Don’t Try This at Home!: The Physics of Hollywood Movies , Adam Weiner , Kaplan, New York, 2007. $17.95 paper (264 pp.). ISBN 978-1-4195-9406-9
If there is one thing Adam Weiner’s Don’t Try This at Home! The Physics of Hollywood Movies has in abundance, it is style. Like an Indiana Jones movie, Weiner’s prose moves at high speed from the very start, where he introduces for dissection the first cinematographic corpus, a well-known 2002 action film:
In XXX, Xander Cage (how’s that for a name?), played by Vin Diesel (how’s that for a name?), is an extreme counter-culture rebel looking for adrenaline thrills while sticking it to “the man” whenever he can. He’s tattooed, tough, and fearless.
Weiner later describes a particularly exciting section of the film:
In XXX’s climactic scenes 25 and 27, Yorgi has just released the automated boat containing the toxic gas containers onto the Danube. It is traveling “80 mph at least” according to Vin Diesel, as he and Yelena frantically try to stay parallel with it while driving on the road adjacent to the river in their specially outfitted GTO…. Fortunately the car has been equipped with rocket launchers that the two heroes use to blast wooden crates and bales of hay out of their way so that they don’t have to slow down much.
After a page of setting up the movie, Weiner, a physics teacher at the Bishop’s School, a college preparatory school in La Jolla, California, moves on to a four-page exposition of one-dimensional kinematics, which can be used to judge the likelihood that the car will catch up to the boat. According to the blurb on its back cover, the book is supposed to teach film buffs and physics students alike the major topics found in a year-long introductory physics class. In fact, Don’t Try This at Home! does skip right along from kinematics to quantum mechanics while, in more than 250 pages and eight chapters, the author mostly savages 10 films that violate physical laws by wide margins. They include Spider-Man (2002), covered in “Newton’s Laws”; Mission: Impossible (1996), in “Conservation of Momentum and Energy (with special guest appearances by Heat and Thermodynamics)”; Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971), in “Fluids, Gases, and Thermodynamics”; The Core (2003), in “Electrostatics, Electricity, and Magnetism”; and Event Horizon (1997), in “Modern Physics in Modern Films.”
Typically, about half of each chapter is exposition of physics and the other half cinematic description and analysis. An amazing amount of that analysis is quantitative. Either from the film’s dialog or from careful examination of the scenes, Weiner has extracted sufficient information to allow for computation. For example, in discussing Spider-Man’s wall-climbing ability, he writes, “If you look at the close-up of Spidey’s fingers in scene 8 and make an approximate count of his fingertip hairs, you might estimate he has about 300.” The result of the computation turns out to be quite at odds with what is depicted in the movie. Each hair would need to support about 0.25 N, the weight of a large marble, without flexing if Spider-Man were to climb a wall. As a quick experiment with one of your own hairs will show, even a short strand will bend under a far smaller force than this.
So, how well would Weiner’s book serve the average action-film aficionado or physics student? The answer, I’m afraid: not well. If you haven’t already acquired the requisite knowledge of elementary physics, you won’t be able to develop it on your own with the few pages the book offers on any given topic. There is also the strong motivation to just skip ahead and see how badly the film writers screwed up a particular scene in terms of what is physically possible. If you’re a film buff or a pre-med student, Weiner’s book is not the one from which to learn introductory physics. Even as a light read, its good parts are annoyingly interrupted by the author’s expositions of physics.
Perhaps Don’t Try This at Home! could be a supplement to a standard introductory physics sequence. Yet, even in that role the book fails in a pragmatic sense. If the reader is already learning the material from another venue, then the half of the book presenting a “Cliffs-Notes” version of introductory physics, although surely comprehensible, becomes boring. Once more, I suspect the typical student would only read half the book.
Yet a perfect audience does exist for Weiner’s book. Many colleges and universities offer some form of a liberal-arts physics course for students who will have no need to apply physics content knowledge in any other arena. Those courses are supposed to communicate the idea of what physics is and offer a sense of what the discipline has accomplished. The mathematical expectations are typically low but not vanishing; Weiner’s book could be the heart of such a course. The level of explanation, the mathematical detail, and the examples are just right. It even has half a dozen problems at the end of each chapter that are a perfect mix of conceptual and computational. Lectures—with the instructor’s liberal use of clips from the movies—would nearly write themselves. By hooking students with almost daily peeks at movie screwups, the instructor could maintain class interest and morale at a much higher level than is the norm today. At the same time, the classroom setting would provide motivation for those students who actually want to engage in the physics. I intend to suggest just such a class to my department.
