Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope poster and all film stills ©2012 Wreckin Hill Entertainment, all rights reserved.

Every July, hundreds of thousands of fans descend upon the city of San Diego for a four-day celebration of comics, sci-fi, popular arts fandom and (growingly) previews of mainstream television and film blockbusters. What is this spectacular nexus of nerds? Comic-Con International, of course! From ScriptPhD’s comprehensive past coverage, one can easily glean the diversity of events, guests and panels, with enormous throngs patiently queueing to see their favorites. But who are these fans? Where do they come from? What kinds of passions drive their journeys to Comic-Con from all over the world? And what microcosms are categorized under the general umbrella of fandom? Award-winning filmmaker Morgan Spurlock attempts to answer these questions by crafting the sweet, intimate, honest documentary-as-ethnography Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope. Through the archetypes of five 2009 Comic-Con attendees, Spurlock guides us through the history of the Con, its growth (and the subsequent conflicts that this has engendered), and most importantly, the conclusion that underneath all of those Spider-Man and Klingon costumes, geeks really do come in all shapes, colors and sizes. For full ScriptPhD review, click “continue reading.”

In 1970, comics fan Shel Dorf organized a three-day gathering in San Diego at the US Grant hotel as a fringe gathering for the most enthusiastic amateur comics fans, aspiring artists and writers to interact with comics pros. It drew 300 fans. This was the backdrop against which young Morgan Spurlock grew up in West Virginia, passionately consuming comics and horror films, transported to a different world where everyone was a little bit askew and “weird.” “I wasn’t just a fan,” Spurlock remarks. “I was addicted.” It wasn’t until 2009 that he was able to make his first amateur journey to Comic-Con International San Diego, by now a cultural juggernaut regularly drawing over 150,000 fans, amid a vastly changed (and comics- cultural landscape. Nevertheless, Spurlock was thrilled. He ran into boyhood idol Marvel animator Stan Lee, and thanked him for all the confidence and creativity he helped to inspire. Stan’s response? “Let’s make a documentary about Comic-Con!” And so, gathering forces with Lee, sci-fi cult icon Joss Whedon, among others, Spurlock embarked on a two-year journey that captured the 2010 Con (the 40th Anniversary edition) in all its glory—including panels, parades, photos, costumes and interviews with notable celebrities that have turned passions into professions. Most of all, however, Spurlock captured the fans.

Costume designer Holly Conrad with her team on the convention floor exhibits at the 2010 San Diego Comic-Con.

To winnow down the most compelling stories for the documentary, Spurlock held a casting call online that drew thousands of submissions. Among them was Holly Conrad, a talented, award-winning costume designer from a small town hoping to win the grand prize at the annual Comic-Con costume show. Knowing her slim odds, especially because of where she comes from, and the importance of making a splash for her career to take off, Holly called Comic-Con a “suicide mission for her future.” Also in a pressure cooker was Chuck Rozanski, proprietor of Mile High Comics, Americas largest inventory and dealer of comic books. Chuck uses the hectic, chaotic, crowded Comic-Con exhibit area to sell rare and collectible comics, comprising a substantial portion of his company’s income for the year, but faces a more fractured Con, with a smaller focus on comics every year. If he doesn’t make a killing at this year’s Com, Chuck knows the future of his whole business might be at risk. Sharing the convention floor with Chuck are comics-obsessed bartender Skip Harvey and US Airforce pilot and family man Eric Henson, two amateur graphic artists also putting their destiny on the line in San Diego. Armed with only a portfolio and a dream, Eric and Skip are hoping to get noticed at the portfolio critique sessions and land a professional design contract with one of the comics representatives. One succeeds (to the preview audience’s delight) and one learns he is a very big fish in a very small bowl, and must cultivate his talent for the greater stage. Intermingled for comic relief is the adorable story of James Darling and Se Young Kang, a couple who met and started dating at the previous year’s Con. James is planning to ask Se Young to marry him at this year’s Con, but must overcome a slew of hilarious obstacles to pull of his nerdy romantic feat.

Chuck Rozanski hangs rare collectibles that he is hoping to sell on the convention floor in a scene from Comic-Con Episode IV.

Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope is a terrific purview into the conflicts and dissent of the modern Con. Hidden beneath the popularity of the yearly event is a schism between older fans who have been coming for years (and feel somewhat lost in the shuffle) and the new fans, such as lovebirds James and Se Young, who may not even necessarily be there for comics events. Longtime attendees such as Kevin Smith admitted that the event has become a “beancounter” with tremendous power to preview movies and television, something Hollywood has noticed and latched onto. One can legitimately forget the presence of comics and the graphic arts at Comic-Con altogether without trying very hard. This presents a huge problem for the poignant storyline of Chuck Rozanski, with whom we empathize as he struggles to sell comics through 4-day event. When ScriptPhD.com asked Spurlock at a recent Los Angeles junket about what surprised him the most, he pointed to the sheer volume of what goes on at Comic-Con, especially the job-hunting aspect of the Comic-Con exhibition floor. His favorite moment in the movie is the comparison of Comic-Con to a Russian nesting doll, with events hidden beneath other events. “I showed the movie to people and they responded that they didn’t even know that went on at Comic-Con! There is something for everyone, no matter what your passion.” Spurlock remarked.

The documentary is at its strongest and most successful when the focus turns to what the essence of what Comic-Con is defined by—the fans. “We all weighed in with what we thought were the most important pieces of the story,” Spurlock says. “But in the end it all came back to the fans.” It is the fans whose enthusiasm drives the growth of events like Comic-Con, however much nostalgia for the past may feel threatened. It is the fans whose passion continues to motivate and drive geniuses like Stan Lee to this very day. That very same passion also launches new careers, as Holly Conrad found. Since the filming of this documentary, she has moved to Hollywood and found successful work as a costume designer on several productions. Lastly, and most importantly, it is the fans who create that magical atmosphere where no matter who you are, where you come from, what you look like, how “out there” you behave, you find total acceptance and camaraderie amongst a group of treasured friends just as passionate and devoted as you are. To Spurlock, the Con “reminds us all of the importance of dreams and of wonder. It’s not just an event… it’s a state of mind.”

Trailer for Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope:

“Making of” featurette:

Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope was released in select cities on April 5, and theaters and video on demand on April 6th.

~*ScriptPhD*~

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Awake, and all images and screenshots, ©2012 NBC Universal, all rights reserved

As far back as last summer, when pilots for the current television season were floating around, a quirky sci-fi show for NBC called Awake caught our eye as the best of the lot. Camouflaged in a standard procedural cop show is an ambitious neuroscience concept—a man living in two simultaneous dream worlds, either of which (or neither of which) could be real. We got a look at the first four episodes of the show, which lay a nice foundation for the many thought-provoking questions that will be addressed. We review them here, as well as answering some questions of our own about the sleep science behind the show with UCLA sleep expert Dr. Alon Avidan.

Detective Michael Britten (Jason Isaacs) is a middle class police officer living in Los Angeles, with a lovely wife and teenage son, a virtual ‘everyman’ until an unspeakable tragedy—in the show’s opening moments—transform him into a paranormal dual existence. A violent car accident kills at least one member of his family, possibly both (the audience doesn’t yet know, and neither does Britten). Except instead of mourning the loss and moving on, Britten begins a bifurcated dream existence, where in one state, his wife Hannah (Laura Allen) is alive and his son Rex (Dylan Minnette) has perished, and as soon as he wakes up, the opposite is true. Complicating matters further is the mirroring of his lives on each end of this sleep-wake spectrum state. In his ‘single father’ widower existence, he is partnered with gruff police veteran Isaiah Freeman (Steve Harris), and works with no-nonsense therapist Dr. Judith Evans (Cherry Jones). In his other existence, mourning the loss of his son with his wife, Britten’s Captain (Laura Innes) has partnered him with rookie Efrem Vega (Wilmer Valderama), as he works things through with kind, objective therapist Dr. John Lee (BD Wong).

In this still from an episode of 'Awake,' Detective Britten works with partner Detective Freeman (foreground) as his partner from his other reality (background) looks on.

Juggling two worlds might seem complicated (and exhausting) enough, but life for Detective Britten gets even more muddled. Soon sliding with regularity between his two new worlds, he takes various clues from one to solve crimes in the other, even as his behavior in both becomes more erratic and precarious. And while the pilot flawlessly establishes the landscape of Britten’s new reality, future episodes will slowly chip away at it, leaving the viewers with many unanswered questions and mysteries. Is Britten simply dreaming one of these worlds? If so, which is his ‘true’ reality? Is either? Could they both be a lucid dream? Could it be that both his wife and son died? And while later episodes can sometimes veer a bit too much into standard procedural fare, they also offer a thunderbolt of a plot point, suggesting that the car crash that took Britten’s family may have been no accident at all. Given how quickly the last truly ambitious network sci-fi drama (Heroes) veered into absurdity, the steady pacing and erudite plot development of Awake is an almost welcome relief.

We look forward to dreaming for many episodes to come.

Catch up with what you may have missed with this extended trailer:

The sleep science behind the thought-provoking concept of Awake excited us a lot, but we wanted to get deeper answers to some of our most basic questions about the neuroscience of sleep, and just what it is that Michael Britten might be suffering from. To do so, ScriptPhD.com sat down with Dr. Alon Yosefian Avidan, the Director of the Sleep Disorders Laboratory at UCLA’s Department of Neurology.

ScriptPhD.com: Dr. Avidan, for people reading this that may not know very much at all about sleep science, can you give us a brief layperson’s overview of what the scientific consensus is on what sleep is for, exactly?

