Mr. Gose,

Science Film #2 : "The Day the Earth Caught Fire"

        I went to Blockbuster and found out that they do not carry most of the films mentioned in the "Science in the Cinema" book. Fortunately, I have a friend who is a B-movie and sci-fi buff and he has most of these films. So I have been borrowing from him and watching them. I saw "The Day the Earth Caught Fire" last Saturday.

        In this film, the explosion of 2 simultaneous hydrogen bombs push the Earth toward the Sun. According to the physics, this is not possible because "for the Earth to be moved toward the Sun, some of the matter would have to be propelled in the direction away from the Sun at sufficient speed to escape the Earth's gravitational pull, that is, at speeds greater than the escape velocity of 25,000 m.p.h."(Dubeck, 1988, p.18). If we did a calculation, even with more than a million tons of debris, the Earth would have moved only a minute amount closer to the Sun, unnoticeable to the eye (Dubeck, 1988, p.18).

        Also temperatures continued to rise dramatically in the film. Even now, Malibu is a little cooler but in the valley, the heat rises to almost 110 degrees and people suffer from heat strokes. "The newspaper indicates temperatures of 140 have been reached and are rising each day; at such temperature most people would have collapsed from heat stroke, not continued to function to a limited degree, as pictured (Dubeck, 1988, p.22).