When John Koestler is teaching his class at MIT at the beginning of the movie, the blackboard shows James C. Maxwell's equations of electro-magnetics. The Earth's magnetosphere is what protects us from harmful solar radiation called "solar wind" by channeling these particles to the Earth's magnetic poles, causing the phenomenon known as the Aurora or Northern/Southern Lights. This same solar wind, when extreme, cannot be fully mitigated by the Earth's magnetic field and may cause electrical and radio communications problems. Theoretically, a very powerful solar emission, such as the one which destroys the Earth in the movie, is a very extreme case of solar wind, called a Coronal Mass Ejection. Hence, the equations on the blackboard are a subtle and clever hint of what will happen later in the movie. Additionally, the equations are, rather unusually, given in spherical coordinates, with rudimentary drawings of a circle (possibly representing the Sun) and the Earth and its magnetosphere, all of which indicate that this is a deliberate and clever hint.

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