Alon Avidan: There is no answer. We don’t understand the central reason for why we need sleep. But we know one thing—we can’t do without it. There are about 13 theories that help explain why we sleep. The theories range from needing it to have better memory akin to letting your computer organize files in its sleep mode, so the brain is doing that same thing in your sleep; organizing thoughts, memories and allowing space for new ones to be formed. Another theory is that sleep has a rejuvenating function, essentially for repair, for better immune function. There are other theories that sleep is a hibernation period during which you don’t really need to eat or look for food and it’s a way for you to reserve your energy. This is probably, evolutionarily speaking, back when humans were foraging and needing to conserve energy. There are some theories that sleep is a way for us to synchronize our bodily functions with the Earth. There are really not that many things that we humans are capable of doing during the night, and this is a time for us to synchronize our biological rhythms with that of the Earth.

SPhD: So regardless of which of these theories is true, extreme sleep deprivation has really bad consequences.

AA: Absolutely. When exposed to extreme sleep deprivation, laboratory animals, rats in particular, don’t survive for more than two weeks. They begin to have skin changes, ulcers and they eventually die. In humans, we have situations where people don’t sleep enough. There is a very rare condition called fatal familial insomnia, a condition where patients lose the ability to sleep, and the patient rarely survives beyond a year, maybe six months. But we do know that there are very acute and very chronic consequences that we can observe very quickly [in sleep-deprived patients], including memory problems, planning, and problems with cognitive functions. The chronic issues include inability to regulate food intake, so people end up gaining weight, people end up at risk for diseases that include diabetes, heart disease. And we know that for patients who have primary sleep disorders such as sleep apnea, narcolepsy, insomnia or others, their life expectancy is lower compared to patients in the same age group.

SPhD: Well, turning to some of the sleep issues in Awake, our main character, Michael Britten, vacillates between two different sleep states, both of which function as his reality, in order to cope with the loss of his wife, son or possibly both. How much do we in fact use our subconscious as a coping mechanism for the traumatic things that happen to us in our lives?

AA: That’s a very interesting point. We know that people who are depressed spend a lot of time in bed, they tend to spend a lot of time sleeping, but their quality of sleep is disrupted. And perhaps it is a coping mechanism for them not to deal with the true conflicts or trauma that are occurring in their lives. What’s very interesting is that in those patients, when they do sleep, sleep is very disrupted. The quality of sleep related to depression or anxiety is really bad. They have arousals, they have awakenings, the duration is short, and the quality of sleep is very light. They often wake up and feel as if they haven’t really slept.

SPhD: What about the dream aspect of sleep in this patient sub-population?

AA: Dreams are when healthy individuals reach the REM cycle (which you know is when we dream). You can have dreams in non-REM cycles as well. What’s interesting is that patients who have post-traumatic stress disorder or anxiety, their dreams are frightening. They’re usually nightmares. Studies show that in many patients who have a very profound trauma like 9/11 survivors in New York City, there was an epidemic of nightmares and stressful sleep experience. Dreams are not normal in patients who have psychiatric disorders, and they are more dramatic and more intense dreams.

SPhD: In the show, Mr. Britten takes clues from one sleep state to solve his crimes in another sleep state (either of which he considers a reality). One of his therapists warns him that doing this is incredibly dangerous because his “unconscious is unreliable.” What do you think the therapist meant by that?

AA: So what’s likely happening to him clinically is that he’s unable to distinguish between sleep and wakefulness. And what is being advised is be more careful not to rely on facts that may be occurring in dreams or wakefulness, because he is not aware which state this is arising from.

SPhD: Is there something to that piece of advice? What about people who regularly swear by premonitions or things they “see” in their dreams?

AA: Clinically, we really don’t see that very often. We don’t see patients relaying a sense of reality between sleep and wakefulness. There is a situation that is neither a sleep state, nor wakefulness, but a combination of the two—the patient has lost sense of what is real and what isn’t. Dissociative fugue disorder is a rare psychiatric disorder where the patient loses their sense of reality, their sense of identity. And it does have something to do with sleep because it’s one of those mixtures of sleep and wakefulness when the patient is unsure of whether they were asleep or awake. It involves extensive memory loss, usually into the wakefulness period, and the person just doesn’t have the capacity to determine what is real and what is fiction.

So, what you are describing with this police officer, he could have this sleep disorder (or something similar) rather than a primary sleep disorder. In the sleep literature, we don’t have patients who strictly come in and lose the perception of sleep and wakefulness and have no other psychiatric issues. What you’re describing is a patient who has a fugue, and may have dream episodes that are very profound, but his underlying primary pathology is a psychiatric one. And there is usually something that crosses this person into the fugue state, and the one thing that does it is usually a major life event that is very stressful. Or a condition in which the patient has such a severe depression that they have no sense of reality because they have a borderline personality and they forget what is real—their sense of reality is so profoundly sad and full of tragedy that they can’t accept it, and are thus creating this lucid state in which they exist more comfortably because they don’t need to deal with the tragedy in their lives.

We want to thank Dr. Avidan for taking time to chat with ScriptPhD.com and give his thoughts on some of the sleep science pertaining to Awake.

~*ScriptPhD*~

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ScriptPhD.com covers science and technology in entertainment, media and advertising. Hire our consulting company for creative content development.

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The Go Red For Women logo ©2012 American Heart Association, all rights reserved.

In years past, Valentine’s Day has been a fun chance to explore the more lighthearted aspects of science, as pertains to matters of the heart (such as our post on the neurobiology of love and dating). This year, we use Valentine’s Day as an opportunity to talk about a different, more serious matter pertaining to our hearts — keeping them healthy. And while blogs, magazines and popular media provide men with no shortage of ideas about what to shower the many women in their lives with on Valentine’s Day, they provide little coverage of the biggest silent killer and danger to women every day: heart disease. So this year, join us in Going Red For Women and learning more about an issue truly close to our hearts. For more, click “continue reading.”

Your valentine might be at risk for a broken heart that you didn't cause.

Fact: more women will die of heart disease than all cancers combined. Scary, isn’t it? With the “pink”-washing of virtually all consumer products (and even some sports teams!) every October, one would surely think that breast cancer is the biggest threat to women’s health. Indeed, 48% of women do. Yet despite the very real, and deadly, threat that breast cancer continues to pose for women, according to the American Heart Association, only 1 in 30 women will die of breast cancer, while 1 in 3 will die of cardiovascular disease. 500,000 women die each year in the United States (1 per minute!) of cardiovascular disease, making it the number one killer of women—our colleagues, our friends and loved ones. [Download a full fact sheet here.] But there’s good news! 80% of all heart attacks are preventable, with the majority of heart disease precursors (including diet, weight and sedentary lifestyle) under our control.

If you are absorbing this sobering information for the first time, you’re not alone. At a recent Los Angeles event for an AHA cause called Go Red For Women, I learned many of these facts for the first time as well. Even in the medical community, the rates of misdiagnosis and underdiagnosed, with women’s heart disease symptoms often dismissed as stress. The power of organizations such as Go Red For Women is enormous. In addition to helping spread the necessary information about heart risks to women online and at local events all across the country, GRFW provides educational tools for physicians to better treat female patients for cardiovascular disease. In Los Angeles County, they were instrumental in championing ordinances that removed smoking from beaches and junk food from schools. Nationally, they’ve championed legislation such as the HEART For Women Act, federal legislation introduced to Congress February 12, 2009 to improve the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of heart disease and stroke in women. They are also working with the entertainment and media industries to produce more pop culture materials such as this short video called “Just a Little Heart Attack starring actress Elizabeth Banks:”

ScriptPhD.com caught up with Dr. Vyshali Rao, a cardiologist that has led the efforts of the Los Angeles-based Go Red For Women campaign, to ask her about the importance of raising awareness for women’s heart issues.

ScriptPhD: Dr. Rao, tell us about what motivated you to get involved with Go Red For Women?

Vyshali Rao: At first I got involved on my own, with the American Heart Association, because of my dad, who is a cardiac survivor and had a bypass operation when he was 86 years old. Being a cardiologist myself, it’s important tying it as much to health care as possible. And it turns out, the hospital that I work at, Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, CA, is the Los Angeles sponsor for the Go Red For Women campaign. Through myt work at Huntington, I’ve become the medical director of the women’s heart program here, and through that, have worked closely with the Go Red For Women campaign. It really has, for the last three or four years, been a really exciting experience for me, because you meet so many women from all walks of life—different ethnicities, different backgrounds. The commonality of it, though, is they are all [impacted the same way cardiovascularly], which is what we are trying to get out there.

SPhD: Why is this an issue just now coming to the forefront in the media?

VR: In this day and age, it’s interesting to note that cardiovascular disease remains [women’s] #1 health risk. The majority of people will think it’s breast cancer, or cervical cancer, but no one thinks, “OK, I’m going to die of a heart attack or a stroke or cardiovascular disease.” So, I think that for the last few years, the Go Red For Women campaign has really tried to push that information so that more women get involved and get everyone educated about it.

SPhD: Do you feel, fairly or unfairly, that there has sometimes been an overemphasis in the media on other causes or issues? Do you think they could be doing more to highlight women’s cardiovascular health?

