| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
Armageddon: Asteroid Splitting Doesn’t Work
Armageddon is a perennial favorite target for so-called “nerd-gassing” among the geekerati. Its Wikipedia entry cites at least 168 scientific errors, over a running time of 150 minutes. That’s more than one howler per minute. This is why Bad Astronomer Phil Plait often lists it as his choice for the worst science in film, detailing the most egregious errors in a classic 2001 blog post.
Here’s a sampling. The opening narration grossly underestimates the energy of that dinosaur-killing asteroid that hit Earth 65 million years ago. Objects in space tend to be shaped like spheres because of gravity, yet the asteroid is shown to be jagged with jutting spikes — plus there’s a mysterious vapor. A gravity scene aboard a Russian space station gets the direction of gravity wrong. Oh, and at one point, a military leader refers to NASA as “Nassau.”
About the only scientific fact the movie got right is that asteroids do actually exist.
And the nerd-gassing continues. A new analysis by a group of graduate students at the University of Leicester reveals that all other howlers aside, the nuclear bomb Harry detonates wasn’t nearly large or powerful enough to split an asteroid of that size.
