and totally possible.

My name is Diandra Leslie-Pelecky.

I have a PhD in physics, and I started off my life

as a condensed-matter physicist working in nanomedicine.

Along the way, I ended up writing a book called

"The Physics of NASCAR."

So today I'm gonna use that knowledge

to talk to you about some clips

from "Fast and Furious."

This is one that is a little difficult to analyze,

because you're not quite sure how long they're falling.

It could be anywhere from 11 seconds to maybe 15 seconds.

That's a really long time to fall.

I calculated out

what Dom's terminal velocity would be,

and that's biggest velocity you can fall

given that drag gets bigger as the speed goes up.

And he almost approaches it.

After 11 seconds,

Dom would be going 124 miles per hour

when he hit the water.

He would have fallen about 1,775 feet

at that point.

Now, 124 miles per hour into water,

maybe that's survivable.

Laso Schaller holds the record for the highest jump.

That was from 193 feet.

He hit the water at 76 miles an hour.

He broke his right clavicle and dislocated his pelvis.

The Golden Gate Bridge is about 245 feet.

People hit the water at 86 miles an hour.

Only 5% of the people who jump survive.

So the probability of them surviving is pretty small.

They built a launcher and took this beautiful

1966 Corvette and actually launched it

off the side of the cliff,

and then they had stuntmen

who did it separately from the car

because being hit by a car midair

would be worse than actually hitting the water.

And so they had the stuntmen do it,

but the stuntmen were on cables.

Then they came back, did it on a green screen

with the actual actors, who were, you know,

maybe eight feet above the ground.

But this one I think I would have to give a score

of two, because there's absolutely no way

they could've survived a jump that long.

So, this a 1969 Camaro.

It's got a mass of about 3,500 pounds.

So, they're hitting 90, so you know

the boat's going at least 90 miles an hour.

One of the things that you notice is that

when the car and the boat are both speeding along,

they're parallel to each other.

Now, how they all of a sudden get behind the boat,

I'm not actually sure how that happens.

But let's assume they can do that.

When they take off, they're going at approximately

45-degree angle off this ramp,

and they're going 120 miles an hour.

So not all of the speed

is taking them in a horizontal direction.

So I've taken cosine of 45; they're only now going

about 78 miles per hour toward the boat.

Now, that's a problem,

because the boat and the car looked like

they were going the same speed.

And the problem is, if the boat's going 100 miles per hour,

it'll be 1,200 feet from the shore.

The problem is, the car can only go 945 feet

in the time it's in the air.

There's actually no way

that the car could make it onto the boat.

Let's pretend the boat is only going 78 miles an hour,

because if they are, it's totally possible.

It is going fast enough, and it makes up

all the distance between it and the boat.

So if you include drag,

they're gonna lose some of their speed

due to air resistance.

They're still gonna hit that boat

at around 105 miles per hour.

The kinetic energy of the car

and the guys in the car, at that point,

is equal to about a fifth of a pound of TNT.

Some of that goes into wrecking the boat

and wrecking the car, but not all of it.

Which means some of it is gonna go into the guys,

and they're gonna have a whole lot worse

than a broken arm.

I think I'd give it probably a seven out of 10,

because it's possible it could happen.

They had to modify this tank

so it could go 60 miles an hour,

'cause they normally only go 30 miles an hour.

Dom, we'll assume his car was going 60 miles an hour,

so when he left it, he was going 60 miles an hour.

So you can look at conservation of momentum

and figure out that by the time they hit and continued on,

they were probably going around 40 miles an hour.

So a little bit of change in speed,

but the problem is when he hit the car

going 40 miles an hour, and she is about 120 pounds,

he's about 225, so you're talking about 340 or so pounds.

You're gonna be hitting it with an acceleration

of almost 100 g.

They have no protective gear.

So, you know, race-car drivers

routinely survive hits of 100 g.

They've got a big car around them.

And maybe it's possible that Dom could launch himself

at just the right angle to intercept Letty.

And then maybe it's possible that

that path took you onto the second bridge

instead of over the first one,

and maybe it's possible that there happened to be a car

at the point where they were landing,

and maybe it's possible

they survived hitting the car together.

Each one of those things might have happened,

but all four of them together

is just too much of a coincidence.

