I’ve been a fan of Blizzard Entertainment since their WarCraft II days. I must admit that I’m unusual in that respect – because the thing I liked most was Blizzard’s storylines. Don’t get me wrong, the gameplay was great – I loved sneaking those ghosts into Terran Confederacy bases, blasting my way through enemy defenses with a Protoss carrier group, or overrunning the towns of Azeroth with necromancers and skeletons. But I really appreciated the time Blizzard put into the single-player campaigns and the storylines behind them. Even with a standard real-time strategy-game God’s-eye view of the battlefield, I would imagine what the Terran frontier towns on Mar Sara were like, imagine Kerrigan making her last stand against the Zerg onslaught, or picture Tassadar on the bridge of his command carrier, surrounded by his most trusted warriors as he led them to their heroic end.
Blizzard isn’t alone in this, of course. For all its repetitive gameplay, Assassin’s Creed tried to be as much like playing inside a movie as it could (it’s only a matter of time until someone takes a similar engine to make the Bourne Identity video game, and that will be awesome). The Star Wars universe became an interactive movie with The Force Unleashed, especially on the Wii, which let players wave their hands through the air to control the Force (at least, in a rudimentary way). But besides the gameplay elements, The Force Unleashed is a great example for having production values right up there with movies – that game had some of the best concept art I’ve ever seen, the story was clearly thought out and compelling, and the acting was very well done. Speaking of acting, video games were once the realm of C-list voiceovers, but now we now have the likes of Martin Sheen voicing characters in Mass Effect 2 – which had a tremendous cinematic trailer, enough to make me wish for an XBox.
I really like this trend. It makes video games into – gasp – a reputable medium for storytelling. I don’t think this format will ever replace books or movies, but it can certainly come up right beside them as a way to tell an interesting tale, describe compelling characters, teach us something about human interactions, and make the audience think.
Oh – what prompted this sudden post, you ask? Easy:
Not only is this an insanely high-production-value cinematic trailer, but it is clearly investing the StarCraft II story with a great deal of emotional content. Yeah, sure, it’s emotional content I’ve seen in movies/books/TV before – what is important to my point here is that the last time we saw this stuff, in the original StarCraft, it was from a standard RTS top-down perspective with voiceovers on little moving head-and-shoulders portraits of Kerrigan and Raynor. Now we see it as if it’s got a film director behind it. And now all the gamers get immersed in not only the plot but the characters’ experiences and sensations. Exciting stuff for storytellers!
Okay, Pixar. I love your movies. Toy Story was a wonderful opener, and since then, you’ve turned out some amazing stuff. Monster’s, Inc and Finding Nemo were tremendous. A Bug’s Life was fun. Cars wasn’t the greatest, but still wasn’t a bad film.
While I worried that you had caught Disneysequelitis with Toy Story 2, you even showed me that you could make a great sequel.
The Incredibles and Wall-E very quickly became some of my favorite movies. They’re both visually stunning with engrossing plotlines and characters that make me smile.
But this time, Pixar…this time I think you’re going to hit me too close to home!
Before “Avatar,” I’d seen a couple of movies in 3D and had not really been impressed with what the extra five bucks got me. Up until that point there was really only a single scene in a single movie in which I thought the 3D effect actually added anything to my experience. (It’s the shot in Pixar’s “Up” in which the house floats in front of the sunset…all the colors of the sunset shine through all the colors of the balloons, each balloon is a nice round object, and the whole collection of balloons looks three-dimensional. Beautiful.) For the most part, though, I tend not even to notice that a movie is 3D unless I’m specifically looking for the three-dimensionality – if it’s a good movie, the story and characters ought to hold my attention more than that – or if the filmmakers try some cheesy, gimmicky, amusement-park-style 3D “popping” effects, a la “Beowulf.”
“Avatar” changed my mind a little, in that many more of the scenes looked so damn cool in 3D. But the more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that while the 3D experience was pretty neat, if I go see “Avatar” any more it will be in 2D, because it really didn’t add that much to the movie. The forest creatures and sweeping panoramas will look just as good projected in 2D. The only aspects of that movie that would miss out are the holographic computer displays, and those aren’t really that important.
In fact, I think that Hollywood ought to just abandon this 3D movie kick. It’s not that I get a headache or think that cool things can’t possibly be done in 3D. It’s that even when filmmakers do the cool things, it adds so little to a movie that I’m definitely not inclined to shell out for a 50% surcharge on a ticket. Here’s why…
First: great movie, literally awesome visuals, stunning effects, good acting and execution, fun alien creatures, who cares if it’s a retelling of Pocahontas.
