Ask Your Resident Physicist Questions

Ho boy. Hollywood physics is a rabbit hole that's always fun to go down. In case there are people who haven't seen The Last Jedi yet, I'll keep this as spoiler-free as I can and keep it general.
Hollywood, particularly when it comes to action thrillers and sci-fi movies, doesn't give a damn about physics. If it makes for an intense scene, it works for them. While I'm not bothered by these, I'll go ahead and list a few unrealistic things in Star Wars (though these can extend to any space-based movie):
-Space battles would be silent. Sound needs a medium to travel through, and space conveniently lacks any such medium.
-Spaceships suddenly changing direction would put insane g-forces on the pilots, but they often act unaffected by them.
-Why do all planets have Earth-like gravity and atmospheres?
-Faster-than-light travel would require infinite energy to achieve.
-What powers the Death Star's mega laser? On that topic, how does Starkiller Base contain the mass of a star in the volume of a planet?
-Lightsabers are a whole topic unto themselves. As they exist in the movies, they're (currently) impossible to build. Being cut/stabbed by one would be a lot more gruesome and fiery than shown.
-Specifically for The Last Jedi, the whole "tracking through light-speed" thing is a little odd. That's the only one that bugs me a little.
The list goes on, but I'll stop there. There was one scene in The Last Jedi with some particularly interesting physics.

Spoiler: That Interesting Scene

When Captain whats-her-face sent the Rebel cruiser through Snoke's flagship at light-speed. With our current understanding of relativity, a ship going that fast would have infinite mass and, therefore, infinite momentum. We'll keep it a little more realistic and say that the ship was almost to light-speed, which would still give the ship a huge amount of kinetic energy. Snoke's ship wouldn't just have a chunk broken off of it, the whole damn thing would be in ruins, with much of it being vaporized on impact.
Rang over.

 

The scenery. I live in a more rural area, so I'm used to seeing hills and fields covered in perfect snow. The lights everywhere are a nice touch, too.

 

I don't think my high school offered AP physics. We had Honor's physics (which I didn't take for some reason), and we had IB physics (which I didn't take because I wasn't in the IB program).

 

A bit of both, in a way. Instruments can always be improved, but if the Uncertainty Principal is true, then we can never build an instrument that gives us absolute precision on more than one measurements at a time. With time, we'll be able to bridge the gap between quantum randomness and classical order.

 

-Possibly. I'm an out-of-shape asthmatic, which means my adventures into the wilderness would likely have to be short.

-Normally, I'm the kind of guy who wants to know exactly what I'm getting myself into. That said, pleasant surprises are always welcome, but I like to be as surprise-free as I can help.

-Aside from the usual Hollywood physics shenanigans, I haven't looked that deeply into the Fast and Furious movies to find specific things to pick apart.

 

In a movie theater? Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
At home? I think one of the Jurassic Parks, I can't remember which.

 

-Answering, if only slightly. I'm often afraid that the questions I ask make me sound dumb.
-Not particularly, no. Science and logic have answers to most things nowadays.
-I can definitely be if I wanted, I just often choose not to be.

 

-I think the original one and Jurassic World were the best so far. The second one didn't quite capture the same manic as the first, and I honestly don't remember enough of the third to pass judgment.

-I do, in fact, though I rarely use it.

-I have a really hard time remembering things like this, unfortunately, so I don't have an answer for you.

 

Hm... November was the last time I think I participated in LV's SotM. I haven't had time to since.

 

-Other than variations of it (adding numbers, removing the space), ID Zeta is my only alias.
-Define "word puzzles".
-Alphabetically, zeta is the 6th Greek letter. It's not used in physics, though we do like using the z-axis to define things, which could count. I picked it because it sounded cool at the time, honestly.