Once you're in the air, you cannot steer.

So if you misjudge in any way,

you're gonna miss her.

Now, if you watch baseball players,

they develop this very intuitive ability

to know the arc of a ball.

And after all, it's just a parabolic motion.

Maybe just Dom understands physics so well

that he knew exactly where to launch himself.

And if you talk to a race-car driver,

they would be able to understand centripetal acceleration

and explain it to you. Again, no equations,

but they get this intuitive understanding for it.

So, it's just possible, maybe Dom has

rescued enough people who are flying through the air

that he understands how to do it.

Hollywood has its own physics.

One of the rules is they have time dilation,

which is that when something really exciting is happening,

it can take as long as you want it to take.

Slowing down, let's say 120 miles an hour,

and I pick that number only because

that'll tell you, at 120 miles an hour,

the car is going two miles every minute.

So for every minute of that clip,

you're traveling two miles.

The longest airport runway in the word is 3.4 miles,

which means if they were on that runway,

this still could take 1.7 minutes.

And it doesn't.

It takes a lot, it takes, like, 11 or 12 minutes,

which would result in just this unfathomably long runway.

OK, so Dom is driving a 2012 Dodge Charger,

and let's pretend this is a super-reinforced version

of a Dodge Charger.

He doesn't have a lot of time to get up speed.

Because he's only got the inside of a plane,

and as you saw from the fight that was going on,

there's not a lot of room.

I think I have to give a one.

Just because here,

they stretched my ability to ignore reality

just a little further than I'm capable of doing.

Try to figure out how much that vault weighs,

according to the storyline.

So, we're gonna assume it's a 5-ton vault.

That's about 10,000 pounds.

There's $100 million in $100 bills.

That's gonna give us another 2,200 pounds.

Dom is 225 pounds,

and the car is 4,180 pounds.

That gives us a total weight of 16,605 pounds

that his car has to accelerate.

If you ever tried to move something heavy,

like a refrigerator or a bookcase,

you push on it, and it doesn't move.

And you push harder, it doesn't move.

And you push harder, and finally it moves.

That moment when it moves,

you've just overcome the static frictional force.

The static frictional force is higher

than the kinetic frictional force.

And what that means in real-people talk

is that once you get something moving,

it's much easier to keep it moving.

So the question is,

is it possible for this 2010 Charger SRT

to overcome the friction needed to move?

So we're gonna calculate how long it would take him

to accelerate up to 50 miles an hour.

We've got the 425-horsepower car

accelerating 16,605 pounds.

And it turns out that would take about 5.86 seconds,

which is a little longer than it took him

to actually do it in the movie.

So the fact that he got the car accelerating that fast,

that definitely couldn't happen in real life.

But that's without friction.

So once you put friction in,

what you find if you calculate

is that the coefficient of friction between, like,

steel and asphalt is pretty high.

And you probably could not,

even with a nitrous oxide boost,

get the vault moving.

So, once you got it moving, you could keep it moving.

What the folks have said who did this stunt,

they found the same thing.

They learned a lot about static friction the hard way.

And they actually put a slippery material

on the bottom of the vault to get it moving.

But one of the problems with that

is when you make something easier to start moving,

you also make it easier to stop moving.

And my understanding is they were very surprised

when they thought it would come to a stop

and it took a lot longer to stop than they thought it would.

The other thing is the question of,

you have this fairly small mass of a car and Dom.

That's about 2,000 pounds.

And the mass of the vault,

which is about 15,000 pounds.

So you've got something that's seven times bigger

than something else.

Now, think about when they're coming down

and then Dom starts, stops, and he lets the vault

sort of swing around.

The vault is, you know, seven times heavier

than Dom and his car.

And I just don't buy that he has enough traction

to swing the vault without the vault pulling his car along.

Making these stunts work in real life,

with practical effects and not CGI,

so they built something like seven or eight different vaults

with different weights so that they could do

all the different parts with the vault.

And in fact, in some points, they actually had

a little semi cab inside the vault

and the vault was driving around by itself.

So I would give this stunt a five.

I mean, we've all tried to go up a down escalator, right?

That's all he's doing there.

This whole stunt relies on

the person being able to run faster

than the bus is falling.

When they filmed this, the stuntperson did actually

run up the bus as it was falling.