What I absolutely did not expect when I finally got to see James Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ yesterday afternoon was to see my own research appear in the movie. Granted, it doesn’t take a front-row seat and it doesn’t play any major plot roles. As I was driving home with my girlfriend (a fellow aerospace engineer), we got into a discussion about how this was a reasonably hard sci-fi movie. None of the technologies seem particularly farfetched: ducted-fan helicopters exist on Earth at a low technology readiness level (TRL), as do exoskeleton power suits. 3D glassy computer displays aren’t a stretch, nor are hovering VTOL aircraft on a low-gravity world. The flight to Alpha Centauri takes 6 years, meaning some reasonable sort of sublight propulsion. The ship Sully arrives on even has rotating segments, big radiators, and solar collectors. The avatars themselves don’t even seem too crazy, since we keep hearing about advanced prostheses that can be controlled by a user’s thoughts. (I’ll reserve judgment on mixing alien and human DNA until we have real alien DNA on hand.) Nor does a planetwide neural interface – though I have to wonder what selective pressures would cause such a thing to evolve – given that we have bacterial, fungal, and other life forms on Earth that can split and recombine, blurring the distinction between organisms.
But surely, I thought, those floating mountains are ridiculous. Visually stunning, yes, and great for those 3D flying scenes. But physically ludicrous.
Pandora's Hallelujah mountains
We are led to believe, in the movie, that these mountains float against the force of (albeit reduced) gravity because there is an exceptionally strong magnetic field generated on Pandora. Cameron even gives us direct evidence of that field: you know how iron filings align themselves with a magnetic field, like that of a bar magnet?
Iron filings aligning themselves with magnetic field lines
Well, the magnetic field on Pandora is so strong that geologic formations align themselves with the magnetic field. The field is so outrageously strong that whatever iron content is in Pandoran minerals – most likely not 100%, even if those rocks are pure hematite or magnetite or something like that – is sufficient to make rocks suspend themselves against gravity in the shape of the magnetic field lines:
A field that bends rock to its will!
I know for experience that this might not necessarily be impossible, for a sufficiently strong magnetic field. After all, in my lab is a whopping-big NdFeB rare-Earth magnet about the size of a margarine tub, and even when it’s contained within its sarcophagal wooden box, I can get six-inch steel bolts to suspend themselves, against gravity, at a 45° angle in its field. So, for a sufficiently strong magnetic field, this flux-line rock formation is not at all out of the question, believe it or not!
How about the mountains themselves? Couldn’t the magnetic field strong enough to make these “flux arches” also levitate mountain-sized chunks of rock?
Well, I thought, surely not if it is solely the repulsion of like magnetic poles that is responsible. After all, Earnshaw’s theorem says that the familiar field sources that drop off with distance, like gravity, electrostatic attraction, and magnetostatic attraction, cannot be arranged in a passively stable configuration. If you don’t believe me, then I set for you a challenge: get some ordinary bar magnets, and lay them out on a table. Try to arrange them in such a way that they are within a few centimeters of each other, but the attraction of opposite poles and repulsion of similar poles cancel out so that the entire arrangement sits on the table without moving. (For safety’s sake, do not do this with the rare-earth magnets I mentioned above, because when you fail at the challenge, the magnets will jump towards each other with substantial force. Rare-earth magnets are brittle and will shatter if that happens, sending neodymium shrapnel flying around – if they didn’t pinch your fingers when they impacted.) You will find that no matter how hard you try, no matter how many friends you get to hold the magnets in position and simultaneously release them, no matter how you angle them and tweak them, you won’t ever be able to prevent at least one of the magnets from attracting or repelling some other magnet. The whole arrangement will either fly apart or collapse together. You might think that in 3D you’d be able to come up with some super-clever configuration that is stable, but, in fact, if you move beyond the two dimensions (and three degrees of freedom) of the table top the situation gets far worse, because all the bar magnets try to align themselves with one another in 3D. So, a combination of purely magnetic and gravitational forces cannot result in a stable configuration of those mountains.
“But, ha!” you say. “You must be wrong! You said that a combination of gravitational field sources can’t be in a stable arrangement, and clearly, the planets of our solar system have been stably orbiting each other for four billion years! And I’ve even seen those Levitron tops – magnetic tops that stably levitate against gravity, just like those mountains!“
The Levitron: just two magnets, one inside a spinning top
The key difference between a Levitron or an orbit and the bar magnets on a table top are that they are dynamically stable. They requiremotion to preserve stability. Stop the planets from orbiting, and they will fall into each other and the Sun. Stop the Levitron from spinning, and it flops over – aligning itself with the magnet in the base – and drops to the ground. So, for Pandora’s mountains to levitate like that, they must be spinning or moving in some way. It might be the case that, if they were at Pandora’s equator, the repulsive magnetic force actually “cancels out” the low gravity of the moon enough that the mountains are actually in circular orbits about Pandora’s equator. But that situation is dynamically tricky, requiring exquisite balances of forces – and I would estimate from the different sizes of floating mountains that they have different magnetic mineral contents, so the balance between gravity and magnetism would be different for each mountain and each would have a different orbit. Doesn’t work.
