Film and science have combined with varying degrees of success, from 50s B-movies all the way to Interstellar. But is science just a hokey hook from which to hang a plot? Or can films actually help to teach and encourage science?
Hoping to answer those questions, or at least gain an insight, I met up with Rick Edwards the day his book, Science(ish): the Peculiar Science Behind the Movies, was published to ask him. Based on the podcast of the same name, which he hosts with co-author Dr Michael Brooks, the idea behind Science(ish) is to take a serious look at big screen science, so he seems the ideal person to ask.
Edwards and I were at university at the same time, but we never met, despite having interests in common. I thought this was odd, until we got chatting about his degree, at which point everything made a bit more sense.
While English student me was hanging out in the library reading novels and working through the odd medieval lyric, Natural Scientist Edwards was working his way through the physical sciences: physics, chemistry, geology, plus a bit of maths on the side. “Gradually I veered towards human impact on the environment and ended up doing conservation, climate change, population dynamics,” he explained. “But it’s so broad, you end up doing quite a lot of other things – I loved all the palaeontology stuff in geology.”
His interest in science is clearly undiminished since his student days. As well as keeping up with the latest research developments, he has obviously managed to fit in some serious film-watching.
Edwards is keen to stress that he believes films are a key way to communicate science, and that the intention is not to jeer at Hollywood’s scientific bloopers. “We don’t really spend a great deal of time myth-busting. It’s very easy to find that stuff - if you want to find the 20 scientific mistakes in in The Martian, then just Google it and you will find endless people detailing those things. We’re much more interested in the real science, and where science is at in those areas and what they’ve got right.”
Films not only make science accessible, they generate essential debate, he contends: “you come out of something like Ex Machina – it doesn’t matter if you know anything about artificial intelligence – you come out of that film and I guarantee you will have a conversation with your friends about ‘so hang on, how close are we to that – should we be regulating this stuff? Was she conscious? What is consciousness? All of these questions – that are huge science ethics questions – people are just asking them without thinking ‘oh, I’ve just been given a guided tour of an area of science.’”
And that’s the nub of it: despite the stereotype of science as existing in a sterile, intimidatingly complex space, science and film are both hugely imaginative undertakings. Edwards agrees: “science is incredibly imaginative because almost by definition you’re at the frontier of something, you’re thinking about what might be possible ... you need to have a fertile mind.” And that, he continues, is what makes film and science such natural bedfellows. “There are directors out there that can use scientific concepts as kernels, seeds from which to grow a film and I think that we should be encouraging that.”
We talk about favourite “science” directors, and perhaps not unsurprisingly, Christopher Nolan came up. Edwards is impressed with Nolan’s rigorous approach. That seems a fair assessment, given that Nolan worked with gravitational wave-discovering Nobel laureate Kip Thorne on the script for Interstellar, for example. “I think as far as me and Michael could work out it’s the only film that’s every had a scientific paper published off the back of it ... Nolan wanted to absolutely get the look of the black hole. He didn’t want ‘I think that might be what a black hole looks like’, he thought: ‘I want people who are actually working on them – not literally, clearly – day in day out to tell me, and we will do that.’”
And what if history judges Kip Thorne and Interstellar to have been way off the mark? Like poodle perms and the flat-Earth hypothesis, there are certain things that history will reveal as having been wrong. Will these films, and these theories, end up seeming ridiculous? The important thing, says Edwards, is to remember that it doesn’t matter. There will always be new leaps of imagination and new discoveries to fuel the creative processes of film and science: “Science is wading through a never-ending hallway of curtains, and every time you open a new curtain, you sort of think ‘that’s it, there’s no more curtains’ but there always are. Everlasting curtains. That’s science: bear in mind there are more curtains, guys.”
Science(ish): The Peculiar Science Behind the Movies by Rick Edwards and Dr Michael Brooks is out now in hardback, £12.99, published by Atlantic.
Know science and movies? Rick and Michael have put together a quiz to test your knowledge
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Which is the most abundant compound in the Martian atmosphere?
Carbon dioxide
Hydrogen
Carbon monoxide
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Which of these dinosaurs had a large skull crest and ‘duck-bill’?
Triceratops
Brontosaurus
Parasaurolophus
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Which scientist consulted extensively on the nature of black holes for the Christopher Nolan film ‘Interstellar’?
Rip Torn
Kip Thorne
Stephen Hawking
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Which early hominid group is believed to have had ginger hair and a high-pitched voice?
Denisovans
Andregigantes
Neanderthals
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In what year did Einstein (Albert, not Doc Brown’s dog) publish his Special Theory of Relativity?
1915
1905
1875
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Which of these is a strain of the virus commonly known as bird flu?
H5N1
HS2
H1N2
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The Wachowskis required all cast members of The Matrix to read Simulacra and Simulation. But which French philosopher wrote it?
Jean Baudrillard
Rene Descartes
Didier Deschamps
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In a DNA helix, which base pairs with Adenine?
