2. Tears Don't Fall In Space; They Don't Bubble Up And Float Away Either
After Clooney has magically drifted away and after yet another landmark space structure, the International Space Station (ISS), gets shredded by the ravaging wave of satellite debris, Sandra Bullock's character has some moments of introspective despair. She's yet to figure out that she can use the soft landing jets to propel the damaged Soyuz to the Chinese space station (Clooney's ghost hasn't yet arrived to give her that bit of advice), so she is merely adrift in the Russian capsule. There is no contact with Mission Control, as the monstrous wave of debris has also wiped out communications satellites. "Half of North America just lost Facebook," Clooney's character says at one point in all seriousness. Bullock is completely alone. She does get to hear one last human voice as well as some barking dogs when what I presume is a shortwave radio picks up a transmission from a jovial Inuit fisherman. Shortly after, Bullock is on the verge of cutting off her oxygen and surrendering to the big sleep. A single tear forms at the corner of her eye, then bubbles into a sphere and floats off her face toward the camera. It is a great moment, cinematically and emotionally. Scientifically, however, it's far from accurate. In reality, if an astronaut's eye produces tears, the water tends to conglomerate around the eyeball, forming into a flubber-like glob of liquid. In 2011, astronaut Drew Feustel had some trouble during a spacewalk when a fleck of soap from the inside of his helmet got into his eye, causing him to tear up. The tears didn't turn into tiny little balls that bounced around inside his helmet. Again, if there's no force acting upon something in a zero-g environment, it's not going to go anywhere. The tears just built up into a blob around his eyeball until he was able to wipe them away with a space sponge. Super-cool Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, who made many interesting videos during his stay on the ISS (including a music video for his version of David Bowie's Space Oddity), answered this question about tears back in April of this year. Apparently, the writers of Gravity didn't get the memo.
