Slide 1: Titanic Good and Bad Science
Slide 2: Plot Overview After winning two tickets, during a poker game, for a trip on the RMS Titanic, Jack Dawson boards the ship. While onboard he spots the beautiful Rose DeWitt Bukater who is on her way to Philadelphia to marry her snobby fiancé, Cal. Rose feels trapped by her situation and makes a suicide attempt. Luckily Jack Dawson was able to rescue her. Cal, although disgusted by Jack, is forced to invite him for a first class dinner. After an unbearable dinner, Jack takes Rose to dance where she has the time of her life. Rose falls in love with Jack and decides to throw away her seemingly perfect life to be with the unpredictable Jack. During their evening together, they watch as the Titanic hits the iceberg. Cal finds out of their escapades and has Jack arrested and locked up as the ship is sinking. Rose now has to find Jack, avoid Cal, and quickly get herself to safety before the boat sinks into the freezing north Atlantic waters.
Slide 3: GOOD SCIENCE
Slide 4: Boat Turning • Before the boat hit the iceberg, they tried to reverse the boat and turn it to the right. • The propellers were initially moving forward and pushing the water backwards. Then once they stopped the boat kept moving forward. Then they changed the propellers’ direction in attempt to move the ship backwards. The ship had to overcome the forward moving momentum that the ship had in order to move the ship backwards. • Example: Remember the lab we did with the car that moved by using a propeller?
Slide 5: Water Pressure • The Captain of the Titanic locked himself in a room surrounded by glass windows in order to go down with his ship. We see him watch the water rising to the top of the window. The windows then break and the water comes rushing into the room. • The glass windows break due to fluid pressure. Fluid pressure is the pressure on an object submerged in a fluid. This pressure on the Titanic comes from the sheer weight of the fluid. Fluid pressure occurs in open conditions, such as the ocean. • p=pgh  pressure = (density of the fluid) (acceleration of gravity) (height of the water)
Slide 6: The Sinking Process • The direction of the rotational vectors showed good science • First the ship’s stern rotated upward, then it rotated downward as it broke off from the bow, then rotated upward again just before its final descent
Slide 7: BAD SCIENCE
Slide 8: Weather • The night the Titanic sunk the weather was below freezing and the water was ice cold. • Rose was in a thin dress with short sleeves and Jack had on a light jacket. They seemed to have not felt any of the coldness at this point. • Even after having been in the freezing water, their bodies showed no sign of being submerged in the freezing water. • Their bodies should have began to lose color and eventually the effects of the water would greatly slow down their speed and restrict their ability to move
Slide 9: Dead Bodies • A newly dead body, when placed in water will sink. However, after the gases of decomposition build up in the chest and abdomen, the body will inflate, causing it to rise like a hydrogen-filled balloon, and pop to the surface. With the passage of time and further decomposition, however, the body cavities eventually rupture, the gas escapes, and the corpse goes down again, this time for good • Jack Dawson had been dead long enough for the gases to rise into his chest. He would have floated rather than immediately sinking.
Slide 10: Undertow • As the ship took its final descent, Jack instructs Rose to hold on to him and kick to the surface to fight being sucked down by the ships undertow. • If the ship had actually created a large undertow, both Rose and Jack would have been taken down so far that they wouldn’t have had enough time to reach the top before running out of air. • Rose had a life vest on and would have floated up immediately but Jack did not and would have remained underwater. They came up too quickly for this to actually work.
Slide 11: The Final Descent • Researchers have found that the ship would not have created an undertow at all! • Chief Baker Charles Joughin, a Titanic survivor, was clinging to the railing on the stern (just like Jack and Rose had done) when the ship sank and he claimed he simply stepped off into the water without ever getting his head wet. • Researchers looked into this and found that there were probably large trapped air pockets in the ship. This made the upward acting buoyancy force almost equal to the downward acting gravitational force. This means the stern only had a small net downward force on it. This was enough to sink the ship, but given the ships huge inertia, it resulted in a very slow rate of descent, allowing the ship to gently sink under the water.