The Cartoon Laws of Physics | StarTalk

So we're talking about animation here, and, uh, some of the earliest concepts of animation.

There's a drawing on a, is it an N in Iran, where it shows several images that, in sequence, is a moving animal. Yeah, it's a leaping animal.

It's so we've been thinking about this for long. Is the first movie 5,200 years ago? And I'm sure that before that, uh, there is a piece of pottery with some porn on it. Porn, because that's the first thing that people go to whenever any new technology is moved. Reproduction is a powerful motivation.

Absolutely, yeah. That kind of motion science went on later in photography when people took stop motion and numerous pictures to try to see whether, when a horse was running, it would actually have all of its feet off the ground at once. And the answer was, it did!

And it's gone since then. Nowadays, with movies, we can't even tell that they're sep. So, in fact, animation film, yes, this whole industry requires that you cannot resolve in time the images that are going by your eyes.

That's right, your brain blurs them. So now, there's some fun facts in here. For example, Charles, you must know about this. It's on the internet, and it's old; it was one of the first things sort of transferred into an inter, into digital form, yes, was the physics of cartoons.

Cartoon physics, the cartoon laws of physics. And so, for example, one of them is, if you're running off a cliff, you will not fall until you realize that you're no longer standing on a cliff.

That makes perfect sense, that's like the first law of physics. And there's a whole, there's like 20; there's a whole page of them. I'm sure there's got to be a law that if you see a very attractive woman, your eyes pop out of your head very large, and then go back in. And there's a honking sound too.

Well, what is the famous ultimate rule? Uh, you have to follow the laws of physics unless it's funnier not to!