Being
home for holiday breaks usually involves lifetime movies on reruns in the
background of cooking all day. Over this
break, one of the movies playing in our family room was Titanic, the classic
1997 film. * Spoiler Alert *, the boat
sinks and our main protagonists are left to fend for themselves in the 28
degree waters. Rose is able to climb
onto a door from the sunken ship but Jack is left to freeze to death since
there is not enough room on the door for the two of them. With all the emotional investment in the
movie, you can’t not be upset because it seems clear that Jack and Rose could
have fit on the door and escaped the wreckage together. However, director James Cameron in a recent
interview with Vanity Fair explained that this scene is actually true to the
physics of the situation. He says, “I
was in the water with the piece of wood putting people on it for about two days
getting it exactly buoyant enough so that it would support one person with full
free-board.” Cameron spoke about how he
was a stickler on the physics of it. If
we look at the equation
v (displaced)/v
(object) = p (object)/p (fluid)
the density of wood is around 7000 kg/m^3 and water is 1000 kg/m^3 so the
percent submerged would be 70%, and this is without the addition of a full-grown
adult. Therefore, there had to be enough
changes to the door to allow for one person to be fully out of the water on the
door so two people would have taken more altering that would be far from
accurate. I looked into a Mythbusters
episode in 2012 they actually had on this topic, and they found that the only
way both Jack and Rose could have fit on the board would have been if there had
been a lifejacket under the board to aid in the buoyancy. It appears the physics and the script are compatible,
but regardless people still love to debate the fact.
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