Neil deGrasse Tyson Breaks Down Sci-Fi Movies

First of all, one should never watch "Star Wars" for its science [chuckles] Just leave science at home. Hey GQ, Neil deGrasse Tyson here. You're a personal astrophysicist. And today we're going to look at scenes from sci-fi

films, to decide whether they got the science right or wrong. This is "The Breakdown." [bright music] "The Day After Tomorrow." These tornadoes are forming so fast. What?

Oh, oh my God. Lisa, are you getting this on camera? This tornado just came and erased the Hollywood sign. The Hollywood sign is gone. It's just shredded.

[wind howling] [suspenseful music] [Reporter] What can you see? Is anyone hurt? I wouldn't be surprised, there is so much damage down there. And there are people down there taking pictures.

What the hell are you guys doing? Go for cover, you can't stay here. Get out of here. I've never understood why in disaster films, the objects of disaster tend to aim for monuments and things we especially

care about. You have all the area of California, the tornado is hitting the Hollywood sign. Come on, have you been to the Hollywood sign? There's so much else it could have hit and it's

not. It aimed for the Hollywood sign. So that pisses me off, okay? A, B, these are circulating currents. They correctly show them turning counterclockwise.

Storm systems turn counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere. But watch, if two storms turning counterclockwise are too close to one another, then the air moving this way on this side cancels the air moving that way on the other side.

So you can't have two storms too close to one another because they'll cancel each other out on the side that faces the two of them. And they'll either merge to become one, or they'll just cancel each other out completely.

And so we're looking at these two tornadoes adjacent to one another that you thermodynamically and the fluid dynamics of air will not permit that. And so while I was watching this movie, I was just pissed off the whole time.

And we got a guy in a helicopter commenting that people are on the ground taking pictures. The dude's in a helicopter around a tornado. And he's worried about someone on the ground taking pictures. Who's at risk here?

Who do you think is at risk? The helicopter that's in the air that's moving or someone planted on the ground? So anyhow, climate change in general will be responsible for extremes of weather conditions that'll take us outside of our

comfort zone of how and why we built cities where they are. "Oh, there's a flood. I don't like that flood. Let's build embankments to prevent the flood from happening in

the future." "Oh, here's an even bigger flood. Let's build the embankments even bigger." It got really hot in the summer. Let's bring in air conditioning. And so over the years and over the decades, a

city will adjust itself to the range of climate that it experiences. This is quite normal and natural. If it gets a lot of snow, you bring in snow removal.

Once you've established that, then the city moves on decade by decade, accommodating its weather extremes until you have climate change where weather extremes outstrip your historical record of weather extremes. And when it outstrips it, everything you had done before