So what’s the answer? Well, it’s all in those little gray crystals the imperialist human colonists of RDA are after. Unobtainium.
An unobtainium crystal, unobtrusively levitating. Wait, what?
Above is a picture of an unobtainium crystal from the movie. It’s levitating above some crazy sci-fi antigravity contraption, that holds it stably up in the air where people can poke at it, spin it, pluck it out of midair and play with it before putting it back in exactly the same spot again. Now, wait a minute – where have I seen this behavior before? Oh, right. My research lab.
A rare-earth magnet levitating over a high-temperature superconductor
That is a picture I took of a NdFeB magnet, stably levitating over the high-temperature superconductor yttrium barium copper oxide, or YBCO. (For scale, the magnet is 3/4″ across.) You can do everything with that magnet that they do with the sample of unobtainium in ‘Avatar.’ Leave it alone, and it happily floats in midair. Poke it, and it rocks a little before going back to its equilibrium position. Give it a twirl, and it’ll spin over the YBCO – and if the magnet isn’t cylindrically symmetric, it’ll eventually stop spinning and settle down again. Pull it away from the YBCO, and you can put it back later and watch it float in exactly the same midair spot as when it started. You can even pin different sizes and shapes of magnets – all stable against gravity. This whole setup would work perfectly if the magnet was on the table and the YBCO was doing all the floating, too. It’s all because the magnet induces currents in the YBCO that are not opposed by any resistance – “supercurrents” – which generate their own magnetic fields that then interact with the magnet.
“Wait,” you ask, “that magnet is just a magnet. The supercurrents make magnetic fields. I thought you said that magnetic field sources couldn’t be arranged in a stable configuration! It’s Earnshaw’s Theorem again.”
That would be an astute question. The answer is that, in this case, the superconductor doesn’t have a fixed magnetic field. As the magnet moves around – let’s say it starts to fall from its equilibrium position, because gravity is pulling on it – then its motion causes the supercurrents in the YBCO to move around. The new distribution of supercurrents gets superimposed on top of the previous distribution of supercurrents, with the net result that the magnetic field from the YBCO tends to push back on the magnet, keeping it in its original position. It’s as if the field lines of the magnet get stuck, or trapped, in the volume of the superconductor. The effect is called “magnetic flux pinning” for that very reason, and it happens with Type II, or “high-temperature” superconductors. (If you know about Meissner repulsion, flux pinning is related but not the same.) So, that blue-glowing antigravity generator in the RDA command center, with the levitating sample of unobtainium, is very likely just a magnet. And the Hallelujah Mountains are just a scaled-up version of the magnet and YBCO in my lab.
But, you probably noticed from that photo, the YBCO has to be below liquid nitrogen temperature in order to superconduct and exhibit flux pinning. Clearly, Pandora is not at cryogenic temperatures, which pretty much pegs “unobtainium” as a room-temperature superconductor – a type of material that is highly sought-after in research labs today, and would indeed be extremely valuable. That means that the Hallelujah Mountains on Pandora likely consist of large deposits of unobtainium, which are flux-pinned to the stupendously powerful magnetic field lines coming from that field sources on the planet. This explains the value of unobtainium, how the mountains levitate the way they do, and why the floating mountains are so close to the flux arch structures.
There’s another interesting link between ‘Avatar’ and flux pinning. Remember how I said that the effect of flux pinning is as if a magnet’s field lines get stuck within the superconductor? Well, if you had a good electricity and magnetism course, that notion might sit uncomfortably with you, because you were probably taught that “field lines” or “flux lines” are not physically real, but are a good visualization tool for magnetic fields, which exist everywhere around a magnet and not just in neat little looping lines. Well, you’d be right, but things tend to get kind of weird inside superconductors. Magnetic fields are quantized just like everything else, and it is these magnetic flux quanta that get “stuck” inside the YBCO. In fact, they actually get trapped on impurities within the YBCO’s crystal structure. You might think that these quanta of magnetic flux would be called “fluxons,” but because they correspond pretty well to magnetic field lines, papers on superconductivity and flux pinning tend to throw around several names for them – like “flux lines,” “field lines,” and “flux vortices.” That last name likely comes from the fact that, in the superconductor, each of the magnetic field lines induces a little loop of electric current that races in a circle around the flux line, like a little vortex. The sum total of all these little currents adds up to the distribution of supercurrents that gives us flux pinning.
