When I was a wee pup, my favourite thing about James Bond movies were the scenes with Q. Back then, getting a peek behind the laboratory of insane gadgets and wild weapons was just as cool as killing bad guys in a tuxedo and sleeping with women without one. But how real were those movie-world gadgets? Giz favourite Neil deGrasse Tyson analysed and fact checked Bond weapons to see which were scientifically viable.
In an interview with NPR (you can listen to it here), Neil deGrasse Tyson shows us what weapons could theoretically be real (like, actually exist in the real world) and which gadgets could only exist in the movie-world. Could a ring, when twisted, emit a high enough frequency to break glass? Maybe! What about a watch that could emit a magnetic field so strong it could deflect a bullet? Nope! Bullets are made out of lead.
So what could be real? According to Neil deGrasse Tyson, not much. But that’s not a bad thing:
“What made the Bond gadgets attractive is that they used a little bit of what you already knew was out there, and just took it to some extreme, forcing you to say, ‘Yeah, that could happen,’ even if it had to violate a few laws of physics along the way.”
We all just want them to be real. That’s probably because we all just want to be James Bond, too. [NPR]