Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics by Tom Rogers

Author:Tom Rogers
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-fiction, History, Humour, Science
ISBN: 9781402210334
Publisher: Sourcebooks Hysteria
Published: 2007-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

It’s hard to imagine that an object falling from a height of 1 mile would create the equivalent of a gigantic nuclear bomb blast—but then it wouldn’t. The blast would be worse than an exploding bomb. A falling 15-mile-diameter disk would act like a gargantuan piston. Air underneath would be forced sideways out of the gap between the piston and the ground, forming a horizontal blast wave in the process. A nuclear bomb releases energy upward as well as horizontally, but it’s the horizontal energy that destroys cities and countryside. The falling saucer would waste little of its destructive energy in the vertical direction. The drop would mostly unleash energy in a horizontal blast wave.

The air velocity out the gap would be equal to the downward velocity of the saucer times the ratio of the saucer’s area to the area of the gap at the saucer’s perimeter (assuming that the air underneath acted as though it were incompressible). As the saucer fell, the gap would get smaller and smaller. When the saucer was 0.25 miles above the ground, the area of the saucer would be fifteen times as large as the area of the gap. If the saucer were falling at about half the terminal velocity of a sky diver, sixty miles per hour (97 kph), the horizontal wind coming out of the gap would be 900 miles per hour (1450 kph).These velocities are easily comparable to those of the Hiroshima nuclear blast13. True, air is compressible and so the wind will be lower, but the gravitational potential energy of the spaceship that is not converted into wind speed will be converted into elevated pressure and temperature beneath the spaceship, both of which cause damage.

Make the same calculation at a height of 100 feet, and the area of the saucer would be 198 times as large as the area of the gap. The wind velocity would be nearly 12,000 miles per hour (19,300 kph)—an impossibly high number. Obviously, instead of the extreme wind speeds, air would now be compressed to very high pressures, attaining high temperatures in the process. Combustibles under the saucer would likely ignite and blast a high-speed wall of fire out the sides of the gap. Unlike a nuclear blast radiating in all directions from a point source, the saucer blast wave would occur along its 47.1-mile perimeter and be focused in a horizontal direction. The effect would devastate a much wider area than an equivalent nuclear bomb blast.

Okay, the saucer would probably tilt as it fell, but if it’s only 1 mile off the ground, the tilt would be less than seven degrees. If it fell from a height of, say, 15 miles, the tilt could approach ninety degrees, but then the ship would also have fifteen times as much potential energy. Besides, if the ship tilted as it fell, the first side to touch the ground would block air flow, meaning that airflow out the elevated side would be higher than if the ship did not tilt.

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