In ‘Avatar,’ every time they fly near the flux-arch structure, they talk about a “flux vortex.” It sounds like your classic sci-fi trope of combining sciency-sounding words. (“Invert the phase capacitors!”) But, hmm…maybe, just maybe, that’s not mere technobulshytt after all!
I’m pretty convinced that all this isn’t accidental. The filmmakers had every intention of unobtainium being a room-temperature supercondcutor and the floating mountains being flux-pinned to the field source within the planet. Because I know that this is not the first article on the web about it! But the fact that it’s my own research in this movie: now that is cool! (For the uninitiated, I’m working on using flux pinning to assemble and reconfigure modular spacecraft. More info on my web site and my research group web site. You can also check out Youtube videos of me demonstrating flux pinning and our microgravity experiments with flux-pinned spacecraft mockups from last summer.)
Of course, ‘Avatar’ doesn’t get it all right. And they shouldn’t be expected to. I know from my research that flux pinning is a very short-range effect; getting those mountains to levitate would require a (probably literally) mind-bogglingly powerful magnetic field. Not something I’d expect to see from a planetary dynamo. Nor would a dipolar magnetic field within Pandora explain the flux arches: those are clearly centered on a magnetic field source at the surface of the world. And if the field source is powerful enough to get the rocks to bend around and follow field lines – all the aircraft, armor suits, guns, mobile lab trailers, and equipment carried by the human scientists and soldiers probably has more than enough ferromagnetic metal content to be ripped towards the field source. And that doesn’t even account for this happening:
Oh, well. But, speaking as someone who hopes that our future space program will involve spacecraft build out of components that “levitate” near each other without touching, but still acting as if they are mechanically connected, I would sure love to see some room-temperature superconductors and floating mountains!
Recently, ABC’s new series “Defying Gravity,” starring Ron Livingston of “Office Space” fame, has caught my attention. All the current episodes (1-6 as of this writing) are available on Hulu. I think it’s been interesting enough for me to keep following it. I have a couple points of interest about the show:
First, I am impressed with how much the show’s creators, writers, and artists have paid attention to the probable operation of a near-future space program. Of course, the show makes the usual sci-fi physics gaffes. “Defying Gravity” goes to unusual lengths to rationalize shooting a space series in terrestrial gravity (“centrifuge” is a fine explanation for me, “magnetic nanospray” and “electrostatic nanofibers,” eh…not so much – novel attempt, though), there are silly numerical issues like pressurizing a spacesuit to 5 atm (never mind the entirely ridiculous idea of a human-rated “Venus suit”), and this show, like almost every other sci-fi, doesn’t come close to getting the physics of tethers right. However, I’ve just come from a summer at NASA Johnson Space Center, and I am incredibly impressed with this show’s depiction of mission control, the MCC/spacecraft communications, space jargon, uniforms and suits, the art of the spacecraft interior, potentially realizable space technology, and the fact that they do depict zero gravity with much greater frequency than most other sci-fi. From my (albeit limited, but still quite extensive compared to the general public) exposure to the astronaut office at JSC, it seems to me that this show’s depiction of the Astronaut Office and the experience of being an astronaut is about as spot-on as it could be.
Second is the point that this series was apparently, according to Wikipedia, pitched to the networks as “Grey’s Anatomy in space.” I couldn’t care less about the soap-opera-y who’s-sleeping-with-who dynamics of a show like that, but there’s plenty more going on that make “Defying Gravity’s” characters fun to watch. In contrast to shows like “Star Trek: (pick your favorite)” – which highlights some aspect of human nature or morality by having our intrepid characters encounter a planet peopled by a species that embodies a single, streotypical trait – and “Battlestar Galactica” – which explores the interactions between its characters against the backdrop of larger questions about what it means to be free, human, just, etc. – “Defying Gravity” is a show almost purely about the interactions between the characters and how their past experiences impact those relationships. Certainly, Trek and BSG include those elements, but “Defying Gravity” removes most of the external influences on the characters. (Not all, of course, because external stressors are great for getting characters to look at themselves or their companions.) Now, using a long-duration spaceflight with astronauts cooped up in close quarters, millions of miles from assistance, communication, or rescue to set up a character study is absolutely nothing new to science fiction in general (see, e.g., Poul Anderson’s Starfarers and Tau Zero, many of Ben Bova’s novels, and the beginning of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars saga) – but it is new to mainstream movie and television sci-fi. Fortunately, these are pretty interesting characters, they seem like three-dimensional people, and the show so far has been about how they each come to terms with their own past at the beginning of their six-year voyage. I definitely like seeing the space program as the setup for such drama. Which brings me to…
Last, and certainly not least, this show is extremely pro-space. (Just listen to Maddox Donner’s voiceover monologue at the close of the pilot episode!) I love what it says about viewing audiences: the mainstream media is comfortable with, and thinks the public is comfortable with, a relationship drama set on a spacecraft against a background of mostly-real physics and operations. It helps to make astronauts feel not just like heros, but like real people. As if – gasp – we could grow up wanting to be an astronaut and hold on to that dream even if we don’t picture ourselves as the perfectly polished John Glenn or Neil Armstrong type. We can be good at things, bad at things, have our own flaws, and still go become astronauts, mission controllers, and engineers. That is a message that I really, really want to get out into the public. If we can get the more adult audiences likely to watch “Defying Gravity” thinking that it’s okay to keep dreaming to be an astronaut, then we’ll raise a generation of kids who are willing to hold on to that dream and become the scientists, engineers, and space explorers of the future. Augustine Commission, NASA management, and politicians, please take note!
