John Price: Physicist Debunks Movie Stunt for Science Channel Production

Not only is John Price an expert on nuclear physics – he also had the opportunity to play one on TV. The associate professor of physics at California State University, Dominguez Hills was chosen to explain how a stunt in “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” was scientifically impossible for an episode of “Science at the Movies,” an upcoming show for the Science Channel, which will premiere this summer.

In the film, Indiana Jones, played by Harrison Ford, tries to protect himself from a nuclear blast by hiding in a lead-lined refrigerator in an empty house. Price says that not only would a lead-lined refrigerator not exist in a common home, but that the appliance would not provide any protection from radiation.

“You can get a refrigerator lined with lead if you’re going to store radioactive materials inside of it and need to keep them cold,” he says. “Other than that, you would never have a lead-lined refrigerator, it’s not useful. Lead conducts heat, which is the last thing you want in a refrigerator.”

Price says that a refrigerator is a death trap that cannot be opened from the inside. He also points out that a refrigerator would not provide any protection from the blast, despite being lined with lead.

“There are two types of radiation,” Price points out. “One is gammas, which is like light. The other is neutrons. They want us to think the lead lining is going to protect him from all the radiation in the bomb, but it’s not. Lead has no effect on neutrons, they go right through it.”

Jones emerges unscathed from the refrigerator after presumably being shielded from radiation and after it is hurled by the blast’s ensuing wind hundreds of yards away. Price says that the force would have crushed his skeleton and given him fatal internal injuries.

“The refrigerator overtakes a speeding car and lands, bouncing several times as it does so,” he says. “He then gets out of the refrigerator and walks away.

“By the end of this movie, he should have been at the very least, balding and suffering severe radiation sickness, but you don’t see any of this,” he notes. “This really skirts a lot of scientific issues. But it makes for a fun movie.”

Last fall, Price and the CSU Dominguez Hills physics department, which has a heavy concentration in nuclear and particle physics, hosted the annual meeting of the California Section of the American Physical Society (APS) in the Loker Student Union, bringing international scholars and researchers to the Carson campus.

For more about the physics department at CSU Dominguez Hills, click here.

- Joanie Harmon