VR: Yes. Obviously, in today’s day and age, whoever gets their message out the loudest and attracts the most attention gets it. At this point, there’s so much advertising and so much media for breast cancer and AIDS, which are both issues we need to get everyone educated about. But, heart disease seems to be a little bit slower to get attracted to, and we don’t have the big budget like some of the other [causes and organizations] do. And we don’t have as much money directed at heart disease. The majority—80%–of all the money that comes into the American Medical Association is directed towards research. So, we don’t have big budgets for advertising or media campaigns, so sometimes our message gets lost. Through volunteers and through programs and events sponsored by organizations such as Go Red For Women, we are hoping that this will change, and that heart disease and the American Heart Association will get the attention that it deserves.

SPhD: Do you feel that this campaign and discussion extends somewhat beyond women’s health to our health as a nation and steps we can all take to make our hearts healthier?

VR: Yes, absolutely. The goal of the campaign is not to just empower women. It’s to get everyone educated and to understand the risks for cardiovascular disease. The best thing about cardiovascular disease is that the majority of it is preventable! There’s not a lot of diseases that you could say that about. The majority of the risk factors for heart disease—hypertension, diabetes, cholesterol, obesity, sedentary lifestyle—they are all potentially preventable. If people can get educated, get off the couch and exercise, we won’t have to suffer from cardiovascular disease as much as we are.

SPhD: If someone is reading this and wondering what they can do to get involved, beyond their own health, what would you tell them?

VR: That’s the great thing. You don’t have to have any money to get involved. The American Heart Association largely works through volunteers. So the majority of the events that we have, like our ‘Heart’ walks, they’re always looking for volunteers, whether it’s to learn CPR, or educate people about it. Now, they launched a new program called ‘School Gardens’ where we actually go to inner-city communities, educate the kids about fresh vegetables, plan the fresh vegetables, harvest them, and then cook with them. You’d be surprised how many of these kids have never eaten a fresh tomato! There’s so many things that have nothing to do with money and people can get involved.

Make sure your Valentine's heart is as healthy as it is loved.

Feel motivated to go red? Here are some suggestions for you and your Valentine that will get your hearts pumping, and leave them healthy for many Valentine’s Days to come.

1. Know the risks for, warning signs and types of cardiovascular disease. Educate yourself.

2. Get involved! Volunteer in your community for an American Heart Association event or training. If there is a girlfriend, wife, mother, daughter, sister, friend or other significant woman in your life, donate the time and effort to spreading the word about Go Red For Women and heart health. Let’s stop heart disease from being the biggest killer of women together.

3. Take care of your heart. We’re not speaking metaphorically here, lovebirds. From heart-healthy recipes, to stress management, to managing physical activity and weight management, the American Heart Association offers a plethora of ideas and guides to forming heart-healthy habits.

4. Impact the next generation. I cannot stress strongly enough how much the problems plaguing Western nations as a whole (and that contribute as precursors to heart disease) are preventable through dietary changes and exercise. But changing decades of unhealthy eating, especially in lower-income neighborhoods without immediate access to fresh fruits and vegetables, will take a collective effort. Programs such as First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign and the AHA’s Teaching Gardens will go a long way towards planting seeds for a lifetime of good health. Take a look at this incredibly moving video about the impact the program has already made:

And lastly, since today is the day we celebrate those that have captured our hearts, here are 10 Amazing Facts About Your Heart. We think it’s worth protecting!

Happy Valentine’s Day from ScriptPhD.com.

~*ScriptPhD*~

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ScriptPhD.com covers science and technology in entertainment, media and advertising. Hire our consulting company for creative content development.

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Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists and Cinema book cover ©2011 MIT Press, all rights reserved

Read through any archive of science fiction movies, and you quickly realize that the merger of pop culture and science dates as far back as the dawn of cinema in the early 1920s. Even more surprising than the enduring prevalence of science in film is that the relationship between film directors, scribes and the science advisors that have influenced their works is equally as rich and timeless. Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists, and Cinema (2011, MIT Press), one of the most in-depth books on the intersection of science and Hollywood to date, serves as the backdrop for recounting the history of science and technology in film, how it influenced real-world research and the scientists that contributed their ideas to improve the cinematic realism of science and scientists. For a full ScriptPhD.com review and in-depth extended discussion of science advising in the film industry, please click the “continue reading” cut.

Written by David A. Kirby, Lecturer in Science Communication Studies at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester, England, Lab Coats offers a surprising, detailed analysis of the symbiotic—if sometimes contentious—partnership between filmmakers and scientists. This includes the wide-ranging services science advisors can be asked to provide to members of a film’s production staff, how these ideas are subsequently incorporated into the film, and why the depiction of scientists in film carries such enormous real-world consequences. Thorough, detailed, and honest, Lab Coats in Hollywood is an exhaustive tome of the history of scientists’ impact on cinema and storytelling. It’s also an essential and realistic road map of the challenges that scientists, engineers and other technical advisors might face as they seriously pursue science advising to the film industry as a career.

The essential questions that Lab Coats in Hollywood addresses are these—is it worth it to hire a science advisor for a movie production? Is it worth it for the scientist to be an advisor? The book’s purposefully vague conclusion is that it depends solely on how the scientist can film’s storyline and visual effects. Kirby wisely writes with an objective tone here because the topic is open to a considerable amount of debate among the scientists and filmmakers profiled in the book. Sometimes a scientist is so key to a film’s development, he or she becomes an indispensible part of the day-to-day production. A good example of this is Jack Horner, paleontologist at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, MT, and technical science advisor to Steven Spielberg in Jurassic Park and both of its sequels. Horner, who drew from his own research on the link between dinosaurs and birds for a more realistic depiction of the film’s contentious science, helped filmmakers construct visuals, write dialogue, character reactions, animal behaviors, and map out entire scenes. J. Marvin Herndon, a geophysicist at the Transdyne Corporation, approached the director of the disaster film The Core when he learned the plot was going to be based on his controversial hypothesis about a giant uranium ball in the center of the Earth. Herndon’s ideas were fully incorporated into the film’s plot, while Herndon rode the wave of publicity from the film to publish his research in a PNAS paper. The gold standard of science input, however, were Stanley Kubrik’s multiple science and engineering advisors for 2001: A Space Odyssey, discussed in much further detail below.

Armageddon did phenomenally well at the box office despite not relying on the advice of their science advisor. Pictured here is a meteorite falling on New York City in the film, largely panned as not very realistic, scientifically.

Kirby hypothesizes that sometimes, a film’s poor reception might have been avoided with a science advisor. He provides the example of the Arnold Schwarzenegger futuristic sci-fi bomb The Sixth Day, which contained a ludicrously implausible use of human cloning in its main plot. While the film may have been destined for failure, Kirby posits that it only could have benefited from proper script vetting by a scientist. By contrast, the 1998 action adventure thriller Armageddon came under heavy expert criticism for its basic assertion that an asteroid “the size of Texas” could go undetected until eighteen days before impact. Director Michael Bay patently refused to take the advice of his advisor, NASA researcher Ivan Bakey, and admitted he was sacrificing science for plot, but Armageddon went on to be a huge box office hit regardless. Quite often, the presence of a science advisor is helpful, albeit unnecessary. One of the book’s more amusing anecdotes is about Dustin Hoffman’s hyper-obsessive shadowing of a scientist for the making of the pandemic thriller Outbreak (great guide to the movie’s science can be found here). Hoffman was preparing to play a virologist and wanted to infuse realism in all of his character’s reactions. Hoffman kept asking the scientist to document reactions in mundane situations that we all encounter—a traffic jam, for example—only to come to the shocking conclusion that the scientist was a real person just like everyone else.

Most of the time, including scientists in the filmmaking process is at the discretion of the studios because of the one immutable decree reiterated throughout the book: the story is king. When a writer, producer or director hires a science consultant, their expertise is utilized solely to facilitate, improve or augment story elements for the purposes of entertaining the audience. Because of this, one of the most difficult adjustments a science consultant may face is a secondary status on-set even though they may be a superstar in their own field. Some of the other less glamorous aspects of film consulting include heavy negotiations with unionized writers for script or storyline changes, long working hours, a delicate balance between side consulting work and a day job, and most importantly, an inconsistent (sometimes nonexistent) payment structure per project. I was notably thrilled to see Kirby mention the pros and cons of programs such as the National Science Foundation’s Creative Science Studio (a collaboration with USC’s school of the Cinematic Arts) and the National Academy of Science’s Science and Entertainment Exchange, which both provide on-demand scientific expertise to the Hollywood filmmaking community in the hope of increasing and promoting the realism of scientific portrayal in film. While valuable commodities to science communication, both programs have had the unfortunate effect of acclimating Hollywood studios to expect high-level scientific consulting for free.

A still from a scene in the spacecraft of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Stanley Kubrik painstakingly designed each element of the technology and aeronautical science in the movie, and depended on a slew of science advisors to do so.

1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is widely considered by popular consensus to be the greatest sci-fi movie ever made, and certainly the most influential. As such, Kirby devotes an entire chapter to detailing the film’s production and integration of science. Director Stanley Kubrik took painstaking detail in scientific accuracy to explore complex ideas about the relationship between humanity and technology, hiring a range of advisors from anthropologists, aeronautical engineers, statisticians, and nuclear physicists for various stages of production. Statistician I. J. Good provided advice on supercomputers, aerospace Harry Lange provided production design, while NASA space scientist Frederick Ordway lent over three years of his time to develop the space technology used in the film. In doing so, Kubrik’s staff consulted with over sixty-five different private companies, government agencies, university groups and research institutions. So real was the space technology in 2001 that moon landing hoax supporters have claimed the real moon landing by United States astronauts, taking place in 1969, was taped on the same sets. Not every science-based film has used science input as meticulously or thoroughly since, but Kubrik’s influence on the film industry’s fascination with science and technology has been an undeniable legacy.

