THIS FILM CAN'T SINK!

Twenty-five years after it was released, James Cameron’s Titanic continues to enthral audiences in India

- SNEHA BHURA

It is an online lecture called ‘The science of deformation’. The speaker is Prof Rajesh Prasad of IIT Delhi, an expert in applied mechanics. He asks the students what seems to be a fairly straightforward question: “If steel hits ice, which one do you think will break—steel or ice?”

Not so fast.

The question was preceded by a sequence from the film Titanic. The protagonists, Jack and Rose, climb on to the stern rails as the giant vessel breaks into two and is swallowed by the ocean. The connection to the question is obvious. The Titanic had been the largest moveable object made by man until it struck an iceberg and sank in the Atlantic on the midnight of April 14, 1912, killing more than 1,500 passengers and crew members. The ship was made of 46 million kilograms of the finest steel available, and yet it had crumbled like a cookie when it hit the iceberg.

“The question is,” asks Prasad, “Why did the Titanic sink so easily? The ship’s steel was more than an inch thick—a very high-quality steel at the time.”

Soon, Prasad begins to explain why the ship went down, using jargon that sounds as poetic as it is esoteric—elastic and plastic deformation, ductile and brittle fracture, and so on.