What were the many errors of "Day After Tomorrow"?

Just watched the movie last night...I'm so far behind...heh. Here's my question:
Would it be possible for the buildings in New York city to still be standing after that huge tidal wave crashing against them? It's a little off topic, but it really is a bit of a burning question for me. Thank you!

 

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Not necessarily...

Imagine, that you planted five hollow blocks with at least one third of them under cement as a foundation. Pretend that is New York. Then, get a large bucket of water and just spill it so it could clash with the blocks. Its almost the same thing as compared to New York and the wall of water.

 

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Billy

I have browsed your web site a bit. Some ponderings.

I read

I have unsuccesfully tried to locate those in a reference list, perhaps I did not look well enough? Moreover, By some odd chance, a quick googling session on those terms did not shed more light on the case either.

I'd be happy if you could point to some substantiating literature.

Somewhere I read

I seem to remember that planetary perturbations like precession cycles, obliquity cycles, eccentricity cycles have all been mathematically (or numerically) explained within the confines of the solar system, without needing external vectors like passing small dark holes. Obliquity was certainly the thoughest one, especially looking at the extreme tilt angle of Neptune. However William Ward was the first to explain obliquity as caused by interaction between gravity driven planetal spin axis precession and the precession of the plane of orbit of the planet in respect to the absolute plane. Moreover, should the cycle frequency of both cycles be roughly equal then a chaotic resonance process would drive the obliquity of the spin axis to extreme angles.

More experts in this field are Prof Laskar (Paris) Prof Correia (Lisbon)

About Ice Ages, I do have some background here. Although generally believed that Ice Ages was about global warming and cooling, more evidence is emerging that the whole thing is getting lots more complicated. Any mechanism that would explain general cooling or heating of the Earth will fall far short of explaining all phenomena that have been recognised during the transition phases in and out "ice ages". However it will take problably several more decades before a paradigm shift will be introduced reluctantly and hesitantly.

 

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the biggest mistake was when the bf of that one girl sees this huge wave coming from libary still has time to jump down run down the stairs grab his girl friend and get back inside and up the stairs... Very unrealistic they would both be dead.

 

I always wondered why people could not survive large wave impacts... Could they not just brace themselves for a swim?

 

Think of it this way ... if you were free-falling into the ocean at terminal velocity, you have little chance of surviving because at terminal velocity, hitting a body of water is almost equivalent to free-falling onto concrete since the viscosity of water is negligable at about 120 mph.

Also, the only reason that you may survive is because once you hit the surface, your momentum due to your weight will determine how quickly you'll stop and your angular entry determines how the energy will be redistributed upon impact.

So, if you have little of chance for your 80 kg body to survive a fall into the ocean at about 115 mph ... imagine your chances of survival if you have millions of kg of water crashing into you at half that speed. It may not sound so fast compared to free-falling but just the momentum alone will kill you since since having such a tremendous quantity of water hitting you is like getting hit by several hundred semi-trucks at once. Also, you have no control over your direction of movement until the wave stops. So, if you're lucky enough to survive the initial crash of the wave, then the wave will smash you into several building walls.

 

Aaghh... makes my heart pound just thinking about that, because I hate parachuting - and the idea of hitting the ground, or water, at terminal velocity is what underlies such fear, for anyone...

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One thing which seemed curiously absent from The Day After Tomorrow was the morbid surplus of dead bodies, which would surely have been strewn thickly around New York before the floodwater froze. You'd think they'd bloat with early decay enough to float, and drift into the library...

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We saw a couple of frozen corpses after the eye of the storm passed, who I think were the very people who tried to walk to safety against Sam Hall's advice. But they should have been everywhere.

 

what about the fact that after the lines frezze inside the choppers the only thing needed to stop the cooling was closing the door and throwing a couple more books on the fire

 

What I found amusing was how they were accounting for the storms being the result of humanity polluting the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses, etc. THEN, they point to the past, the wooley mammoth, who was frozen with fur still on its body, implying that a similar storm happened back then. Well, sorry, but I don't think the mammoths were driving around in cars, burning fossil fuels.

 

Billy T: About the loss of scientific competence in America, Americans seem too likely to think that a student who excels in the sciences is somehow "wierd." If the student is Asian, it's expected. Encouragement makes a huge difference.