One of the real treats of Lab Coats in Hollywood is the exploration of the two-way relationship between scientists and filmmakers, and how film in turn influences the course of science, as we discuss in more detail below. Between film case studies, critiques and interviews with past science advisors are interstitial vignettes of ways scientists have shaped films we know and love. Even the animated feature Finding Nemo had an oceanography advisor to get the marine biology correct. The seminal moment of the most recent Star Trek installation was due to a piece of off-handed scientific advice from an astronomer. The cloning science of Jurassic Park, so thoroughly researched and pieced together by director Steven Spielberg and science advisor Jack Horner, was actually published in a top-notch journal days ahead of the movie’s premiere. Even in rare spots where the book drags a bit with highly technical analysis are cinematic backstories with details that readers will salivate over. (For example, there’s a very good reason all the kelp went missing from Finding Nemo between its cinematic and DVD releases.)

As the director of a creative scientific consulting company based in Los Angeles, one of the biggest questions I get asked on a regular basis is “What does a science advisor do, exactly?” Lab Coats in Hollywood does an excellent job of recounting stories and case studies of high-profile scientist consultants, all of whom contributed their creative talents to their respective films in different ways, what might be expected (and not expected) of scientists on set, and of giving different areas of expertise that are currently in demand in Hollywood. Kirby breaks down cinematic fact checking, the most frequent task scientists are hired to perform, into three areas within textbook science (known, proven facts that cannot be disputed, such as gravity): public science, something we all know and would think was ridiculous if filmmakers got wrong, expert science, facts that are known to specialists and scientific experts outside of the lay audience, and (most problematic) folk science, incorrect science that has nevertheless been accepted as true by the public. Filmmakers are most likely to alter or modify facts that they perceive as expert science to minimize repercussions at the box office.

A lot of the math seen in the film A Beautiful Mind was drawn by actual mathematicians to preserve authenticity.

A science advisor is constantly navigating cinematic storytelling constraints and a filmmaker’s desire to utilize only the most visually appealing and interesting aspects of science (regardless of whether the context is always academically appropriate). Another broad area of high demand is in helping actors look and act like a real scientist on screen. Scientists have been hired to do everything from doctoring dialogue to add realism into an actor’s portrayal (the movie Contact and Jodie Foster’s depiction of Dr. Ellie Arroway is a good example of this), training actors in using equipment and pronouncing foreign-sounding jargon, replicating laboratory notebooks or chalkboard scribbles with the symbols and shorthand of science (such as in the mathematics film A Beautiful Mind), and to recreate the physical space of an authentic laboratory. Finally, the scientist’s expertise of the known is used to help construct plausible scenarios and storylines for the speculative, an area that requires the greatest degree of flexibility and compromise from the science advisor. Uncertainty, unexplored research and “what if” scenarios, the bane of every scientist’s existence, happen to be Hollywood’s favorite scenarios, because they allow the greatest creative freedom in storytelling and speculative conceptualization without being negated by a proven scientific impossibility. An entire chapter—the book’s finest—is devoted to two case studies, Deep Impact and The Hulk, where real science concepts (near-Earth asteroid impacts and genetic engineering, respectively) were researched and integrated into the stories that unfolded in the films. (Side note: if you are ever planning on being a science advisor read this section of the book very carefully).

In years past, consulting in films didn’t necessarily bring acclaim to scientists within their own research communities; indeed, Lab Coats recounts many instances where scientists were viewed as betraying science or undermining its seriousness with Hollywood frivolity, including many popular media figures such as Carl Sagan and Paul Ehrlich. Recently, however, consultants have come to be viewed as publicity investments both by studios that hire high-profile researchers for recognition value of their film’s science content and by institutes that benefit from branding and exposure. Science films from the last 10-15 years such as GATTACA, Outbreak, Armageddon, Contact, The Day After Tomorrow and a panoply of space-related flicks have attached big-name scientists as consultants (gene therapy pioneer French Anderson, epidemiologist David Morens, NASA director Ivan Bekey, SETI institute astronomers Seth Shostak and Jill Tartar and climatologist Michael Molitor, respectively). They also happened to revolve around the research salient to our modern era: genetic bioengineering, global infectious diseases, near-earth objects, global warming and (as always) exploring deep space. As such, a mutually beneficial marketing relationship has emerged between science advisors and studios that transcends the film itself resulting in funding and visibility to individual scientists, their research, and even institutes and research centers. The National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) promoted themselves in two recent films, Twister and Dante’s Peak, using the films as a vehicle to promote their scientific work, to brand themselves as heroes underfunded by the government, and to temper public expectations about storm predictions. No institute has had a deeper relationship with Hollywood than NASA, extending back to the Star Trek television series, with intricate involvement and prominent logo display in the films Apollo 13, Armageddon, Mission to Mars, and Space Cowboys. Some critics have argued that this relationship played an integral role in helping NASA maintain a positive public profile after the devastating 1986 Challenger space shuttle disaster. The end result of the aforementioned promotion via cinematic integration can only benefit scientific innovation and public support.

Futuristic touch screens shown in 2002's Minority Report have become standard in technology such as phones, tablet computers and other security devices.

Accurate and favorable portrayal of science content in modern cinema has an even bigger beneficiary than specific research institutes, and that is society itself. Fictional technology portrayed in film – termed a “diegetic prototype” – has often inspired or led directly to real-world application and development. Kirby offers the most impactful case of diegetic prototyping as the 1981 film Threshold, which portrayed the first successful implantation of a permanent artificial heart, a medical marvel that became reality only a year later. Robert Jarvik, inventor of the Jarvik-7 artificial heart used in the transplant, was also a key medical advisor for Threshold, and felt that his participation in the film could both facilitate technological realism and by doing so, help ease public fears about what was then considered a freak surgery, even engendering a ban in Great Britain. Of the many obstacles that expensive, ambitious, large-scale research faces, Kirby argues that skepticism or lack of enthusiasm from the public can be the most difficult to overcome, precisely because it feeds directly into essential political support that makes funding possible. A later example of film as an avenue for promotion of futuristic technology is Minority Report, set in the year 2054, and featuring realistic gestural interfacing technology and visual analytics software used to predict crime before it actually happens. Less than a decade later, technology and gadgets featured in the film have come to fruition in the form of multi-touch interfaces like the iPad and retina scanners, with others in development including insect robots (mimics of the film’s spider robots), facial recognition advertising billboards, crime prediction software and electronic paper. A much more recent example not featured in the book is the 2011 film Limitless, featuring a writer that is able to stimulate and access 100% of his brain at will by taking a nootropic drug. While the fictitious drug portrayed in the film is not yet a neurochemical reality, brain enhancement is a rising field of biomedical research, and may one day indeed yield a brain-boosting pill.

No other scientific feat has been a bigger beneficiary of diegetic prototyping than space travel, starting with 1929’s prophetic masterpiece Frau im Mond [Woman in the Moon], sponsored by the German Rocket Society and advised masterfully by Hermann Oberth, a pioneering German rocket research scientist. The first film to ever present the basics of rocket travel in cinema, and credited with the now-standard countdown to zero before launch in real life, Frau im Mond also featured a prototype of the liquid-fuel rocket and inspired a generation of physicists to contribute to the eventual realization of space travel. Destination Moon, a 1950 American sci-fi film about a privately financed trip to the Moon, was the first film produced in the United States to deal realistically with the prospect of space travel by utilizing the technical and screenplay input of notable science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein. Released seven years before the start of the USSR Sputnik program, Destination Moon set off a wave of iconic space films and television shows such as When Worlds Collide, Red Planet Mars, Conquest of Space and Star Trek in the midst of the 1950s and 1960s Cold War “space race” between the United States and Russia. What theoretical scientific feat will propel the next diegetic prototype? A mission to Mars? Space colonization? Anti-aging research? Advanced stem cell research? Time will only tell.

Ultimately, readers will enjoy Lab Coats in Hollywood for its engaging writing style, detailed exploration of the history of science in film and most of all, valuable advice from fellow scientists who transitioned from the lab to consulting on a movie set. Whether you are a sci-fi film buff or a research scientist aspiring to be a Hollywood consultant, you will find some aspect of this book fascinating. Especially given the rapid proliferation of science and technology content in movies (even those outside of the traditional sci-fi genre), and the input from the scientific community that it will surely necessitate, knowing the benefits and pitfalls of this increasingly in-demand career choice is as important as its significance in ensuring accurate portrayal of scientists to the general public.

~*ScriptPhD*~

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Contagion official movie poster ©2011 Warner Brothers, all rights reserved.

“Don’t talk to anyone, don’t touch anyone.” The austere slogan of the new film Contagion mirrors the gripping subject matter of the latest addition to the pandemic disaster movie club. One of the most science-oriented films to be released in the last few years, Contagion follows the path of several scientists, public health workers, and ordinary citizens as a full-fledged pandemic breaks out from an unknown virus. It explores scientific, moral, social and ethical questions for how we would prepare as a modern society if such a tragedy ever struck us. Additionally, Contagion is a cinematic ode to the visual and technical wonders of modern science, on full display here, both in the storyline and the beatifully-designed sets and costumes. For a full ScriptPhD review, including information on the behind-the-scenes science consultants that worked with the film’s producers to create scientific realism, click “continue reading” below.

