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Bring on the Bad Science!
A recently-published article in The Guardian calls for science-fiction films to obey the laws of physics. Starship Troopers, The Core and Angels & Demons are all cited as examples of “the film industry’s worst abuses of science”. The “bugs” in Starship Troopers would be crushed by the weight of their own exoskeletons,1 the Earth’s core cannot be “restarted” by means of a nuclear detonation,2 and the anti-matter in Angels & Demons is (1) “more than we will make in a million years of running a high-energy particle collider”3 and (2) could not be contained “using an iPod battery”.4
Professor Sydney Perkowitz, member of The Science and Entertainment Exchange and professor of physics at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, has created guidelines for the film industry that include “confining scriptwriters to plotlines that embrace the suspension of disbelief but stop short of demanding it in every scene”.5
Perkowitz advocates a limit of “one big scientific blunder” per film. Goodbye, Star Wars;6 so long, Star Trek;7 and fare-thee-well, Back to the Future.8 It was fun while it lasted.
Well, you might say, Star Wars is really space opera or fantasy, not science-fiction. You’re correct, of course. And Angels & Demons is really a techno-thriller but Perkowitz has no problem taking it to the mat, does he, Semantics Boy?
Now, don’t get me wrong: I have no problem when films utilize good, solid science. I’m okay with explosions not making any sound in the vacuum of space and I’m fine with spaceships obeying Newton’s laws when in a low- or zero-gravity environment. I like the “science” half of science-fiction.
But you know what? I like the “fiction” half much, much more. Giant bugs that swarm across the galaxy crushing feckless humans in their massive mandibles? Gimme! Sharks that can leap thousands of feet into the air to bring down a jet-liner? I’m all over that. A superlaser capable of destroying an entire planet? Yes, please! A coffeemaker-sized fusion reactor on the back of a DeLorean? Well, why the hell not?
A movie theater is not a classroom;9 while edutainment may be fine for my four-year-old son, I’m not looking to learn about non-topical solitons when I watch Sunshine. I don’t particularly care if the science in a movie is good or bad, as long as the story sells it well. Personally, I feel that a movie can play fast and loose with the laws of physics in the service of an entertaining story as long as those laws are flouted with reasonable consistency; I have no problem with a previously-undiscovered prehistoric shark swimming at a speed so great it can leap out of the water and bring down a passenger jet, so long as that same prehistoric shark doesn’t later have trouble catching a submarine that has a top speed of about 35 knots—that’s just bad storytelling.
- We’re safe! [↩]
- We’re doomed! [↩]
- We’re safe! [↩]
- We’re…doomed? [↩]
- No mention is made of confining authors in such a fashion, despite the fact that two of the three cited examples were adapted for the screen from popular novels. Apparently scientific verisimilitude in print isn’t as important as it is on screen. [↩]
- Sound in the vacuum of space? Blunder! Spacecraft that maneuver like aircraft in an atmosphere? Blunder! Hyperspace? Blunder! Greedo shoots first? How dare you? [↩]
- Warp drive? Preposterous! Transporters? Outrageous! Kirk’s hair? Suspend, disbelief! Damn you, suspend! [↩]
- Time travel? Impossible! Anti-gravity? Unpossible! One-point-twenty-one gigawatts? What the hell’s a gigawatt? [↩]
- Nor is it a laboratory, Science Nitpickers. [↩]
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About The Secret Lair
The Secret Lair is a podcast and blog which follows the real life adventures of Kris Johnson and Chris Miller. Together with their staff of contributors and countless minions, they seek to dominate the planet, or at least the tri-county area, using the twin weapons of Discussion and Overwhelming Opinion. And zombies. And maybe a Death Ray. Or two.
You know my thoughts on this, so I won’t belabor all the points you ignored on Twitter
I will say though that Perkowitz is going too far, and I have no problem liking Star Wars, the Matrix, Back to the Future, and all the other movies (Well, not all of them. The shark one I’ll give a pass to) you talk about up there. I also have no problem suspending my disbelief about faster than light travel in a futuristic space adventure. I have no problem with time travel in a time travel movie. I have no problem ignoring the square-cube law (to a point) in a giant bug movie.
My problem is when there is a perfectly valid – and appropriately gruesome – way to kill someone in space by asphyxiation and outgassing (From both ends! Who wouldn’t want to see that!?). Why show him freeze the moment he cracks his helmet? That’s not just bad science, it’s silly.
