‘Unobtainium’ is a fictional term used to describe a material that’s super rare, expensive or impossible to get hold of. The term dates back to the 1950s, and is believed to have originated in the aerospace engineering community. Engineers used it as a joke to describe materials that had perfect properties but were impossible or impractical to get hold of with current technology – like something that’s lightweight but incredibly strong or resistant to damage. As you can probably guess, it’s derived from the word ‘unobtainable’.
‘Unobtainium’ turns up in science fiction a lot, although I’m not completely convinced that the writers/directors are always in on the joke. The most famous one is probably from CGI snooze-fest Avatar, where unobtainium is a highly valuable mineral mined on the moon Pandora. It also turns up in The Core, a terrible 2003 sci-fi starring Hilary Swank and international treasure Stanley Tucci (both of whom should know better, frankly). In that film it’s a material used to construct a drilling machine that can withstand the extreme conditions in the Earth’s core. Why do they need to build that? Well, because the Earth’s core has stopped rotating, causing chaos on the surface including people with pacemakers suddenly dropping dead, and lightning strikes causing Rome’s Colosseum to explode. Ah, okay then.
The Core has the dubious accolade of having got almost all of its science completely wrong. Here are just a couple of examples:
if the Earth’s core did stop spinning, we’d have no protection from solar radiation and would all cook to death (which would have been a very short, and probably better, film)
the movie’s scientists constantly refer to the Earth's ‘electromagnetic field’ when, in reality, the Earth has a magnetic field, which is quite different
when our hastily assembled team of random heroes reach the centre of the Earth, they communicate with their commander using a radio. This would be completely impossible because the ground would block the signal
when the drilly-ship thing is drilling through the Earth to the core, it’s going straight down. But the writers seemed to forget about gravity, as the people inside it still manage to walk back and forth between different parts of the ship, when they should in fact be climbing.
This is just the tip of the bad science iceberg – The Core’s science was so inaccurate that it led to the creation of The Science & Entertainment Exchange, a programme that connects entertainment industry workers with scientists and engineers to promote better science in movies and television. Wow.
(With thanks to my friend Abby for suggesting this as a word of the week.)