It’s the movie moment that has sparked debate for over two decades – could Rose have saved Jack on that door in Titanic?
And now a group of school girls say they’ve proven that it was possible for Leonardo DiCaprio’s character to have survived the famous ship’s sinking, if the pair had used one simple trick.
Fans will recall the moment Rose and Jack are forced into the freezing North Atlantic Sea and Rose clambers onto a piece of floating debris to escape the cold.
There is “only room for one” on the door and Jack tragically sacrifices himself so Rose can survive.
Year 10 pupils Abigail Wicks, Christy Zhang and Julia Damato from Westminster School in Adelaide used a math formula to show they could have both survived if they had put their life jackets under the floating door.
This would have supported the wood and the pair could have floated to safety.
Speaking to The Advertisor in Adelaide, Wicks, 15, said: “We looked at how buoyant the door would have been and how that would have changed if there were people on top of that.”
“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.”
Damato, 15, said the team also considered the door’s buoyancy would have been affected by the salt content in the water.
The students presented their theory at the National Maths Talent Quest and won an award for their work.
Other groups researched other quirky ideas like whether it would be feasible for President Donald Trump to build his wall dividing the US and Mexico.
Back in 2012, Mythbusters also waded into the debate by getting two grown men to climb onto a plank of wood and see if it would float. Spoiler alert – it did.
However, director James Cameron recently ended his 20 years of silence on the topic – in the hopes of settling the debate once and for all.
Speaking to the Daily Beast, he said: “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.”
‘Titanic’ was released in 1997 and received 14 Oscar nominations while Kate Winslet and Leonardo Di Caprio’s top deck smooch was voted the best movie kiss of all time.
