10 Common Misconceptions About Science In Film And TV That Bug Real Scientists

Light speed and relativity are tricky things to understand, that’s why it took a literal Einstein to help work out many of these concepts. However, scientists are a finickity bunch and won’t even give studios a pass for this.

When it comes to the many representations of light speed travel there are numerous faults, many more than can be detailed here, however most scientists, when asked, said their main issues are with time and mass.

When it comes to light speed, time starts to get a bit freaky. Imagine if you will you are on a ship travelling at light speed (299,792,458 m/s) towards a destination 5 billion light years away, ignoring the expansion of space, how long do you think it would take for your journey?

Well, that all depends on who you ask.

For you, the journey would be instantaneous. Not figuratively instantaneous. Literally. The passage of time does not exist at this speed.

However, for someone on observing you from the planet you started from, it would take 5 billion years (space-time and relativity- It’s weird). Just think about that for a second. 5 billion years ago the Earth didn’t exist. So many things will have changed in that time.

Granted the distances portrayed on screen are often much smaller distances, but even travelling 1000 light years would have a significant impact on what you found when returning home, entire civilisations could have risen and fallen in this time and coordination of entire fleets of ships would be impossible.

Those familiar with DC’s The Flash may also be aware of the problem with mass. Travelling this fast would give every one of your molecules infinite mass. Which in addition to killing you, would destroy everything in your wake, creating numerous blackholes and essentially breaking physics and spacetime.

Not only this but if Einstein’s famous equation of E=MC2 is true, then infinite mass requires infinite energy (the M and E parts respectively), meaning an infinite amount of energy is required to move something with mass to lightspeed (without using something that can shorten the length of spacetime, such as a warp drive).

Surprisingly, this is not the only misconception that involves The Flash.