It will probably come as no surprise to you that when Hollywood tackles scientific topics, it almost always gets them wrong.
But as Sid Perkins describes in a recent article in Science News Online, some scientists and teachers are using movie science to teach science and promote an interest in science.
There are innumerable examples of bad movie science, but Perkins focuses on two recent examples, beginning with the would-be blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow.
In The Day After Tomorrow, global warming melts so much polar ice that the flood of cold fresh water interferes with the ocean’s thermohaline circulation, which warms the North Atlantic (and with it, Europe). In the movie, the collapse of this circulation triggers a new ice age within weeks.
Alas, about the time the movie came out, Andrew J. Weaver, a climatologist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, and Claude Hillaire-Marcel of the University of Quebec in Montreal reported that their computer analysis of today’s climate in the light of what we know about sudden climate change in the past showed no plausible scientific scenario that would shut down thermohaline circulation any time in the next 500 years.
And in any event, “sudden” climate change happens over years, not weeks. About 8,200 years ago, thermohaline circulation did shut down, when the ice sheet that covered northeastern Canada collapsed, pouring more than 163,000 cubic kilometers of glacial meltwater into the North Atlantic over just a few months. After a decade or so, that inaugurated a 400-year-long dip in global temperatures…but nothing as apocalyptic as in The Day After Tomorrow.
Another recent example of memorably bad science cited in the Science News Online article is the four-hour TV miniseries 10.5. Aired by NBC last May, it depicted the devastation of the west coast by powerful earthquakes. But on a reality scale of 1 to 100, geologist Rick Wilson of the California Geological Survey, who reviewed the movie for the Survey’s Web site, rated 10.5…well, 10.5.
The movie’s biggest fault (sorry) is that a magnitude 10.5 quake is impossible. The energy released by a quake is determined mainly by the length of the fault line. Chile was hit by a magnitude 9.5 quake on May 22, 1960. That quake, the largest ever measured, involved the rupture of a 1,600-kilometre fault line. A 10.5 quake, which would release 32 times as much energy as a 9.5, would require the rupture of a fault zone stretching a quarter of the way around the Earth. There isn’t one.
Still, scientists took advantage of the bad science in The Day After Tomorrow and 10.5 to promote good science. Weaver conducted numerous media interviews and was quoted around the world. Wilson and his colleagues promoted good geological information in California by meeting with local journalists from NBC affiliates two weeks before 10.5 aired. Wilson’s review of the miniseries was also calculated to spread good science: as expected, visits to the California Geological Survey Web site doubled the days the miniseries was on.
Teachers are also using bad movie science (and that much rarer animal, good movie science) to interest students in their classrooms in science. In fact, some university professors are building entire courses around analyses of movies. The Science News Online article mentions a “Biology in the Movies” course taught at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va., in which Jurassic Park, Gattaca and The Boys from Brazil lead to an exploration of cloning and genetic screening, and a popular “Physics in Films” class at Central Florida University in Orlando. And at the University of Kent in Canterbury, U.K., physicist Robert J. Newport is developing an educational package for the undergraduate physics curriculum that includes deconstructing movie scenes to teach scientific principles.
Some scientists are even trying to infiltrate the movie business in the hope of improving the depiction of science on screen. The Air Force Office of Scientific Research sponsors a scriptwriting workshop for scientists at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. The goal is to get science-literate people involved in the early stages of film projects in the hope that will lead to more accurate depictions of science and scientists, which in turn would lead to more science students.
Can it work? Well, thanks to the popularity of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and its spin-offs, forensic science has been the most popular undergraduate major chosen by incoming freshmen at West Virginia University in Morgantown, W. Va., for two years in a row.
The touch of Hollywood, it seems, can glamorize anything.
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