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This thread is about movies or tv shows where its appears the writers appear to not have access to google and make unforgivable scientific mistakes. Forget FTL travel or clarketech that should not exist. I'm talking about things that are more simple and are harder to handwave or even contradicts its own lore. One which come to mind is the episode of Star Trek: Enterprise "Marauders" where klingons steal deuterium from a mining colony.
Deuterium being one of the most abundant matter in the universe, and they mine it on a earth like world and only by a thousand kilograms yet its as valuable as gold. As a hardcore trekkie I would think they would steal antimatter instead since that's what they use for their annihilation reactors. Science fail and inter-universe lore fail. 
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Ooohh - so much potential crunchy goodness here 
Let's see....
1) The movie The Core in which Earth's core stops spinning for some unexplained reason, all that rotational energy just disappears for some unexplained reason, and the loss of the Earth's magnetic field allows 'microwaves' from space to start striking Earth, resulting in the Golden Gate Bridge dissolving and collapsing. Oh, and before that, the failure of Earth's magnetic field results in some kind of giant lightning storm that knocks down a bunch of stone structures. And they are supposed to restart the core by detonating a nuke deep underground.
Any mechanism that could stop Earth's core from spinning (assuming it even spins at a rate different from the rest of the planet - not sure of the top of my head) would likely turn the planet molten in the process. If the core did stop spinning all that rotational energy wouldn't just vanish without a trace, but would go somewhere, likely also doing Very Bad Things ™ to the planet. The planetary magnetic field has no effect on any form of EM radiation and so couldn't stop microwaves from space even if such were a common occurrence (which I'm pretty sure they're not since Sol doesn't radiate much of its energy as microwaves). Any microwaves that do hit the planet from the Sun (if any) would be absorbed by the 100+km of atmosphere and certainly aren't going to dissolve a steel bridge while having no effect on the people sitting on said structure. Lightening is a common destructive force in movies, but in reality tends to just either pass through or ground out into the Earth in most strikes and certainly isn't going to knock down the Acropolis or the Roman Coliseum or the like. Any nuclear bomb we could build with anything like our current tech would be insignificant compared to the mass of Earth's core or the energy needed to get it to move in any significant fashion, rotating or otherwise. Expecting such a bomb to boost the planetary core up to speed from a dead stop is totally beyond the pale.
All this before all the other issues this stinker of a film has.
2) Any movie or TV show (the original V mini-series, Battle: Los Angeles, probably others) in which aliens arrive to steal our water. Water is one of the most abundant items in our solar system and most of it isn't sitting at the bottom of Earth's gravity well. They could just go to Ceres or the various moons of the gas giants and tank up as much as they want for much less effort and without anyone being able to shoot at them in any way, at least with our current tech.
3) The film Armageddon in which a set of nuclear bombs that humans can practically carry around single-handedly are able to split an asteroid 'the size of Texas' in half and propel the chunks to pass on either side of the Earth. Um. No.
All I got for now. Probably more later as they come to me.
Todd 
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The first thing that comes to my mind is "City Beneath the Sea" - a 1971 science fiction television film and television pilot for a proposed series by Irwin Allen.
Evidence separates truth from fiction.
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"That DNA looks human!", uttered in Mission to Mars by an astronaut looking at a short chain of pseudo-DNA on a computer screen.
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Independence Day: Advanced alien race with giant city ships, energy weapons, anti gravity technology is no match for the awesome power of a Apple Powerbook 5300!!!
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I love Pertwee's Doctor, but "Reverse the Polarity of the Neutron Flow" makes me laugh, espically when you know the story behind it
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Any time the story hinges on a psuedo-science deus ex machina, I get upset. So yes, I got upset quite a bit with ST:TNG. When the conflict of the story is resolved entirely by a character saying some sciencey-sounding words and mashing a couple of buttons it's pretty clear that the story sucks. I'd honestly rather the conflict be solved with machine gun fire (though that's a cheap shot, too) a la Stargate SG1.
The fix for this is easy: Don't explain. Trust your audience to fill in the gaps, and do your best to keep the gaps small. Need FTL in your sci-fi story? Don't explain it - let the fans explain it. That worked quite well for ST:TOS. However - you can't do this when the gaps are too big. You end up with "The Core" as was mentioned earlier, and people won't jump the gaps and move on with the story.
On a side note: I am completely worn out on the trope of "aliens mining natural resources" as a backdrop for an alien invasion. We are already contemplating asteroid mining as a cheaper alternative to terrestrial mining. If you are already in space AND can travel interstellar distances, why go planetside to mine ANYTHING? Now - this opinion doesn't completely negate alien invasion stories. What if the resource they want is something biological? The goofy 80s Dolph Lundgren movie "I Come In Peace" (apparently titled "Dark Angel" for those not in North America) stepped around this. Another viable "alien invasion" story that doesn't fall into this is the aliens invading earth simply because they WANT the fight. "Predator" does this on the small scale and (I can't believe I'm going to actually praise this skidmark of a movie) "Pixels" had an interesting take on it.