REVIEW: Contagion
ScriptPhD Grade: B-

Contagion is one of those all-star Hollywood packages that seem too good to be true, and in this case it is. It’s clear that Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh (Erin Brokovich, Traffic, Ocean’s Eleven) paid attention to his advisors and took the time to get the science right, but perhaps he did so at the cost of any real drama making its way through the movie. The star-studded cast, which includes Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law and Lawrence Fishburne, may have delivered great performances in their original storylines, but the final cut is such an odd mash up of actionless sequences that it’s impossible to stay invested in any of their stories.

Dr. Leona Orantes (Marion Cotillard) investigates the origins of the virus causing a pandemic in the film Contagion.

When Beth Ernhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) returns home to Minneapolis, her bad case of let lag takes a perilous turn for the worse, and two days later, she is dead. To the shock and dismay of her grieving husband Thomas (Matt Damon), doctors don’t know the cause. Soon, the contagion spreads around our increasingly interconnected world, and a pandemic ensues. Scientists at the United States Centers for Disease Control soon take on deciphering the code of a rapidly mutating virus along with quelling the simultaneously rising tide of public panic. While Deputy Director Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishbourne) allays public panic, Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) is sent directly into harm’s way. Concurrently, WHO Dr. Leona Orantes (Marion Cotillard) delegates solving the maze of clues that will eventually lead back to what ordinated the virus. While the doctors race time to find a cure, their efforts are thwarted by extremist activist blogger Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law), whose conspiracy theories that the public isn’t getting the whole story from the US Government, which sets of a wave of paranoia more dangerous than the virus itself.

Scientists rejoice! As a realistic depiction of a bird flu epidemic, Contagion attempts to right some of the scientific wrongs of Outbreak, which played more like a conventional zombie movie than a warning parable about the global reach of modern infectious diseases. Contagion was a difficult review for ScriptPhD to compose, because we’ve always marveled at the overt inaccuracies of its predecessor: an unauthorized person walking out of a secured government lab with a sample of a deadly virus (without gloves no less!), scientists and civilians walking into a Biosafety Level 4 lab without proper personal protective equipment, an unrealistic rate of viral spread, and we could go on and on…

The scientific details of Contagion were pinpoint accurate, including research done in a sealed Biosafety Level 4 laboratory, pictured here with Jennifer Ehle as Dr. Ally Hextall.

Thanks to the involvement of Participant Media and Warner Brothers, Contagion is a science film masquerading as a public service announcement to raise awareness about the possibility of such an outbreak and show that widespread panic is more dangerous than the virus itself. We applaud this goal. But too many minutes were invested in forcing actors to deliver technical language, along with clunky lines explaining their meaning. The balance between scientific accuracy and storytelling always has to ultimately tip in the balance of storytelling—the lynchpin of compelling films across all genres.

Showing scientists in realistic settings is noble and important, but lab work doesn’t qualify as action, and unfortunately for the viewing audience, that’s as good as it gets for this ‘action-thriller.’ As an example, Marion Cotillard’s Dr. Orantes is introduced in a tense moment of the film with a minute-long montage where we watch her take meetings—she’s literally sitting across a desk and talking to people—but we don’t get to hear what she’s saying because the awkward and uneven score plays over it. This is about the most boring visual montage I’ve ever seen in a movie. Then she gets thrown in a van and we don’t see her for another hour.

There’s a dark secret at the heart of how the virus afflicts Beth Ernhoff, but that drama isn’t allowed to play out in any meaningful way because there are five other plotlines to keep track of. Matt Damon gives some great scenes dealing with her death. But too many emotional punches were pulled: he skips over the death of his son to focus on somewhat-comically keeping his daughter locked away from the boy next door.

Thomas Emhoff (Matt Damon) must contend with quarantines imposed after a deadly pandemic strikes in a scene from Contagion.

Fishburne and Winslet go a good job introducing the audience to the Center for Disease Control and the ridiculous pressures applied to government officials in their position, but don’t look for any happy endings in a movie this insistent on accurate depiction. Finally, Soderbergh is attempting to outdo himself in terms of the number of plotlines he can weave into a cohesive story, following up on his best director Oscar nod for Traffic. Where Traffic succeeded in integrating pieces into a cohesive whole, Contagion stretched my emotional attention span too thin. As the non-linear plot skips among all these amazing actors, the audience is constantly having to recall who they are and what they want.

This became comical at the wrong moment when the film returned to Cotillard’s character teaching schoolchildren in some Chinese village where she’s been held hostage. We are supposed to feel bad for these villagers, now that Marion has become one of them. But the theater was filled with a wave of frenzied whispers as entertainment bloggers consulted their neighbors on what she was doing there in the first place.

Speaking of writers and bloggers, Jude Law’s self-promoting freelancer Alan Krumwiede drew plenty of inside chuckles from the press screening crowd as a blogger seeking to profit from conspiracy theories about the government’s ties to pharmaceutical companies. His character is clearly a tongue-in-cheek homage to biological warfare NGO Sunshine Project muckraker and blogger Edward Hammond. This feeds into the film’s public service message to encourage us to trust our government in a big disaster situation, but it runs counter to the logic of movies that the little guy is corrupt and The Man is actually watching out for us.

If you’re interested in the subject matter or are fascinated by portrayal of science in film, Contagion is well worth the ticket price, but otherwise you’ll probably see it on Netflix in about three months. Contagion is hands-down the most realistic epidemic movie we’ve ever seen, but the film’s competing interests kept it from succeeding in any of its other lofty ambitions. Ultimately, it just wasn’t contagious enough.

Official Trailer:

Contagion goes into wide release on September 9, 2011 in theaters nationwide.

Natasha K. Griffith, MS, director of biosafety and biocontainment at the University of California at Los Angeles, and a world-renowned expert in training scientists to handle the most dangerous pathogens, consulted on all of the laboratory set design and high-tech suits that the actors wore during the filming. We had the opportunity to ask her a few questions about her work with Contagion.

ScriptPhD.com: Tell us a little bit about your expertise and specialty.

Natasha Griffith, MS: My expertise is in high containment laboratory design and management, primarily for Biosafety Level 3 and Biosafety Level 4 labs.

SPhD: Excellent. What kind of work, specifically, did you do for the film production crew? What were you asked to contribute?

NG: I was hired as a technical biosafety consultant. I helped with set design, that is making sure that the set was designed according to regulations, and to make sure that it matched actual BSL-3 and BSL-4 labs. Both are presented in the movie. I worked with the actors that were wearing containment suits at Level 4, and made sure that they knew what they were doing and felt comfortable in the suits. It can be a little difficult if you’ve never worn one of the suits before to just stick you into one and expect you to know what to do. I also oversaw the script, and made sure that all written lines were technically correct, and worked with the set designer to design the Level 3 and Level 4 suits. We also worked closely with the props department to make sure that the items used in the laboratory scenes and that the actors were working with were accurate research-wise. Before the filming even took place, I worked with the set and production designers to make sure that the labs were set up correctly and in place, including all the appropriate biosafety signs, and items in the freezers, and so on.

SPhD: Can you explain to people who are going to see the movie what the difference is between a Level 4 and a Level 3 lab?

NG: A Level 4 lab is truly what we call a “suit lab,” which is where the majority of this movie is presented. People are working in fully enclosed suits, so there’s no contact with the laboratory environment at all. All the air is provided through an external air line into the suit, so that people are not breathing in any air from the lab that might be contaminated with the agent they’re working with. It’s the highest possible level of containment that houses new agents, agents that have a very high mortality, and those that we don’t know much about or have a cure for. A Level 3 lab is one step down from Level 4, so there are different types of personal protective equipment that are used. In this case, the suits are not actually completely isolated from the laboratory environment, but the suits do filter the laboratory air through a special HEPA filter and eliminate any contaminants the scientist might have been exposed to. The agensts housed in a Level 3 lab are usually airborne [infectious disease agents], but we usually have some type of cure or treatment for them.

SPhD: Were there any moments during the filming of Contagion where you saw something terribly inaccurate being filmed and had to correct it? Can you give us examples?

NG: There were some details like this, but for the most part, the people I worked with were trying their best to be very accurate. Changing things wasn’t usually a big problem. A bigger challenge was explaining the highly technical information in such a way that the crew and actors could all understand what was going on and why certain things were important or something had to look a certain way. Usually, once we agreed on those big picture things, changing other small lab-specific details wasn’t a big problem.

SPhD: There have been a host of “pandemic” films that have come out in the last 10-15 years, dealing with global-scale pandemics, something really scary happening. And the fact is, we live in a global world, where in one day, you can travel across half the world (as is depicted in Contagion). The amount of stuff we touch in a given day is truly scary, which is another point the film touches on. In your opinion, having worked in this field, and all the things you’ve seen, is this storyline a Hollywood fantasy or something we should genuinely be investing our research money in and preparing for?

NG: Well, there’s always the possibility of a pandemic, and as you mentioned before, you truly can travel from one end of the world to the other in a very short period of time. So, anything that is new and emerging in Africa or Asia could be here tomorrow, so the risk definitely exists. Research money is obviously being invested already into preparedness, which is really the best way to prepare for such an event. I would say it’s definitely not a Hollywood fantasy. It is something that could happen, and something that we should keep in mind, but not something that we should be paranoid about. We have a lot of things that are always happening, and most of them don’t result in a huge pandemic. But you could say that one day, it might happen. One thing that really impressed me about Contagion was that they really, really tried hard to stay true to the science and what would happen if a pandemic actually happened.

