This timepass article thanks to Subroto. He told me about this scene in the movie Torn Curtain starring Paul Newman. The story deals with - yes, you guessed it - the Cold War and how an American physicist (actually, rocket scientist) is acting as if he wants to defect to USSR. Said rocket scientist, Dr. Michael Armstrong, is played by Paul Newman.

Caution: this will only seem funny to physicists, so feel free to go back a step and read some of the non-esoteric articles!

In one of the scenes, Dr. Armstrong is apparently talking to a Russian physicist who is (typical!) haughty and overconfident, and wants to know how much Paul Newman knows about The Secret Formula (whatever that is)... and he says something to that effect.

Paul Newman goes upto the blackboard and writes down an equation.

This equation - fellow physicists - is nothing but the equation of motion in a rotating frame of reference! But - for some reason, it is written in a wierd scalar form, with the coriolis force being written as 2mω sinθ (which anyone reading this far down the page knows is the magnitude of the force, but not a single component in general).

Still, you can stop there and say, not bad, at least they got the magnitude right.

But no. The Russian physicist scoffs at this, and says something like, "Hah! Is that all you know? Now I will show you what I know!!"

And he adds an extra term to the right hand side of the (a wierd kind of scalar) equation of motion:

2mω cosθ

That's all I got to say about that.