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2001: A Space Odyssey: How Kubrick Mastered Weightlessness (and You Won’t Believe How)
It’s not a perfect movie. I mean, it feels like you could cut an hour of material out if you just started with the apes and then skipped the tripping colored visuals as Dave enters the monolith. But still, it was created in 1968 and the special effects were stellar for the time. Oh, the science was pretty good too.
If you haven’t seen it, the basic idea follows the first contact of humans with an alien intelligence. A group of astronauts attempt to travel to Jupiter to investigate an anomaly — but their ChatGPT robot doesn’t know how to handle hiding the truth from them so he figures he should just kill them.
I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.
There, now you are caught up. Still, you maybe should just watch the movie because it’s a classic.
But wait! There’s physics here too. Let’s get to two of the scenes that I like to use in my introductory physics courses (even though hardly any students have ever seen this flick).
Air Lock With No Helmet
HAL 9000 (before Google Gemini) trapped the astronaut Dave outside of the main spaceship. Dave was in a pod, but HAL wouldn’t let the pod dock. In his rush to leave, Dave forget his spacesuit helmet so that he…