The filmmakers of Contagion also consulted with Dr. Ian Lipkin, one of the world’s foremost microbe hunters and a professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. In addition to suggesting the movie’s plot might be triggered by an outbreak of a virus similar to Nipah, a deadly virus that has, on occasion, migrated from animals to people, Dr. Lipkin provided recollection of his work with the SARS epidemic in Beijing for the WHO and coached Contagion actors on the practices and procedures of scientific research. Here is a video of Dr. Lipkin discussing his work on the film, and why its broader message is so important for raising pandemic awareness and inspiring the next generation of science researchers:

~*Stephen Compson*~

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Mountaintop Removal poster ©2011 Solid Ground Films, all rights reserved.

About a year ago, a little publicized, unheralded documentary named Mountaintop Removal (which ScriptPhD.com reviewed) attempted to deconstruct the environmentally devastating practice of the same name literally destroying the Appalachian geography of West Virginia’s coal river valley. Honest, yet modestly shot and produced, the small-scale documentary needed a Hollywood touch to resonate on a human level to advance its powerful cause. It got what it needed in The Last Mountain, a celebrated selection of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. This important new documentary succeeds in both relaying the urgency of a destructive coal mining practice that is literally zoning in on one last undamaged mountain as well as forging a human connection with the townspeople battling to save it. Full ScriptPhD.com review under the “continue reading” cut.

Most people don’t think twice about where the electricity for their light bulbs comes from. Or if they know it primarily comes from coal, they are not aware of how that coal comes to see the light of day. In the valleys and mountaintops of idyllic Appalachia, the coal industry detonates the explosive power of a Hiroshima bomb every week, utilizing a crude process called mountaintop removal. There is nothing scientific or technical about mountaintop removal. It is crude, cruel and its effects non-reversible. First, trees and other natural ecology are removed from the tops of mountains. Then, dynamite splits the mountain open to unearth a layer of coal that is mined by brave men risking their lives in ungodly working conditions. When the layer is depleted, the next layer is blasted, until nothing is left but a hollow shell of a devastated mountain. In its wake, the process leaves behind toxic sludge piles containing arsenic, lead and mercury, contaminated rivers and streams, fine particulate airborne matter that creates an epidemiological health nightmare, and unlivable communities. Mountaintop removal has already destroyed 500 Appalachian mountains, decimated 1 million acres of forests, and buried 2,000 miles of streams.

Take a look at a clip from The Last Mountain that shows the destruction from an aerial view:

In the beautiful mountains of the Coal River Valley in West Virginia, mining corporations such as Massey Energy are blasting the mountains of Appalachia into extinction, polluting the air and water with blithe impunity, and amassing the kind of profits that allow them to wield massive lobbying power in Washington, DC to both repeal existing environmental regulations and obviate the ratification of new ones. One small community has had enough. Their only schoolhouse sits at the base of a silo where 28 million gallons of toxic sludge left over from the coal mining are held back by a flimsy levee. Their neighbors and friends—ranging from 5 to 63 years old to—are dying in masses from strange tumor clusters. Water filters that should last 3-4 months get plugged up after two weeks. The very last mountain in Coal River, protecting the community from massive flooding after rainfall, is being targeted for blasting. And that is when the people of Coal River decide to fight back.

The Last Mountain is not just a standard environmental cautionary tale, but also an uplifting tale of citizens taking back their community. Helping the cause is noted environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who travels to Coal River, aligns with the community, and attends dozens of rallies that are held to protest the actions of Massey Energy. In one of the film’s lighter moments, a humble West Virginian remarks “I never thought I’d have a Kennedy in my living room!” It is these very human moments that ultimately connect the audience to a cause seemingly unrelated to our lives. The most poignant moment of The Last Mountain is live footage of Coal River residents that had traveled to the governor’s offices in Charlotte to present him with money raised through a local Pennies For Promise campaign to build a new, safer schoolhouse (an ultimately successful initiative.) At first the governor is touched, even amused, by the rural denizens. But when they bring up the actions of Massey Energy, and the governor’s own futility in stopping the damage to their community, he is stunned, even embarrassed, even going so far as to have the West Virginia government arrest the protesters—one of whom was a 91-year-old woman in a flag-draped wheelchair. “Why are our kids any different?” former Massey Energy contractor turned activist Ed Wiley shouts at the governor. “Because they’re in the coal fields? They’re on the wrong side of the mountain?”

If you think this movie, or mountaintop removal itself, doesn’t affect you, you’re wrong. Almost half of the electricity produced in the US comes from the burning of coal (that’s 16 pounds of coal each day for each man, woman, and child!). 32% of that coal comes from…you guessed it…the mountains of Appalachia. It also happens to be the #1 sources of greenhouse gases worldwide. And it doesn’t stop there. The toll on health from the burning of coal nationwide—contributing to such problems as 10 million asthma attacks, brain damage in newborns and thousands of premature deaths—adds up to $345 billion annually. We are all paying the cost of mountaintop removal in one way or another. You’re connected to coal, whether you realize it or not.

Toxic sludge sits at the base of a mountain that has been mined for coal in a scene from The Last Mountain.

As The Last Mountain eventually conveys, this is a tale about so much more than blasting off a mountain—it’s about hubris and powerful people thinking they can do whatever they want, while destroying lives in the process. How’s this for a silent statistic? Massey Energy’s 28 impoundments have spilled 24 times in the last decade, contaminating rivers with 300 million gallons of sludge—that is twice the amount released in the BP oil spill in the Gulf that shocked the world. After a $28 million dollar settlement for their environmental violations, Massey Energy committed 180 more violations with no impunity. And the tragic thing is that the alternative technology is so much more effective and inexpensive. The filmmakers end with an uplifting visit to Portsmouth, WV, a municipality that supplies ¾ of its electricity needs for the community with two windmills with low-grade Category 2 winds. The winds in the Coal River Valley? The highest possible—Category 5. One can only imagine how many jobs and clean energy could be created from wind turbines in the Coal River Valley. A 1991 Department of Energy study concluded that only three US States, Kansas, North Dakota and Texas, have enough harnessable wind energy to supply the entire nations energy needs. Twenty years later, we have the technology to make it happen.

The ultimate message of The Last Mountain is that is not enough to simply be outraged anymore. We are all users of the electricity and power that is generated from the sacrifices of the Appalachia residents and miners. The imagery of environmental devastation is so shocking, the deregulation and egregious indifference of the coal mining companies’ various violations so appalling, that we begin to feel somehow complicit in perpetrating this modern American tragedy. Fixing it starts with watching documentaries like The Last Mountain, but also in taking the kind of inspiring action as that of the small rural West Virginia community that the film portrays. Ordinary people, banded together in a common purpose, can indeed move mountains. And sometimes, they can even save them.

Trailer:

The Last Mountain was released in limited screenings on June 15th, and goes into theaters nationwide later in June.

~*ScriptPhD*~

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Le Voyage Dans la Lune, (A Trip To The Moon), released in 1902, is widely considered to be the first sci-fi film ever made. We've come a long way since then!

I was recently watching Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, the sequel to the Oscar-winning 1987 financial cautionary tale. In the middle of a movie that had nothing to do with science, the lead character started explaining the financial investment potential of a national research facility loosely based on the ultra-exclusive National Ignition Facility in Livermore, CA (which ScriptPhD.com was fortunate to visit and profile recently). The film did such an impressive job of explaining the laser technology being used in real life to harness endless quantities of energy from a molecular fusion reaction that it could have easily been lifted from a physics textbook. Translating, explaining and visually presenting complex science on film is not an easy task. It got us to thinking about some of the greatest science and technology moments of all time in film.

In no particular order, with the help of our readers and fans, here are ScriptPhD.com’s choices for the Top 10 gamechangers of science and/or technology cinematic content that was either revolutionary for its time, was smartly conceived and cinematically executed, or has bared relevance to later research advances.

Gattaca

Gattaca art and content ©1997 Columbia Pictures, all rights reserved.

A trend-setter in genomics and bioinformatics, long before they were scientific staples, 1997 sci-fi masterpiece Gattaca has some of the most thoughtful, smart, introspective science of any film. To realize his life-long dream of space travel, genetically inferior Vincent Freeman (Ethan Hawke) assumes the DNA identity of Jerome Morrow (Jude Law), but becomes a suspect in the murder of the space program director. Not only is this the first (and only) movie to have a clever title composed solely of DNA sequence letters (G, A, T and C are the nucleotide bases that make up DNA), it was declared by molecular biologist Lee M. Silver as “a film that all geneticists should see if for no other reason than to understand the perception of our trade held by so many of the public-at-large.” In 1997, we were still 6 years away from the completion of the Human Genome Project. Post that feat of modern biotechnology, the ability to obtain ‘personal genomics’ disease profiles has led bioethicists to question who is to be entrusted with interpreting personal DNA information, and the United States Congress to pass the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act. Could we find ourselves in a world that judges the genetically perfect as ‘valids’ and anyone with minor flaws (and what constitutes a flaw?) as ‘invalids’? The eugenic determinism in Gattaca certainly portrays an eerily realistic portrait of such a world.

Contact

Contact movie still ©1997 Warner Bros. Pictures, all rights reserved.

Voted on by several of our Facebook and Twitter fans (in complete agreement with us), Contact (based on the book by the most important astronomer of our time, Carl Sagan) is an astonishingly smart movie about the true meaning of human existence, explored through the first human contact with intelligent extraterrestrials. Rarely ambitious and quietly thoughtful science fiction for a big-budget movie, Contact is also one of the best explorations of the divide between science and religion. Bonus points for Jodie Foster’s eloquent and dedicated portrayal of what a real scientist is like.

