You may be asking yourself, why does this matter. Why should we take up such arms against bad science in a TV show? Can't I just say "It's just a show" and move on with my life?
If you understand the science behind it and why it's wrong, then absolutely! The problem is when you don't know the science: things that sound sciencey (scienceish?) can get stuck in your head as if they are real science.
This episode is a perfect example of why...
Take, for example, the fears that occurred when the Large Hadron Collider was turned on. There are legitimate concerns about some of the particle physics that occurs (see Rees's warning about Strangelets in "Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning or Hawking's warning about vacuum decay.) However, all of these concerns are simply hypothetical scenarios that are so unlikely to happen, it'd be more likely that every single human would randomly buy the same lottery ticket and all of us win with that ticket. Ok, maybe not THAT extreme, but not far off from it.
None of the legitimate scenarios have anything to do with black holes, even though scientists hope to create microscopic black holes in colliders (and way back in 2008 claim to have created something with an event horizon, which would technically make it a black hole). Yet, sensationalist news rags posted headlines such as "Could a super collider end the world? Proposed upgrade could create black holes and 'strange matter', warn experts" (even though within this article they later acknowledge that even if black holes were created, they wouldn't do any damage).
We can fairly easily see how these two fears are linked - in the real world, scientists might create a black hole in a particle accelerator. People are afraid such a black hole might destroy the Earth. We have a particle accelerator in our show. Maybe it could create a black hole that might destroy the Earth.
It couldn't, but that doesn't stop the show from playing on that fear. A fear that is now reinforced by virtue of seeing it on a TV show.
Such fears have real-world results, and it's this that we need to be worried about. Most of my readers, surely, will already have some feelings about the problem of Americans not knowing anything about science and the ways in which that can cause problems politically. However, even among my readers, I have many who fall into these traps as well, because there are some scientific issues that are not concerned with political leaning... such as GMO foods.
Back in January, Pew Research released a report, the summary writeup of which can be found here. It looked at the differences between layman perception of science and scientist perception of science. In regard to the GMO issue, it showed that 57% of Americans thing GMO foods are unsafe, whereas 88% of scientists think they're safe. 88%. This can only occur in a world in which we have a few fundamental beliefs about science - namely, that science is a bit like the wild west, people are just experimenting on foods without regard to the impact of those foods, big corporations are doing all the research and just pushing this stuff through, etc.
They don't understand how incredibly specific this gene work is:
When scientists take a gene from one thing and put it into another, they know exactly what that gene does and doesn't do. They select the gene very carefully to get exactly what they want, and in so doing can completely eliminate any risk to human health.
The risk is made clear in the above video - people who don't understand genetic science are making policy decisions that make rolling out modified plants harder, which keeps the poor and malnourished of the world both poor and malnourished. This is an issue that affects billions of people.
And it's not the only one. Global climate change has the potential to do even more damage, and yet our knowledge of science has limited us there, too.
We need a drastic change in how we portray science in TV and movies, to counteract our own irrationality and lead us to the point where we're not living the next disaster movie, because even though TV and movies are fantasy, we seem to be really bad at understanding the difference between fantasy and reality.
I'm going to change modes for a moment to write about something near and dear to my heart: namely, bad science on TV. Before going any further, I need to mention that there will be
SPOILERS
in this write-up.
I want to talk for a moment about The Flash, and the season finale.
Now, I know you may be thinking, "this TV show is based on a comic book, and comic books use a lot of bad science. It's specifically a thing called 'comic-book science.' It's acceptable."
Yes, that's true, to a certain extent. You see, there are conceits that we make to accept the rules of any universe on TV, some things we write off a little bit, suspending our disbelief, because it makes sense to in the context of the story.
For instance, in The Flash, we accept that someone can travel at ridiculously high rates of speed without real-world problems such as friction. If Barry Allen were a non-comic-book human, and he were to travel at the speed of sound, for instance, he would burn up from the force of air passing over his body. In fact, if you were to drive at highway speeds with your arm out the window for long periods of time, you'd find yourself getting burns, even at night. That's because even that low of a speed is enough to give you some serious friction.
We accept, for the sake of the show, that Barry is somehow immune to air resistance.
This same resistance should keep him from being able to pass Mach 1. It took until October 14, 1947, for Chuck Yeager to become the first man to break the sound barrier in a jet, and he was doing it in a craft specially designed to slough off the buildup of air that would naturally develop in front of it.
Realbigtaco, "FA-18 going transonic," Wikipedia, 4 October 2008
At low altitudes, where water vapor is present in the atmosphere, we can see the pressure buildup as objects approach the sound barrier and form what's called a "vapor cone" (pictured above). That cone is water vapor condensing in the presence of highly pressurized air. If Barry Allen were to reach Mach 1 and not have some kind of air resistance, we would see a similar (although not-so-cleanly-shaped) vapor cone around him.