So blast away at your enemies! Hook the inertial dampeners to the coffee maker at the last second and short circuit the main drive array to propel your ship into a hyperaccelerated state that sends you back in time 45 minutes so you can take out your pursuer before they even know they’re pursuing you. I’ll watch it, and love it, and cheer at your awesome talents.
Just don’t do it with a black hole that you have to escape with the extra push from a shock wave. In space.
That’s all I ask.
I’m going to defend Perkowitz’s sentiment. Hollywood has been giving misleading views of science for decades. Admittedly, science isn’t the worst thing that the media maligns (that thing happens to be law enforcement), but it is in the top ’5′. These misleading views of things percolate into people’s actual views on the matter and how they vote.
Part of the problem is that Hollywood fiction so drowns out truth that people ‘feel’ they know how things work (because they see the fiction all the time) but they actually have no idea. They ‘know’ something that just aint so, and THAT’S dangerous.
I got my bell rung on this one when I learned that the ‘right to a phone call’ that you supposedly get when you’re arrested.. doesn’t exist. I had a fundamentally incorrect opinion of something basic… as a result of movies and tv shows. That they would ‘fabricate’ a civil right for dramatic purposes seemed blatantly stupid (but they did, do, and keep doing). I had a comfort with the concept because I’d seen it so many times, but that comfort was a lie. Turns out, we *do* learn from the movies whether we admit it or not.
If science were something people were familiar with and it was a ‘suspension of disbelief’ (I love a good suspension of disbelief), there would be no problem. However, science in general is something people know almost nothing about… but they *think* they know about it because they ‘see’ it all the time in the movies, and that causes problems. Hollywood washes its hands of such responsibility.
I think Perkowitz is taking too hard a line on this because sci-fi movies aren’t the biggest offender. They at least have some warning that they are selling bad science….
Shows like CSI, action movies (which re-write the laws of physics),and just about every *other* form of movie/TV show featuring scientists or science give a misleading view while wearing a coat of ‘legitimacy’. They sell lies, implying the lie is the truth (CSI would not be compelling if people realized that given the scientific abilities of the characters on the show that the characters are all essentially super-heroes).
@Doc Gyro — Depending upon where a person is arrested, the “right to a phone call” may not explicitly exist, but it is generally an extension of the right to legal counsel. In Ohio, that right is expressed as follows:
That’s not expressly stated as the right to a phone call, but I think you’d be hard-pressed to argue that being “speedily permitted facilities to communicate with an attorney [...] or to communicate with at least one relative or other person for the purpose of obtaining counsel [or] arranging bail” isn’t pretty much the same thing. It may not be the same everywhere, but this is one specific case where I’m willing to give every fictional arrest made in my lifetime license to simplify that to a phone call.
That said, I’m well aware that Hollywood plays fast and loose with the law in pretty much every aspect in order to make shows like Law & Order and Matlock more entertaining. If we as an audience choose to take any of what is presented in a courtroom where Andy Griffith is arguing for the defense or Sam Waterston is the prosecutor as an accurate representation of actual law, we’re victims of nothing but our own gullibility. And while I can certainly see where this gullibility as it pertains to the law might cause some problem in our everyday lives, I’m not sure that I can say the same about Hollywood’s abuse of physics, particularly when applied to science-fiction. I’m certainly disappointed that I don’t have a miniature fusion reactor in the back of my mini-van, but I’m not sure how believing that such a thing might be possible would result in anything more harmful than the misguided purchase of a Toyota Prius.
@WesleyC — Let’s have a look at those points you made on Twitter, shall we? I want to make sure that they’re all addressed. To that end, here is the entirety of our exchange:
My assumption here is that all three movies you list were (1) bad, and (2) bad specifically because the science they employed did not obey physical law. I enjoyed Armageddon the first time I saw it, but I wouldn’t want to see it again; not because Michael Bay chose to ignore (or perhaps sidestep) the laws of physics, but because that damned Aerosmith song now bugs the living hell out of me. I don’t recall ever seeing The Core or Mission to Mars, so I have no opinion on their relative merits, either as entertainment or sound scientific studies of astrophysics.
