Inertia Express | Muography Short Film (4K)

Do you know how many cosmic ray muon particles have moved through your body?

About ten…in the time it took to read these two sentences.

What would it be like to travel on a train moving like a muon at nearly the speed of light?

On board the “Inertia Express”, two legendary scientists meet to discuss this question and many other questions about the nature of space and time. As they soon discover, this train does not run on normal tracks, nor is its destination predetermined. The “Inertia Express” moves straightforwardly and eternally, through water, metal …. even stars.

This genre-breaking short film combines a narrative style, historical and fantasy elements to accurately describe and illustrate concepts of physics in an entertaining way. Through captivating dialogue and by following this unique journey, “Inertia Express” reveals key concepts of physics: from the nature of light, to time dilation, to relativity, to ultimate inertia. Actors Hector G. Luna (Einstein) and Bruce Mann (Newton) work through these concepts with conversations, inviting audiences to question and observe the world around them differently and to consider the great impact that these ideas have had on our modern world.

The storyline of “Inertia Express” was inspired by recent developments in the emerging scientific field of muography and was made as a collaborative project between the United States and Japan. The United States team was led by multi-award-winning filmmaker Professor Erik Boccio who, with his production team, created a nostalgic mood by shooting “Inertia Express” on sets in California where a handmade train compartment set was built. The United States team also created a stop motion animated special effects sequence featured near the end of the film.

As part of the Japan-based team, this film was written by Professor Hiroyuki K.M. Tanaka, who coined the term “muography”, was the initiator of the ScanPyramids project, was the first scientist to peer inside a volcano, and was one of TIME Magazines’s Best Inventors of 2023. Tanaka’s aim for this script is to introduce the key physical concepts of muography with a new fictional narrative style; he also was its Executive Producer and created its original soundtrack.

In 2007, using the muographic image scanning technique, a corridor was newly discovered in the great pyramid. On March 2, 2023, the Egyptian Authorities named this corridor “the ScanPyramids-North Face Corridor”, which had not been seen by a human being for more than 45 centuries. The discovery of this room is considered to be the most important in the field of Egyptian archeology since 1837, when Howard Vyse discovered the 5th relieving chamber, called Campbell's Chamber, by drilling a vertical shaft above the King's Chamber.

In October 2025, Nature Magazine highlighted a new muography development stating that: “[The] portable muon beam could accelerate archaeology scans. Scientists can use them to image hard-to-reach places: such ‘muography’ has uncovered a hidden chamber in the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt and can be used to peer inside magma chambers of volcanoes.” based on a new successful development from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

One of the main physical elements that construct muography is relativity. In “Inertia Express”, as the protagonists (Einstein and Newton) in this story go on a journey of self-discovery through the ambiguous boundary between the present and the past, the audience also learns about relativity and muography as well as the ways in which these elements interconnect.

One of the most significant symbols used to achieve this goal is a train which serves as a portal to another world, which is in “ultimate inertia” (the scene where Newton finds that he has become an outside observer of the train), where they move “straightforwardly and eternally, through water, metal …. even stars.”

On screen, Einstein and Newton's time flows in opposite directions, and the Inertia Express train serves as their intersection. Here, these two famous scientists, who should never have met, exchange their views about physics through conversation.

Many science documentaries merely introduce the results of past research. Other kinds of science education videos are usually organized as a patchwork of index-based topical scientific elements and sometimes require the audience to have a scientific background in order to understand it. Regardless, in both cases, no matter how well these elements (the results of the past research or index-based topical scientific elements) are organized, this strategy generally makes it difficult for audience to grasp a unified philosophy as a whole. On the other hand, adopting a narrative style has the great advantage of being able to combine topics and to convey its message in more straightforward way by using the power of drama, dialogue and compelling characters. “Inertia Express” has used this unusual strategy for the first time.