Yet, he uses his lack of immunity to wind to great effect in the very first episode, when he runs against the wind of a tornado to reverse its spin.
(Not quite like Bob Seger.)
Yet, we don't question such simple things because they're part-and-parcel to the comic book world - that is, Barry gets to enjoy both the usefulness of air movement and the freedom of frictionlessness.
And, of course, he's not frictionless verses pavement, as otherwise he couldn't accelerate at all. They did, interestingly enough, give him new shoes to counteract the problem of ground resistance (yet he still runs in his street shoes fairly often, with no repeat of the problems he first faced).
All of these things I accept, because while they are wildly inconsistent with the rules they choose to follow or not follow, the one thing that is consistent is that they are all related to Barry's unusual powers. That is to say, he is a stranger in a familiar land. The Earth is still Earth, even with people with superhuman powers. Physics of the real world still work the way they normally do, only to be disrupted when a superhuman power interacts with them.
And that's the key to why I find fault with some things on the show...
Here be spoilers.
In the season finale, the team of ridiculously-intelligent "scientists" (which for some reason includes an uber-scientist who has to ask what a "singularity" is) decide it'll be a good idea to create a wormhole to send Barry back in time.
We can accept that it's possible to create a wormhole because of Barry's weird super-speed force that enables him to see the past when he's only going Mach 2.
And, in actuality, creating a wormhole is fine. We done here?
No, because sadly that wormhole has the capability of collapsing into a singularity for some reason.
So let's be clear about the science behind these two things. Black holes exist. Singularities exist. A singularity is an infinitesimally small point of matter, where all that mass is crammed into space that doesn't have any dimensions, at least not as we know them. Because there are no dimensions to the point, the density is infinite.
A singularity can be reached by an incredibly tiny amount of mass. That said, such a singularity would almost immediately destroy itself, because they eject more energy than they can consume. This is called Hawking Radiation, and it's why we work on creating microscopic black holes in real-world particle accelerators with no fear of destroying the Earth.
(Black holes can, theoretically, exist without singularities, but I'll concentrate on singularities since the show keeps referring to it as such.)
So, to be clear, a singularity the size they're dealing with is completely unimportant.
A wormhole is simply a concept that "what goes up must come down" - that is... what if a black hole didn't keep all the mass it consumed, and instead that mass fell through space and time. Somewhere in the universe, there could be a white hole - the reverse of the black hole, ejecting all that matter. Now, if that's the case, no singularity would exist in the center per se - you'd simply fall through one end and come out the other.
It's entirely possible, though, that the point in the center of the wormhole is still a singularity... that is, that you have to get crushed down to a point infinitely small before coming out the other side. Which would not make for great space travel, as you'd be a string of particles rather than a cohesive creature.
Which means that the wormhole in Barry Allen's story can't have a singularity at the center... it has to instead be an open tube... and if it's an open tube, it can't just collapse into a singularity (there's no accretion of matter, which is an absolute fundamental requirement of a singularity).
But... let's just say that somehow enough matter gets in there to form a singularity... then what?
Then it dissipates thanks to Hawking Radiation.
Ok, but what if that doesn't happen?
Now we're getting way outside of what is possible in the real world...
Let's say that Barry's speed force also enables the singularity to grow... that it's somehow a part of the singularity. Then what?
Well, now you have a big @#!$ing problem. Because if the singularity is not destroying itself by radiating off all of its mass, and it's somehow consuming mass from stuff around it (which would happen a lot slower than the TV show indicated, but who cares at this point), then it's going to eventually consume everything nearby. The entire Earth will be slowly sucked into it.
But right now, at this moment, the Earth is a WAY bigger source of gravity overall. Very close to the singularity, the singularity is a bigger source, which is why it can suck up stuff on the Earth and the rest of the Earth is fine.
But these two things are both massive and attracted to each other. What SHOULD happen next is the singularity falls to the ground (it should've started there, frankly), and it starts eating into the Earth, gobbling up mass on the way to the center of the planet.
Instead, it magically floats into the sky to start consuming the Earth from a height of about 2,000 feet above sea level.
This is also not possible...
We see then that the singularity begins developing what's called an "accretion disk." This happens because singularities are always spinning. Heck, all matter is spinning. Your own protons and neutrons and electrons are spinning.
But, as mass clumps together in the middle of that singularity, it also spins, and increases its spin rate the closer it gets to that center (the classic illustration of this is an iceskater who spins, and if he puts his arms out wide, he spins slowly, and if he pulls them in close, he spins quickly). The accretion disk is actually a bit of good science in all of this bad... the tidal forces of massive gravitational spin cause it, and things that get pulled in close to the singularity would join this accretion disk first (at varying levels).
What's not good is what the so-called "scientists" of the show decide next.
You see, you can't just let a black hole gobble up the Earth. It causes a few limitations on their ability to have a Season 2.
So, these "scientists" decide that the only way for Barry to destroy the singularity is to run in the opposite direction of its spin...
