refrigerator spilling on the floor.
hey, a little late to the party, i know, but in addition to prof fury’s comments on shunting, couldn’t you say that mass all comes from hammerspace? Which isn’t a marvel-specific phenomenon…