No, not the powdery, chalky stuff.

I noticed that Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was on today. Now, movies have a lot of bad physics in them, and I generally don’t let that get in the way of the movie enjoyment. But … there’s the scene where Augustus Gloop falls in the chocolate river and gets stuck in the tube leading to the marshmallow room. First there’s the “the suction’s got him” remark. That’s only a minor nit; suction is due to the absence of pressure the way we’ve defined things, so low pressure doesn’t suck — higher pressure blows, as it were. But that’s just starting the sloppy physics. Willy Wonka next explains that “terrific pressure is building up behind the blockage” and that will get him out. But that’s not the case — at least not at the time it’s stated. There’s no flow anymore, so the pressure can’t be building up. The chocolate is still flowing in the other pipes, and the river is at atmosphere. (and under those conditions, the pipe had better not be more than about 32 feet tall, since that’s all a one atmosphere pressure difference will get you). At best, what can happen is that the pressure in front of Augustus is dropping.

Now, Grandpa Joe declares that Augustus will leave the way a bullet gets shot out of a gun, but what we see is Agustus shooting up, but the chocolate lags behind. It shouldn’t happen that way. Unless Augustus is particularly flatulent (and this is never proffered as an explanation, though with his diet it’s not a bad conjecture), the gap behind him will be a vacuum, and at best the tube in front of him is at vacuum as well (though we hear him yelling, so that can’t be the case as long as we can hear him). There’s no force to propel him faster than the chocolate. Certainly not like a bullet in a gun, where you have rapidly expanding gas exerting a force.

And I won’t even get started on “fizzy lifting drink.” I’m switching over to “Cool Hand Luke”