I think I’ve addressed your point about Star Wars in the main article; I find the semantic argument to be weak, at best.
As far as Star Trek is concerned, am I to take your point to be that bad science is forgiveable if good science is unaffordable? That the validity of the science can be proportional to the size of a movie’s budget? That pretty much gives SyFy the equivalent of diplomatic immunity where The Most Dangerous Night on Television is concerned.
Last but not least, the major failing of The Matrix is that The Brothers Wachowski insisted on making two sequels to it. Humans-as-batteries (assuming that’s what you mean by “that power crap”) may not be good science, but it’s a pretty good motivator for the protagonist to get the hell out of the Matrix.
The argument here seems to be that “taking artistic license in the service of a story” is equivalent to “thumbing your nose at science”, and I’m sorry I echoed your terminology, as I don’t believe that the two are equivalent at all.
I think I’ve covered this.
That sure is an inane idea. Not at all an idea that I ever put forth, but an inane one nonetheless.
Your second sentence here makes me question the accuracy of the first one. You’re making an apples-to-oranges comparison, so I’ll just reiterate my final tweet to you:
A ‘Speedily produced way to communicate with an attorney’ is not a phonecall. A phonecall is one way to do it… but there are many other ways (for example, if they bring the attorney in person in a timely manner).. *without* ever granting a phonecall. These laws were put into place long before telephones..
To say that they stipulate a phonecall is false.
“Victims of our own gullibiity” is the wrong way to think about it. When someone lies to you, even if you don’t believe them… you *still* get to say “it’s wrong for them to lie”. We learn things whether we like it or not.
Sci-fi gets a pass because sci-fi is like a magician. A magician is not a liar, he tells you he’s going to do a trick. Sci-fi already has the “I’m going to do a trick and show you things that aren’t possible at this moment” thing to it….
Science and physics as presented in *other* arenas (non sci-fi movies and tv) however is portrayed in more of a ‘trust us’ kind of way. They’re more like psychics, who do the same things as magicians, but when pressed on it simply give you a smile and say “what I do is based in fact’ and leave it at that. That’s a lie, and when people are lied to, it’s generally unwise to blame the people who believe the liar while leaving the liar blameless.
The CSI effect has already been discussed as a major biasing factor in modern juries (The CSI effect being that juries now grant a disproportionately large amount of weight to forensic evidence and a disproportionately small weight to other types of evidence). This misperception of science is something that can make innocent people go to jail and make guilty people go free….
And the lawyers’ jobs on this is not simply to take a jury that doesn’t know science and teach them the relevant science, it’s to actively try to disable misperceptions that people have, which is a much harder job.
That’s just one example of where scientific misperception causes trouble, how many more would you like? Pick an issue, climate change? health care? Education? (the intelligent design debate going on in schoolboards comes from a massive misunderstanding of biology). Science plays a major role in how issues are looked at… perception of physics, biology, chemistry, meteorology, medicine all wind down to what gets voted on in the voting booth….. while people are inundated with incorrect images of what science is and how reality really behaves.
@Doc Gyro — The cited code is effective 01 January 1960, which is certainly not “long before telephones” nor, in fact, before telephones at all.
You are welcome to continue to argue the semantics of law and the great injustice done to we the audience by the manner in which law is treated in television and film (as I suspect you have previously, as the matter is quite clearly a personal one to you) but I’m going to ask that you do it elsewhere, as the topic of this particular discussion is bad science in science-fiction and my willingness to indulge your tangent has reached its end.
I’m too lazy to review the earlier comments to see where we slipped down the slope from “bad science in science fiction” to “bad science in all genres”. At any rate, I think our scientists are better applied to science than screen-writing, unless you’re talking edutainment. I miss you, Mr. Sagan.
And now the reason I chose to comment in the first place:
“…would result in anything more harmful than the misguided purchase of a Toyota Prius.”
Hmmm… At first I thought you were being insulting, but upon further review I suspect that you simply illustrated a scenario in which someone does something (possibly even something good) for the wrong reason. OK. No retaliation needed. This time. Never mind. Carry on.
@Miscellaneous G — We’re glad cooler heads appear to have prevailed.
As I said I won’t rehash anything said on Twitter. I’ll just link to http://articles.latimes.com/2010/mar/07/local/la-me-shark7-2010mar07 and rethink that whole Shark/Squid movie.