I just saw Sam Rockwell in “Moon” today. Wow, what a movie.
The two-second, non-spoiler plot outline is that Rockwell plays Sam Bell, a blue-collar astronaut who works in a one-man mining outpost on the far side of the moon with no live communications to anyone. He’s about to end his three-year contract when, after an accident, he goes out onto the surface and finds a man who happens to look and act exactly like Sam Bell. Now they have to figure out what’s going on.
The movie is a tour de force for Rockwell’s acting, since he spends most of the time playing against himself. The obvious effects aside, he handles the dialog naturally enough that I really forgot that he had to play the two separately – he was really acting with himself. It’s also incredible that he was able to bring out the subtle differences between the Sam Bell who has been in the outpost for three years and the newcomer Sam Bell. There were some physical differences between the two characters, but sometimes it was hard to tell which was which based on visual impression alone. Yet it was always easy to tell one from the other as they interacted. Rockwell really put a lot of ordinary-guy-ness into the character, and put a lot of thought into the effects of isolation and delayed communication. They way his characters handle the mystery they’ve been thrown into is simulatneously heartbreaking and triumphant.
Now I have to talk a bit about the science fiction in this movie. This is sci-fi in its purest form: science and fiction, with a strong grounding in both solid scientific concepts and in dramatic and chracter development. The science is, in fact, not too far removed from our own – perhaps fifty years off – and it looks like everything grew out of the space program as we know it today. The movie goes to show just how well adhering to real science instead of going for cheesy effects, laser sounds in space, and ridiculous robots can move the drama along. Sam Bell eats freeze-dried, reconstituted astronaut food. He has to wear a familiar white spacesuit. His lunar outpost is all form-built white surfaces, but he still uses sticky notes. He has to exercise to keep his muscle tone. And all these things contribute to the frustrations he experiences in his lonely three-year stay.
However, there is only one bit of science that is absolutely necessary to move the plot along – the explanation for Sam’s duplicate. I got the feeling that this sort of story could have happened in many different places or times, and the science fiction is only a vehicle to move the plot along and let us watch these characters deal with their situation. I definitely appreciated that – it’s about time sci-fi broke out of the rut it’s been in, where it’s all about action-adventure and CG explosions.
(Just FYI: Yeah, they really could have done a better job making 1/6 gee gravity apparent. Yeah, there are some sounds in space – but at least they’re muted, BSG-style. And yeah, the rover design is kind of poor for the Moon. But those are about the only scientific gripes I can put down, and look how tiny and insignificant they are!)
This is also a very smart movie. The film shows you enough information to show you what’s going on, and by the end, I understood all that had happened. But it doesn’t tell you straight up what’s happening. There are no scenes where a character explains to another character what just happened or why they are in the situation they are. Instead, we see Sam figuring things out, and we figure things out along with him. It felt like a very participatory movie to me, and I enjoyed that aspect of it a great deal.
This is a wonderful sci-fi movie. It’s definitely an homage to some of the classics, most obviously the spaceship scenes in 2001 (you know, the best part of that movie), and an homage to the days of the classic Heinlein-style sci-fi that followed on the heels of real space exploration; it brings back the feel of when people followed both space movies and space news. And I’m all for that.
For what it’s worth, I hope this movie gets a much bigger exposure in national release. I will also secretly hope for an Oscar nod for Sam Rockwell, because I think the critics have long overlooked SF as a genre in which great acting and writing can happen.
Posted by Joseph
