Anyone with eyes and a brain can see that Jack could have gotten on the door with Rose and survived. Whether or not their relationship could have lived beyond a weekend cruise ship fuckfest will never be determined, but we finally have mathematical confirmation of what fans and Jezebel staffers have been screaming for years: There. Was. Room.
The Advertiser reports that three teen girls in Westminster, Abigail Wicks, Christy Zhang and Julia Damato, used math to prove that Rose could have scootched over a smidge and let Jack on the door with her as they awaited rescue in the wreckage of the Titanic:
“We looked at how buoyant the door would have been, and how that would have changed if there were people on top of that,” Abigail, 15, says.
“There was a lot of exploring and testing, and we had to fiddle with different buoyancies and look at what materials were realistic for that time.”
In fairness to our heroes, there were some aspects to this solution that might not have occurred to either character in the panic of being thrown into the freezing ocean. These young mathematicians suggest, for example, that the lovers would have had to put their life jackets under the door to support its buoyancy when Jack got on top. Damato said they considered not only the weight of the door and its tragic passengers, but the effect of the sea water in their equation.
Putting the life jacket under the door has been suggested before, and was vehemently contested by Titanic director James Cameron in an interview with the Daily Beast in January:
“OK, so let’s really play that out: you’re Jack, you’re in water thats 28 degrees (-2C,) your brain is starting to get hypothermia.
“Mythbusters asks you to now go take off your life vest, take hers off, swim underneath this thing, attach it in some way that it won’t just wash out two minutes later – which means you’re underwater tying this thing on in 28-degree water and that’s going to take you five to ten minutes, so by the time you come back up you’re already dead.
“So that wouldn’t work. His best choice was to keep his upper body out of the water and hope to get pulled out by a boat or something before he died.”
Who do you believe; James Cameron, noted douche, or three rad teenage girls who won the Year 10 National Maths Talent Quest?