Last week, I saw the movie ‘Chain Reaction’ on TV. In this movie, Keanu Reeves is a chemist working in an alternative energy lab. A massive hydrogen explosion destroys the lab and the surrounding neighborhood. However, Reeves escapes by outrunning the explosion on his motorcycle. He does the same thing at the end of the movie. There are dozens of movies like this, movies in which the hero outruns an explosion. I never took a physics or chemistry course in college, but I am suspicious that you can actually outrun an explosion. James Bond does this quite often. In ‘Golden Eye’, James Bond blows up a military base, but he escapes by running faster than the explosion is expanding. In Rambo movies, Sylvester Stallone outruns explosions in the jungle. In the TV show ‘Star Trek’, the Enterprise is constantly outrunning explosions, including exploding stars. They do this by going to ‘warp speed’, which is many times faster than the speed of light. The show never explains what warp speed is. When I was in college, I saw the movie ‘Krakatoa – East of Java.’ I recall that the title of this movie annoyed me. I was good at geography, and I knew that Krakatoa is west of Java. In this movie, just before the Krakatoa volcano explodes, people get on a sailing ship and sail away. They escape because their ship is sailing faster than the explosion. The majority of my tenants are working in chemistry labs so maybe one of them can explain to me how you can outrun an explosion. People are constantly doing it in movies, but I am very skeptical about this.