Big Things in Too-Small Packages

Remember in Back to the Future II, when Doc, who needs an emergency jump of power for the DeLorean , shoves some garbage into the Mr. Fusion and returns to the future? The car reached the 1.21 jigawatts needed for the time jumped with the power of a banana peel and some stale beer, virtually replacing the need for plutonium. That's a lot to ask out of a little garbage, which simply doesn't have the energy density.Sadly, the proton packs from Ghostbusters fall into this same category. To supply the proton packs with enough power to fire a stream of continuous matter, a Ghostbuster requires a particle accelerator to be strapped to his back, the film tells us. And while some particle accelerators can now be built on something as small as a computer chip , the power demands of an accelerator that could destroy all of space-time if the streams were crossed would be a little outside the scope of a backpack-style device. After all, the Large Hadron Collider is 17 miles around and it has still failed to wipe us off the face of the earth.Speaking of incredible power in an unbelievably small package, the notoriously unscientific movie The Core posits that a few well-placed nuclear weapons in the core of Earth could restart our magnetic fields—which stopped because Earth stopped spinning—for other absurd, unknown reasons.