If science held sway in Hollywood, Earth would have been blasted by a Texas-sized rock in Armageddon and Vin Diesel would have snowboarded for all of .45 seconds before waving a rippled arm goodbye under an avalanche in XXX. Not to mention that there's no sound in space, so bid aloha to cool THX-powered explosions when tie-fighters bite the dust. But a few flicks actually manage to get it right.
High school physics teacher Adam Weiner tracks Hollywood's scientific hits and misses in a new book. All in good fun, he tips his pedagogical hat to the spinning space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey and a radio frequency-less copper cage in Enemy of the State. But two Florida professors take it seriously, blaming Hollywood for crippling students’ minds, Popular Science reports. (More astrophysics stories.)