A Beautiful Mind

A Beautiful Mind poster and content ©2001 Universal Pictures, all rights reserved.

It’s not often that cinema even touches mathematics or physics with depth and significance. It’s even rarer to see complex mathematics at the center of a poignant plot. 2001 Academy Award winning drama A Beautiful Mind was inherently not a film about mathematics, but rather one man’s quest to overcome a debilitating mental illness to achieve greatness. Nevertheless, the presentation of abstract mathematics, notably the Nash equilibrium that won John Nash the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994, is not only difficult to do in film, but is done extraordinarily well by director Ron Howard. For anyone that has studied high-level math, or known a math professor, this film gives a picture-perfect portrayal, and possibly inspired a new generation of aspiring mathematicians.

2001: A Space Odyssey

2001: A Space Odyssey movie still ©1968 MGM Pictures, all rights reserved.

2001: A Space Odyssey is the greatest sci-fi film ever made. Period. Kubrik’s classic introduces an ahead-of-its-time exploration of human evolution, artificial intelligence, technology, extraterrestrial life and the place of humanity in the greater context of the universe. Although definitively esoteric in its content, individual elements could be lifted straight from a science textbook. The portrayal of an ape learning to use a bone as a tool and weapon. Missions to explore outer space, including depictions of alien life, spacecraft and computers that are so realistic, they were built based on consultations with NASA and Carl Sagan. The Heuristic ALgorithmic computer (HAL) that runs the ship’s operations is depicted as possessing as much, if not more intelligence than human beings, an incredibly prescient feat for a film made in 1968.

The Day The Earth Stood Still

The Day The Earth Stood Still movie poster ©1951 20th Century Fox film corporation, all rights reserved.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (we speak of the original, and not its insipid 2008 remake) is a seminal film in the development of the big-budget studio sci-fi epics. Given its age (the original came out in 1951), it still stands the test of time as a warning about the dangers of nuclear power. Well-made, sophisticated and not campy, TDTESS is one of the best cinematic emblems of the scientific anxieties and realities of the Cold War and nuclear era. It is usually a staple of Top Sci-Fi lists.

Jurassic Park

Jurassic Park film still ©1993 Universal Pictures, all rights reserved.

Jurassic Park, originally released in 1993, set one of the most important landmarks for modern science in film—the incorporation of DNA cloning as a significant plot element three full years BEFORE the birth of Dolly, the cloned sheep. Even more important than the fact that, although highly improbable, the science of Jurassic Park was plausible, is the idea that it was presented in an intelligent, casual and meaningful way, with the assumption (and expectation) that the audience would grasp the science well enough not to distract from the rest of the film. Furthermore, the basic plot of the film (and the book on which it was based) act as a cautionary tale about the dangers of unchecked scientific experimentation, and the havoc it can wreak when placed in the wrong hands. With the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003, and the ability to sequence an organism’s genome in a day, bioethical questions about how personal genomics and the resurgent gene therapy are used are perfectly valid. Jurassic Park set a new standard for how modern science would be incorporated into movies.

Terminator 1 and Terminator 2

The Terminator images and movie poster ©1984-present MGM Pictures, all rights reserved.

The Terminator?! Sounds campy, I know. We associate these adventure blockbuster films more with action, explosions and the rise of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Not game-changing science. Think again. The cyborg technology presented in these 1984/1991 action adventures was not only far ahead of its time scientifically, but smart, conceptual, and has really stood the test of time. Countless engineers and aspiring scientists must have been inspired by the artificially intelligent robots when the film first premiered. Today, with robotics technology enabling everything from roomba vacuum cleaners to automated science research, many engineers postulate that the day could even come that humanoid robots could someday fight our wars. Earlier this year, scientists at the German Aerospace Center even created the first ‘Terminator’-like super strong robot hand!

Apollo 13

Apollo 13 movie still ©1993 Universal Pictures, all rights reserved.

Space. The final frontier. At least in the heart of the movies. Far beyond the sci-fi genre, space travel, extraterrestrial life, and NASA missions remain a potent fascination in the cinematic world. For its feat as one of the most factually-correct space travel films ever made, with pinpoint portrayal of a monumentally significant event in the history of American science and technology, Apollo 13 enthusiastically lands on our list. Ron Howard’s almost-obsessive dedication to accuracy in detail included zero gravity flights for the actors (in addition to attending US Space Camp in Huntsville, AL), studying the mission control tapes, and an exact redesign of the layout of the Apollo spacecraft controls. Not only does the story inspire the spirit of adventure and innovation, it is 100% true.

The Andromeda Strain

Andromeda Strain (remake) movie poster ©2008 AS Pictures, all rights reserved. Original film ©1971 Universal Pictures, all rights reserved.

For a film made in 1971, The Andromeda Strain (based on Michael Crichton’s novel by the same name) is a remarkably modern and prescient movie that has had a lot of staying power. The first really significant bio thriller film made, Andromeda’s killer viruses, transmissibility, and global infections have become de rigeur in our modern world. In the film, a team of scientists investigate a deadly organism of extraterrestrial origin that causes rapid, deadly blood clotting—perhaps an unintentional foreboding of Ebola and other hemorrhagic viruses. While the idea of a terrifying pandemic or biological emergency has certainly been replicated in many films such as Outbreak and 28 Days Later, no film has done a better job of capturing not just the sheer terror of an unknown outbreak, but the science behind containment, including government organization, the team of scientists working in a Biosafety Level-4 laboratory, and the fact that the story doesn’t overshadow the focus on the research and lab work. (Incidentally, as far-fetched as Crichton’s plot seemed to be at the time, recent research has shown that Earthly microbes traveling with US astronauts gained strength and virulence in space!)

Moon

Moon film still ©2009 Liberty Films, all rights reserved.

One of the most recent films to crack our Top 10 list, 2009’s debut gem from sci-fi director Duncan Jones failed to amass an audience commensurate to its brilliance and modern scientific relevance. A sweeping, gorgeous epic in the shadow of (and certainly inspirited by) 2001: A Space Odyssey, Moon (ScriptPhD.com review) tells the story of Astronaut Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), who is at the tail-end of a three-year solo stint on the Moon, mining for Helium-3 resources to send back to an energy-depleted Earth. As the sole employee of his lunar station, Bell works alongside an intelligent computer named GERTY (Hal’s third generation cousin), but on the heels of his return to Earth, uncovers an insidious plot by the company he works for to keep him there forever. There are so many scientific and technology themes that made this an obvious choice for our list. Moon exploration and human colonization has been a hot topic for at least the last 15 years, with a recent discovery that the Moon may have as much water as the Earth sure to fuel possible NASA exploration and additional Moon missions. The ethical morass of a greedy company with technology capabilities cloning an employee is not only done brilliantly, but evokes a realistic, chilling possibility in our evolving scientific landscape. Finally, Sam’s relationship with GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey), who ultimately transcends his robotic limitations to exercise free will in helping Sam escape the pod, is especially poignant as technology becomes a more intimate part of human life and literally changes our neurological makeup.

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The free 'Ecosystems' exhibit at the California Science Center. Photography ©2011 ScriptPhD.com, all rights reserved.

Approximately a year ago, the California Science Center added a 45,000 square foot permanent exhibit called ‘Ecosystems,’ nearly doubling the size of the museum. Ten years in the making, at a cost of $165 million, ‘Ecosystems’ manages to impress visually and scholastically. ScriptPhD.com recently got a private tour and in-depth guide of the ambitious exhibit and didactic tool. Afterwards, we had the opportunity to sit down with the man that conceptualized ‘Ecosystems’ and curator of ecology at the California Science Center — Dr. Chuck Kopczak. An avid geologist, and devoted to the promulgation of quality science education, Dr. Chuck graciously sat down with us for an in-depth conversation about ‘Ecosystems,’ the future of science education, and energizing environmental causes through science. Our full tour and podcast, under the “continue reading” cut.

How can we protect and nurture our Earth’s diverse environment if we don’t even know about it? The Earth’s biodiversity is spectacular, with a singular globe housing millions of unique species that have to share space across extreme environments, weather zones and poles. Scientists concur that a better understanding of this diversity, and humanity’s impact on it through our modern life (we add 7 million people to the globe each month!), is an essential component of environmental education and effective activism in fighting pollution and effecting sustainability for future generations. In the heart of Los Angeles, at its most-visited museum, The California Science Center, lies a new exhibit that takes curious visitors through the various ‘zones’ of the Earth’s habitats, with each room providing a colorful, interactive, informative peek at what survival entails. At the very end of the ‘Ecosystems’ exhibit, after we have come to appreciate our Earth’s uniqueness, beauty, and scientific breadth, is a well-timed section on waste, resources, and the power of recycling. Come take a short pictorial tour of ‘Ecosystems’ with us, and then take a listen to our podcast with the passionate scientist, Dr. Chuck Kopczak, that made it all possible.

‘Ecosystems’ is divided into rooms called ‘Zones,’ some of which we’ve documenting here, consisting of a gallery that engenders appreciation for the interconnectedness of a different part of our living world. Portrayed are different environments, species, survival demands, and physical factors. All of the rooms include interactive, hands-on experiments especially tailored for kids.

The ‘Island Zone’ includes hands-on experiments that allow visitors to see the challenge animals face in getting to an island from water, and how their physical characteristics evolve as a result of these environmental demands. The exhibit mimics the discoveries that Darwin might have encountered on the Galapagos Islands.

