The article about physicists in movies cited previously had one other thing worth commenting on: the fictional portrayal of the practice of science:
All these films illustrate a fundamental pattern for movie science. Rarely is the central scientific concept utterly incorrect, but filmmakers are obviously more interested in creating entertaining stories that sell tickets than in presenting a lesson in elementary physics. They also know that scenes of scientists at a lab bench do not generally make for gripping movie moments. Indeed, the need for drama often pushes the basic scientific idea to the limits of possibility and beyond. To fit within the constraints of a two-hour film and maintain narrative drive, events may also be speeded up and supporting details may be omitted or just plain wrong.
Physicists come off a little better than some-- we used to have an archeologist who came to our weekly faculty happy hours, and he could rant at great length about the Indiana Jones effect-- but when movies attempt to show scientists at work, the end result is often comically bad. It's not limited to movies, either-- books are also pretty bad about showing the real business of science.
My favorite praxis mistake has to be the lone genius, the guy who both comes up with the Theory of Everything and uses it to build a time machine in his garage. It makes it easier to keep track of the cast, sure, but these days, the gap between theory and experiment is pretty wide. It's a rare experimentalist who can significantly advance the state of theory, and there are a great many theorists out there who are a little fuzzy about which end of a soldering iron to hold.
There's also the myth of the Eureka Moment-- or, rather, the idea that that's all there is to science. While there are those moments when everything just falls into place, that's generally the beginning of the work, not the end. You have the Eureka Moment where everything suddenly works, and it all makes sense, and then you have several weeks of meticulous data collection before you have enough evidence to write a paper and get it past peer review. Don't get me wrong-- we live for the Eureka Moments, but there's a lot of drudge work between those moments and the Nobel Prize.
So, here's a question for the audience: What are your favorite (or least favorite) failure modes for fictional portrayals of scientists at work? Alternately, what works of fiction do the best job showing science as it is actually practiced?
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For hyperrealism, we clearly have to go with Richard Seaton and Marc DuQuesne.
I have a lingering fondness for John Renfrew and Alex Lustig, and of course Dennis Neul.
My (least) favorite female scientist portrayal is in the movie "The Saint" where Elizabeth Shue plays a scientist who has discovered a method to generate cold fusion. Val Kilmer romances her lab notes out from under her because she keeps them in her bra! The only think I could think of was "Damn, nobody taught that woman how to keep a good lab notebook!"
Hey, if you were working on cold fusion, you'd probably take steps to keep people from finding out, too..
I've never seen an accurate movie depiction of academic biologists. The only accurate depiction of any sort of scientists I can think of is in the movie "Primer", although it deals with an impossible situation.
My favorite would have to be either Leo G. Carroll in (because he was trying to solve world hunger)Tarantula or Gene Wilder (cause he was really funny) in Young Frankenstein or Peter Cushing in darn near every movie he played in...
Glory Enough for All is a wonderful Canadian production that dramatized the isolation of insulin in the 1920s. No aliens, gun battles, car crashes or naked bodies to be found anywhere so it won't be to everyone's taste. No lab notes in the bra, either. But there is a case of an experiment failing because the researcher didn't keep good enough notes and so couldn't replicate his initial successful extraction. Now that's scientific drama!
I've always been partial to the team seeking the genetic code in Richard Powers' The Gold Bug Variations. Lots of false starts, brainstorming, checking theory against data, etc. Too bad the group fell apart before they cracked the code ;)
This movie pissed me off because it hit close to home. One of the main characters is working on a PhD in Drosophila genomics, only she pronounces it "Draw-saw-feel-eee-uh".
In a strange way, I'm rather fond of the scientist character Sara in George Romero's Day of the Dead, if only because she's stuck in that classic researcher position: she wants to make sure that her information is correct before making any claims, but knowing that she could be shut down at any time if she doesn't give results. Of course, the fact that her sponsors are rapidly going insane from stress and that the only fellow researcher getting results does so by breaking every ethical rule in the book doesn't help matters. But that's just me.
I'm not a scientist, so I couldn't judge, but what did people here think of Outbreak?
I like the mathematician portrayed on the TV show numbers, even though I know it's totally hokey and unrealistic
IMHO the best (though not in the slightest bit accurate) portrayals are Nikola Tesla in The Five Fists Of Science and Val Kilmer's character in Real Science :-) Utter genius.
Worst? Ooh, there are so many... Keanu Reeves in Chain Reaction? Or just take your pick from the spate of American made-for-TV disaster movies that have been invading Sky One and E4 in the UK recently...
For sheer fun, I have to vote for all the scientists that ever appear in the '50s pseudo-horror flicks. If you've ever read Stephen King's Danse Macabre, he talks about just how much fun that whole era of cinema was, right up until Sputnik was launched. Whenever anyone asks me why I'm a scientist, they get really worried when I say that it was the 3am monster fest on USA / showtime in my youth, not Pasteur, Einstein, etc. that made me want to take a swing at it.
I have to put in my 2cent theory on the portrayal of science in movies. I think that, in American cinema, almost every scientist ever portrayed on film, irrespective of genre, is "descended" from Viktor Frankenstein, ie. a "mad" scientist, either in fact or buried somewhere deep inside just waiting to come out. It's always been much more fun to either have the scientist as an "almost" villain for wanting to know what's going on, no matter the consequences, or to play up the "egghead" for laughs. It's only very rare to see the scientist as hero.
hypatia opined: "I like the mathematician portrayed on the TV show numbers, even though I know it's totally hokey and unrealistic."
Ah, Numb3rs, the show we hate to love!
Charlie is awfully cute. But I wish someone would tell him how to draw a proper integral sign. And there was that memorable episode near the beginning of the second season in which he referred to "furrier series". . .
But that's just me picking nits. What really bothers me is that as the series goes on, the mathematics seems more and more often to serve as merely a rather convoluted way for the FBI guys to figure out something about the bad guys that they should have been able to figure out without the math.
I've always thought the portrayal of science in The Andromeda Strain was done very well, and I loved Real Genius.
Speaking of Eureka Moments, I watched the first episode of Eureka last night, and quite enjoyed it. The science is all technobabble, but the characters are fun.
Indiana Jones has some realism inside, AFAIK. We all have heard histories of prehistorian archeologists and antropologues gettin out of the cove fast while the debris is falling. My sister got into one of these falls, and one of the most trained archeologues jumped into a dugged trench with Indy-like naturality.
Also, the father of Indy dresses as the late Spanish archeologist Antonio Beltran. I have heard that the scenary team of the film met Beltran's team at Petra.
In the first episode of Numb3rs I was annoyed that Charlie pinned everything on a single version of his model, without even mentioning that it must contain various weighted assumptions, let alone the possibility of varying those weights. For gravy he then insisted that 96% was equivalent to certainty.
In his place I'd try several different approaches and see how their results overlap. But I'm only a dabbler.