Andy Weir, author of the bestselling novel "The Martian," has admitted including this gaffe on purpose — to increase the dramatic effect.
Read more about gravity on Mars.
Explanations from Martin Barstow, President of the Royal Astronomical Society (United Kingdom).
Comments by Martin Barstow, President of the Royal Astronomical Society (United Kingdom).
And here’s what bloggers write on the issue.
Lucy
Explanations from Bradley Voytek, UCSD Neuroscience Professor.
Armageddon
From "Don’t Try This At Home!: The Physics of Hollywood Movies" by Adam Weiner.
The antimatter bomb plot, described in "Angels & Demons," alarmed the public so much that CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) had to create a special page on its website to debunk the info provided in Dan Brown’s novel and its movie adaptation.
From "Don’t Try This At Home!: The Physics of Hollywood Movies," by Adam Weiner.
Gravity
In the words of Robert Frost, Instructor and Flight Controller at NASA:
"The NASA communications satellites are 22,300 miles above the Earth. The International Space Station is at an altitude of about 250 miles. There is no way to physically explain how, in a matter of minutes, an explosion could take out those satellites and then have the debris from those collisions hit the Hubble Telescope and the ISS."
Without such a protective suit, you can lose consciousness from overheating. Also, preparations for exiting the spacecraft to work in space take a few hours, so you can’t just unzip the suit to go to the toilet (this’ll prove a very lengthy process). Proof: a post by NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman; a science documentary called "How Space Suits Work."
Arrival
Comments by an MIT Linguist, Pond Premtoon.
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