All that said, in defense of Independence Day and the power of an Apple laptop - I've never had trouble with that and frankly don't understand everyone's quickness to take exception to it. It's not overtly stated, but it's implied that most of our modern technology is reverse engineered from the alien ship they have had at Area 51 since 1947. With that being the case, it's not a great big leap to assume that the bulk of our computer technology came from their computer technology, and maybe even our programming and networking technology came from the same source. But evidently this is too big a gap for the audience to jump, and could maybe used some explanatory dialog thrown at it.
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(06-13-2017, 04:31 AM)rom65536 Wrote: Any time the story hinges on a psuedo-science deus ex machina, I get upset. So yes, I got upset quite a bit with ST:TNG. When the conflict of the story is resolved entirely by a character saying some sciencey-sounding words and mashing a couple of buttons it's pretty clear that the story sucks. I'd honestly rather the conflict be solved with machine gun fire (though that's a cheap shot, too) a la Stargate SG1.
The fix for this is easy: Don't explain. Trust your audience to fill in the gaps, and do your best to keep the gaps small. Need FTL in your sci-fi story? Don't explain it - let the fans explain it. That worked quite well for ST:TOS. However - you can't do this when the gaps are too big. You end up with "The Core" as was mentioned earlier, and people won't jump the gaps and move on with the story.
On a side note: I am completely worn out on the trope of "aliens mining natural resources" as a backdrop for an alien invasion. We are already contemplating asteroid mining as a cheaper alternative to terrestrial mining. If you are already in space AND can travel interstellar distances, why go planetside to mine ANYTHING? Now - this opinion doesn't completely negate alien invasion stories. What if the resource they want is something biological? The goofy 80s Dolph Lundgren movie "I Come In Peace" (apparently titled "Dark Angel" for those not in North America) stepped around this. Another viable "alien invasion" story that doesn't fall into this is the aliens invading earth simply because they WANT the fight. "Predator" does this on the small scale and (I can't believe I'm going to actually praise this skidmark of a movie) "Pixels" had an interesting take on it.
All that said, in defense of Independence Day and the power of an Apple laptop - I've never had trouble with that and frankly don't understand everyone's quickness to take exception to it. It's not overtly stated, but it's implied that most of our modern technology is reverse engineered from the alien ship they have had at Area 51 since 1947. With that being the case, it's not a great big leap to assume that the bulk of our computer technology came from their computer technology, and maybe even our programming and networking technology came from the same source. But evidently this is too big a gap for the audience to jump, and could maybe used some explanatory dialog thrown at it.
Ancient aliens man. Its all about them aliens.
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Seasons 1-3 of Andromeda were awesome, but seasons 4-5 were just crap.
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This is a book rather than a movie or TV show, but the sheer number of egregious science mistakes in this book justify its addition here IMHO. With that in mind, I give you Hex by Allen Steele and my comments copied from the review I wrote about the book on Amazon:
Science problems:
1) The background for most of the story is a Dyson sphere, a huge artificial structure enclosing its entire star. Probably moderately familiar to most SF readers. In this case, the sphere is spun for gravity. Steele mentions this and then promptly ignores this fact for the entire rest of the story, with his spacecraft (which appear to use some sort of nuclear fission or fusion rocket or even chemical thrusters) just flying right up to it. Problem is, that an object this size, spinning fast enough to produce the 2 gravities of centrifugal force at its equator that is mentioned, would be moving at hundreds of miles per second (Larry Niven describes this in detail in his excellent book Ringworld, with a 1 gravity spin for the ringworld requiring it to move at 770 miles per second. The spin also plays a role in various parts of the story and later books). As mentioned, in Hex this spin gets about 1 sentence and is then ignored.
2) It is mentioned several times in the book that the sphere is made up of about a trillion open hexagonal structures. Less than 15 minutes of research on google to locate the appropriate calculators plus maybe a minute or two more of number crunching reveals that the sphere would actually consist of a bit more than 43 billion hexagons. Still a very large and impressive number but nothing in the same league as a trillion plus.
3) At one point the sphere is said to have a volume of 1.086e17 miles (that's 1,086, +14 zeros). Normally you would say cubic miles, but Steele leaves this out. Possibly because this number isn't the volume of a sphere this size but the surface area. The actual volume 3.37e24 cubic miles (that's 3,370,+21 zeros roughly).
Ok, so maybe it's not critical to the whole story, but given that Steele actually goes out of his way to produce some nice little drawings of details of the sphere structure at the beginning, includes another graphic elsewhere in the book (mine was a hexagon in the paperback copy, they must have fixed it since the other reviews were written), and has a page on which he presents several of the dimensions of the sphere, in one case exactly and out to three decimal places, it would appear that some sort of calculations were done. They just appear to have been incomplete and sloppy.
4) At several points in the book it appears that the main exploration ship is effectively hanging in space near where the action is going on. This would be impossible even if the sphere weren't rotating. Apparently Steele has no real comprehension of the concept of an orbit.
Todd
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