While not perfect, we must admit that Titanic is one of the biggest physics movies around.

We got a bit giddy over the high-tech subs used in the opening scenes. However, we could have done without the hackneyed portrayal of the sub's technonerd staff. Had they merely been portrayed as crude, insensitive, and slovenly, we would have remained silent, but they were also portrayed as greedy money grubbers.

While technonerds may not be in the same category as Mother Teresa, Emily Post, or Little Mary Sunshine, we would like to point out that given the choice between living in luxury and driving high-tech mini-subs around the ocean bottom, real technonerds will choose the latter. It's a no-brainer. The only point of money for technonerds is that a certain amount of it is needed to support their techno-habits. Unfortunately, Titanic failed the reality test in this area.

Apparently the water leaking into the Titanic was magically warmed for the comfort of the passengers. The hero and heroine seemed to be able to slosh through it for much of the Titanic's final hour without so much as a shiver. Our soaked-to-the-skin hero and heroine also appeared immune to the cold night air as they stood on deck bravely awaiting the final moments of sinking. Perhaps they were warmed by the glow of romance. Once in the water, however, things did seem to cool a bit, at least in the thermal sense.

At first we wondered how the hero and heroine of the movie were not pulled under to their deaths by the sinking ship, especially DiCaprio, since he had no life jacket. Like many movie goers we had been indoctrinated over the years to believe the undertow from sinking ships was certain death. However, a little consideration of the doomed ship's free body diagram gave us the answer.

There were probably large trapped air pockets in the ship which made the upward acting buoyancy force almost, but not quite, equal to the downward acting gravitational force. In other words, the stern section probably had only a small net downward force on it. This would have been enough to sink it, but given the ship's huge inertia, would have resulted in a very slow rate of descent (at least initially). Hence, the ship could easily have slipped gently under the waves.

With a little research of historical accounts, we were able to confirm the somewhat gentle sinking rate. Chief Baker Charles Joughin was clinging to the railing on the stern (just like the hero and heroine of the movie) when it sank. He stepped off into the water without getting his head wet. Apparently, he was stone drunk at the time, which was widely credited for his survival in the frigid water before being picked up by a lifeboat. So much for the dramatic heart-rending scene where DiCaprio and Winslet were sucked under and torn apart from each other.

Human stuff aside, the big screen portrayal of the sinking was awesome. It had it all: linear and rotational velocity, acceleration, and inertia with torque, forces, Archimedes principle, and fluid dynamics included on a, well, titanic scale. We resorted to the right-hand thumb rule no less than three times in order to determine the direction of rotational vectors: first as the ship's stern rotated upward, then as it rotated downward when it broke off, and finally as it rotated upward again just before sinking—a three right-hand thumb movie, wow!