Thylacine
Thymine
Guanine
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At which Chinese game did a Google Deepmind artificial intelligence beat the world number one Ke Jie 3-0 in May 2017?
Yahtzee
Mahjong
Go
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Which physicist’s paradox describes the seeming contradiction between the large estimates of how much alien life there is in the universe, and our lack of contact or sightings?
Enrico Fermi
Pierre de Fermat
Michael Faraday
Solutions
1:A - The Martian atmosphere is a whopping 96% carbon dioxide. At the poles, during their respective hemisphere’s Winter, it is so cold that the carbon dioxide condenses into its solid form "dry ice". Very atmospheric. There are traces of carbon monoxide but no hydrogen – which in any case, is an element, not a compound., 2:C - Parasaurolophus lived in the Late Jurassic and had a very fancy cranial crest, quite a narrow beak and ate vegetation. It probably ambled around on four legs but ran upon two. The literal meaning of triceratops is ‘three-horned face’ which is pretty fair. It had the physique of a rhinoceros, but with three horns and a bony frill around its collar. The brontosaurus has, unusually, had two extinctions – once at the end of the Jurassic, and then again in 1903 when palaeontologists decided that it wasn’t a distinct genus at all, rather just a type of Apatosaurus. Good news for brontosaurus fans though – recent research suggests that it is sufficiently distinguishable from Apatosaurus, and should be resurrected as its own genus., 3:B - Kip Thorne is an astrophysicist (and as of last week a Nobel laureate) who wrote the original screenplay for Interstellar (which Steven Spielberg was going to direct) and is credited on the film as an Executive Producer. Stephen Hawking is a renowned physicist and the subject of the Oscar-winning film The Theory of Everything. Rip Torn is an actor whose name rhymes with Kip Thorne. Sort of., 4:C - The Neanderthal vocal tract seems to have been wider and shorter than a modern male – closer, in fact, to that of a modern female. So yes, it is possible that they will have produced quite harsh, high pitch noises. Denisovans are another extinct species or sub-species of human. Weirdly, they were named after a Russian hermit called Denis. Andregigantes is the scientific name for the wrestler Andre the Giant., 5:B - Einstein was born in 1879, so even he would have struggled to publish a paper prior to that. 1905 was his annus mirabilis, in which he published four significant papers, including ones on special relativity and the mass-energy equivalence described by his most famous equation. In 1921 he received the Nobel prize in physics. Well deserved., 6:A - A bird adapted strain of H5N1 is often referred to as bird flu. Worryingly it has been shown that a highly contagious strain of H5N1 can be airborne, and therefore weaponised. H1N1 is better known as "swine flu" and was responsible for the 2009 flu epidemic. HS2 is not a type of influenza virus – it’s a proposed high speed rail line connecting London, Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester. It cannot yet be caught because it hasn’t been built., 7:A - Didier Deschamps is a French footballer, and Eric Cantona aside, they’re not generally known for their philosophy. Descartes was pretty good at philosophy, but not as prescient as Baudrillard, whose 1981 book predicted that people would prioritise looking like they were enjoying life over actually getting on and enjoying life. Does that sound like anyone you know?, 8:B - The genetic letters bind to each other in specific ways: Adenine on one strand pairs with Thymine on the other, and Guanine pairs with Cytosine. These pairings are held, like the rungs on a ladder, on long chains of what are essentially just sugar and phosphate molecules. The whole thing forms into a long double helix that we know as DNA. The Thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, was a marsupial that went extinct. We do have its DNA, though, and (fun fact) have even brought some of it back to life – Jurassic Park-style – inside a mouse., 9:C - The ancient game of Go has long been considered something that computers would struggle to play. The best human players can’t explain why they make some of their moves, citing intuition or "a hunch" as the best reason they can give. You can’t program a hunch into a computer, but it turns out you don’t have to. Advanced artificial intelligence is capable of developing intuition, too – demonstrated by the fact that Google can’t explain how its program beats the best. Yahtzee is an American invention, and probably not even worth DeepMind’s attention., 10:A - In 1950, Enrico Fermi pointed out that life will have been evolving elsewhere for longer than it has on our junior planet, and that some of those civilisations should be way, way more advanced than our own, and capable of interstellar travel or communication. So, said Fermi, where is everybody? Pierre de Fermat was a mathematician who is most famous for a very different comment: he wrote in the margin of a journal that he had solved a seemingly impossible theorem, but didn’t have space to explain. Cue three and a half centuries of trying to crack Fermat’s Last Theorem before Andrew Wiles managed it in 1994. Michael Faraday was an eminent English scientist, and has a special cage named after him.
Scores
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9 and above.
Are you Christopher Nolan? Because your science is smokin'!
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10 and above.
Amazing! You're one film away from a Nobel
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8 and above.
Are you Christopher Nolan? Because your science is smokin'!
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3 and above.
It's Science-ish ...
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2 and above.
Maybe watch some more films - try Gattaca or anything by Christopher Nolan.
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0 and above.
Not quite a black hole ... but close