 

I'm pretty sure, and I'm speaking from fading memory, that "The Day After Tomorrow" used someone's climatology model from somewhere. I suppose that almost anything can happen when you extrapolate some extreme trends without the usual checks and balances, although I would think that the melting of the ice on the Arctic Ocean (which doesn't NOT change the sea level) would actually make the area warmer, or the same cause would make the northern reaches warmer. The Day After Tomorrow scenario involved some rather improbable things, but there is a basis in fact. They keep telling us that something happened that flash-froze the mammoths a few thousand years ago. There was also something that happened that swept the steppes of Siberia clean of life and piled up a lot of dead bodies. Anything that explained this observed evidence would have to be of a fantastic nature.

 

What were the many errors of "Day After Tomorrow"?

There was but a single error.

It was not in the concept.
It was not in the script.
It was not in the casting.
It was not in the special effects.
It was not in the direction.

It was in the failure, on the part of critics, to recognise and acknowledge that this was a piece of entertainment, not a peer reviewed research paper.

 

Even knowing that this was written by Art Bell and Whitley Streiber, who I feel a great deal of affection for, I have to worry about the propaganda value of "The Day After Tomorrow." It doesn't appeal to the rational side as much as it appeals to the emotional side. It is a horror show in that "it's coming after you." Even the wolves, who apparently are able to cover hundreds of miles in a very short time on ice, were part of that. Yes, it's supposed to be entertainment. Yes, it's cashing in on the millenial craze, AGAIN. Still, the more attention you place on the negative, the more power you give it. We don't need to be giving the negative any more power than it already has. It deceives you. It spoils the enjoyment of the good times.

 

I was taught in my English classes about the attitude of mind with which one should approach fictional works: a willing suspension of disbelief. Although this was in relation to written works it seems wholly applicable to any form of fiction. If the intellect of the audience means it is only capable of an unthinking application of belief then as a society we have already descended to dangerous levels of ignorance.

 

Ophiolite,
Yes, suspension of disbelief crosses to film and other medium as well.
I haven't seen this particular movie (it looked just too damed stupid to be entertaining) but it seems your English teacher did fail to teach you one VERY important aspect of suspension of disbelief.
The author (director etc) has at least as much responsibility in the relationship as the audience.
The audience has to be enabled, not simply willing, to suspend disbelief.
This is one of the key differences between a well written and a poorly written fantasy or sci-fi adventure.

 

However it is my impression that exactly this film made people to think about the global warming, people who didn't understand or disregarded scientific data.
Of course the film is overblown, etc, but it did a good job at making people to think and inquire about the environmental situation we have now.

 

I never saw it, though after reading many posts here I don't think I'd want to see it now either.

 

It has really cool special effects and presents a non scientifically accurate simulation of possible events. It's a good watch as entertainment, but not a source of valid information.
I enjoyed it as such and switched off my analytic mind during it.

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:m:

 

That's where I leave the world of reality and float into the Abyss?

 

To Andre:
Sorry I missed your post until now. Dark Visitor is meant to be self contained story, designed to attract students to the hard sciences, who would never open a physics book knowingly. The text you quoted from about “the Harvard authors” is consistent with the story’s statements about how the principle characters met, their educations etc, but they do not exist. Thus it is not surprising that you did not find any of their published papers. Even the historian, Billy T, who claims to have written the story for Jack, the astronomer does not exist. I am not really Billy T, but a retired physics professor concerned that the western world has already lost technological leader ship to Asia and is in the process of losing Scientific leadership (and most good jobs) to Asia now.

I believe you are correct that the solar system is chaotic but not that tis dynamic can explain the tilt of Pluto’s orbit plane from the ecliptic. There is considerable controversy about the “perturbation of Neptune” but none that the belief that it was real by astronomers at that time caused Pluto to be discovered. I wanted a scary story (Northern hemisphere under great ice sheet in less than100 years and all ports useless in a decade as H2O is stored on land dropping ocean levels is one and possible) in which I could hide some physics and perhaps interest a pre med or pre law student etc.. I took the Pluto discovery and fact that many black holes come from almost all the first generations of stars, and in pairs, as the basis of this story.
If you know about ice ages, you know that the Earth’s orbit need only change slightly to trigger a permanent one. You probably also know that great snow falls occur when the air is not too cold and full of water vapor. Thus I timed the gravitational impulse from the passing “dark visitor” to make new Earth orbit more eccentric (but still less than Mars is) with southern hemisphere in summer, closer to the sun to evaporate the oceans and cover most of Earth with clouds as northern hemisphere was in winter, moist and mild with about a yard of snow fall most days in the DC area. Six months later the Earth is farther from the sun and all that snow (~100 feet or more in DC) does not melt in the colder summer.

Most people think the ice age must be associated with colder winters, but if you really want a rapid onset one, you Make lots of snow in moist, mild winters and then do not melt it all in the following colder summer, the way I did in Dark Visitor.