There's just so much wrong with this I can't even wrap my brain around it...
First of all, the black hole is super massive.. so massive, that it's defeating the Earth's gravity and pulling buildings apart to gobble them up. If it's that massive, then what's the mass of one human going to do?
It'd be like Barry trying to slow the rotation of the Earth by running around it the same direction as the spin (which would push force in the opposite direction of the spin). Except that in the case of the Earth, that mass is spread out over a huge area. In the case of the singularity, it's in an infinitely tiny area.
Remember your grade school experiments with simple levers? The entire reason a crow bar works, for instance, is because you're applying the force over distance - the further away from the fulcrum of a lever you are, the more force you can apply thanks to the distance. Running around the Earth would work similarly - small amounts of force applied over a huge area. Running around the singularity would require much greater speed still...
Both far more speed than Barry can generate.
But, let's say for the sake of argument that he can somehow conquer the spin of the singularity, then what?
Because there's the biggest @#!$ing problem with this whole theory... the spin is a result of the singularity, not the cause of the singularity. The mass is still present, even if the spin is gone. The moment Barry stops moving, the spin will come right back. And that spin doesn't somehow destabilize the black hole - if anything, it helps prevent it from growing faster, thanks to centrifugal force. Some objects would be thrown away rather than gobbled up.
Instead, what would really need to happen would be to in some way break up the singularity...
The only answer to which is "Hawking Radiation."
Maybe the "scientists" are hoping instead to create what's called a "naked singularity" - a situation that occurs from just the right amount of angular momentum for a black hole so that light CAN escape from the center... allowing us to see the singularity. Maybe they'll analyze it and figure out how to beat it at that point... but I'm not holding out much hope.
Dangerous because I can't really Google research on the topic without a certain expectation of getting Google Image Search results on the topic, which would certainly be a form of research (if you need a research topic with billions of primary sources, this may be the one for you), but would not exactly be what I'm trying to achieve.
That's not to say I mind naked people - quite the contrary, as a nudist I'm quite used to them. However, the images returned from such a search are not often simply naked people, and even if they were, they would not be what we lovingly refer to as "safe for work."
And that brings up an interesting problem: What is safe for work, and why? What is nudity, and why? Why do we draw lines on the human body to divide up the acceptable and the profane?
From a conservative Christian perspective, of course, the answer is easy: the world is only 6000 years old, Adam and Eve were naked in the Garden, they sinned, God made them wear clothes. The end. Of course, this simplistic understanding leaves even the 6000 years of history that the most hardcore conservatives acknowledge skipped over - that is, it disregards several historical anomalies:
The common practice in much of the Roman Empire during the first century was communal bathing. The practice is entirely unmentioned in the Bible despite discussion of other Roman practices.
People were commonly nude for a variety of tasks, such as fishing (Peter is described as naked in some translations of John 21:7) and gardening (Karl Kästner says that the reason the women in Jesus's posse mistook him for a gardener is that he had left his garments behind in the tomb and was therefore naked, and gardeners at the time would have worked naked.).
In first liturgy of baptism, participants were naked: "Then they shall take off all
their clothes," it says, and later, "after these things,
the bishop passes each of them on nude to the elder who stands at the water. They shall stand in the water naked." (source)
European art from throughout Catholic dominance depicts people naked, especially after Europeans began studying Roman and Greek history and art. This art is often highly religious in nature, depicting stories directly from the Bible. Michelangelo's David, for instance, depicts the king of ancient Israel and Judea.
Of course, if we separate our morality from the morality of the Christian Church, and take a look at ancient history, we see that humans started wearing clothes about 170,000 years ago, about 30,000 years after we became homosapiens, and about 800,000 years after the species that would become human lost its body hair.
So, other than comfort in mild conditions and health in extreme conditions, there's really no reason to be wearing clothes, nor any reason to be concerned about the sight of nudity in others. The sexual desire of certain parts of the body is merely a social construction, one which we can choose to deny.
Doing so would solve a commonly-listed problem fear of some people, especially those on the Right: the fear of other people using the bathroom with them just to sneak a peek at their genitals and breasts. The argument goes something like this: I'm a man, and I'm worried that another man who is gay might use the men's room next to me and leer at my penis while I'm peeing; or, I'm a man, and I'm worried that a woman might dress in men's clothing just to use the men's room and leer at my penis, etc. Same argument with genders flipped for women.
There are countries in the world where they don't worry about gender with regard to the bathroom. Even in the U.S., there's a growing trend for colleges to offer unisex bathrooms. I recall a female friend of mine confiding in me that, while on Christian mission work in Romania, she stayed in a hostel with only one set of showers that were open and unisex - meaning that everyone who showered did so in full view of everyone else. Initially she had typical American reservations about it, but the needs of getting clean after sweating through mission work necessitated using the showers, and her fears about them subsided. She discovered that there was nothing wrong with them. They were simply different.