Tropical island ecosystem on display.

The ‘Extreme Zone’ includes radically different environments representing ecosystems — Rocky Shore, Poles, Deep Sea Vents, and the Desert, both pictured below. Environmental factors such as cold, droughts, and ice deeply test the limits of animals as they try to survive.

The peaceful desert ecosystem, moments before being assaulted with a once-per-hour flash flood to simulate life in the real desert.

Deep sea vents, discovered only 30 years ago, spring from the process of chemosynthesis, with ambient temperatures as high as 760 degrees F. Visitors learn about how organisms have adapted to such a harsh climate by using the Earth's own internal heat to replace sunlight.

Sea life diversity on display at the outdoor tank.

The Global Zone allows visitors to travel around the world with an amazing, first-of-its-kind piece of technology: an internal projection high definition Magic Planet^® exhibit, projecting images onto a global map from within the sphere to answer questions about matter and energy across the globe.

Darkened globe projecting information in the Global Zone.

One of the fan favorites of ‘Ecosystems’ is the ever-so-gross Rot Room, where folks can learn about how much the continuity of life depends upon, well… rot. Interactive decomposition exhibits (such as the one pictured below) and time-lapse videos show the recycling of nutrients and energy back into the environment.

Decomposition in action. Get the CSI experts in here!

The pièce de resistance of the California Science center’s ‘Ecosystems’ exhibit, and its biggest part by far, is the “Rain Forests of the Sea” exhibit, a 188,000 gallon kelp habitat — the largest man-made of any museum in the world — that illustrates the diversity of our sea forests and the environmental factors that kelp forests depend on: a rocky substrate, sunlight, moving water, and high nutrient levels.

The kelp forest is accessed by the amazing 24-foot long transparent acrylic tunnel, displaying the life that exists in coastal kelp forests.

A close up of Kelp biodiversity includes more than 1,500 fish on display.

In the midst of the ‘Ecosystems’ exhibit is an interactive lab, where new additions to the over 250 species on exhibit at ‘Ecosystems’ are researched and cared for. In addition, it provides an opportunity for young high school students interested in pursuing science to answer guests’ questions, pursue research, and learn the scientific method in the process.

A young student working his internship in the official California Science Center 'Ecosystems' lab.

The hands-on lab allows permanent staff and scientists to maintain the exhibits, while young scientists have world-class facilities where they can pursue and cultivate their interests in research.

The end of the ‘Ecosystems’ exhibit takes visitors to the modern ‘L.A. Zone,’ where they can learn about weather patterns, wind currents, and geologic make-up of the Los Angeles Basin. Most importantly, visual waste exhibits expose the unique challenges in the issues of energy, water, and impact on wildlife.

The California Science Center Paper Person. He was constructed of all the paper trash thrown away by patrons of the Science Center on Earth Day 2009. Yes, just on that day alone! The trash was washed, ironed, made into sheets, glued onto a felt backing, and covered with protective sheeting.

Ten years' worth of undecomposed waste, dug up from a California landfill. Newspaper headlines from the 1990s are still clearly readable.

Dr. Chuck in the darkened "Global Zone" at the 'Ecosystems' exhibit in Los Angeles, CA. Photo courtesy of AP/Damian Dovarges.

The mastermind behind such wonders as the kelp zone (his sobriquet is indeed Dr. Kelp!), the Global Zone, and the Los Angeles Zone, among its other structural feats, Dr. Chuck Kopczak is as intellectually accomplished as he is full of wonder about science, our Earth, the environment and the best ways to teach children about them through technology and modern exhibits. Recently, he went on a collecting expedition in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to study species and the environment. We spoke about putting together ‘Ecosystems,’ his hopes for it influencing the establishment of similar exhibits in science centers across the nation, and the larger overall goals of science education in America. Click ‘play’ to listen to our podcast:

Podcast interview with California Science Center’s Dr. Chuck Kopczak

ScriptPhD.com would like to thank the California Science Center, Dr. Chuck Kopczak, and Kristina Kurasz for their help and generosity of time. We encourage anyone planning a visit to Los Angeles, and interested in science and the environment, to check out this free exhibit and learning center.

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ScriptPhD.com covers science and technology in entertainment, media and advertising. Hire our consulting company for creative content development.

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Physics of the Future images and all content ©2011 Doubleday Publishing.

Dr. Michio Kaku recently consolidated his position as America’s most visible physicist by acting as the voice of the science community to major news outlets in the wake of Japan’s major earthquake and the recent Fukushima nuclear crisis. Dr. Kaku is one of those rare and prized few who possesses both the hard science chops (he built an atom smasher in his garage for a high school science fair and is a co-founder of string theory) and the ability to reduce quantum physics and space time to layman’s terms. The author of Physics of the Impossible has also followed up with a new book, Physics of the Future, that aims to convey how these very principles will change the future of science and its impact in our daily modern life. (Make sure to enter our Facebook fan giveaway to win a free copy this week!) Dr. Kaku graciously sat down with ScriptPhD.com’s physics and astronomy blogger, Stephen Compson, to talk about the recent earthquake, popular science in an entertainment-driven world, and his latest book. Full interview under the “continue reading” cut.

Hang on Mom, I’m Building an Atom Smasher!

Michio Kaku’s multi-faceted success may seem to be, as Einstein said, the hallmark of true mastery over any advanced subject. But to fully appreciate the extent of Dr. Kaku’s gift for patient summary to the scientifically ignorant, ask yourself when you last saw an internationally respected physicist appear on Fox & Friends.

“It’s not that you want to be this kind of person when you’re a young kid,” the doctor tells me in the middle of his post-quake media marathon: “I’m sure that when Carl Sagan was a young astronomer, he did not say that he wanted to do this. When Carl Sagan was a kid, he read Science Fiction. He read John Carter of Mars and dreamed about going to Mars, that’s how he got his start. For me it was daydreaming about Einstein’s unified field theory. I didn’t know what the theory was, but I knew that I wanted to take a hand in trying to complete it. So you don’t really plan these things, they just sort of happen.”

Dr. Michio Kaku delivering a recent lecture on the future of major earthquakes.

Another breadwinning talent that sets him apart from high-level physics peers is that Dr. Kaku isn’t afraid to address technologies and phenomena that only exist in science fiction. His Physics of the Impossible is a scientific examination of phasers, force fields, teleportation, and time travel. One of the reasons ScriptPhD.com exists is that too many scientists will dismiss such concepts offhand, but Dr. Kaku has made a career of treating them seriously in published works, his radio broadcasts, and his TV show Sci Fi Science on the Science Channel. His latest book Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 puts forth the bold argument that technology will imbue men and women with godlike powers in less than a hundred years, with specific examinations of the current field and estimated times of arrival on things like artificial intelligence, telekinesis (through implanted brain sensors) and molecular medicine that will dramatically extend the human lifespan.

ScriptPhD: Most scientists are very cautious about making the kinds of predictions that you do in The Physics of the Future. Why do you think it’s important for scientists to address the unknown?

Michio Kaku: Because the bottom line is the taxpayer has to decide what to support with their tax money. With funds being so low, we scientists have to learn how to sing for our supper. After World War 2, we gave the military the atomic bomb. They were so impressed they just gave us anything we wanted: accelerators and atom smashers, all sorts of high-tech stuff. And then with the Cold War, the aerospace program pretty much got whatever it wanted. Now we’re back to normal: lean times where every penny is pinched, and we have to realize that unless you can interact with the taxpayer, you’re going to lose your project.

Like what happened in 1993, we lost the Supercollider. That I think was a turning point in the physics community. This eleven billion dollar machine was lost and it went to Europe in a much smaller version called the Large Hadron Collider. We failed to convince the taxpayer that the Supercollider was worthwhile, so they said, ‘We’re not going to fund you.’ That was a shock. When it comes to non-military technology, where the public definitely has a say in these matters, unless we scientists can make a convincing argument to build space telescopes and particle accelerators, the public is gonna say, ‘These are just toys. High tech toys for scientists. They have no relationship to me.’ So it’s important for very practical reasons, if only to keep our grants going, that we scientists have to learn how to address the average person. President Barack Obama has made this a national priority. He says, ‘We have to create the Sputnik moment for our young people.’ My Sputnik moment was Sputnik.

Chasing Martian Princesses

SPhD: What could be the Sputnik moment for the children of today?

MK: We have the media, which is such a waste in the sense that you can actually feel your IQ get lower as you watch TV. But there is the Discovery Channel and the Science Channel and different kinds of programming where you can use beautiful special effects to illustrate exploding stars and Mars and elementary particles. This didn’t exist when I was young. There were no Television outlets. It was just dry, dull books in the library that talked about these things. With such gorgeous special effects on cable television to explain these things, there is no excuse. These are cable outlets where we can reach the public, millions of them, with high technology.

I had two role models when I was a kid. The first was Albert Einstein. I wanted to help him complete his unfinished theory, the unified field theory. But on Saturdays I used to watch Flash Gordon on TV. I loved it! I watched every single episode. Eventually I figured out two things. First: I didn’t have blond hair and muscles. And second, I figured out it was the scientist who drove the entire series. The scientist created the city in the sky, the scientist created the invisibility shield, and the scientist created the starship.

And so I realized something very deep: that science is the engine of prosperity. All the prosperity we see around us is a byproduct of scientific inventions. And that’s not being made clear to young people. If we can’t make it clear to young people they’re not going to go into science. And science will suffer in the United States. And that is why we have to inspire young people to have that Sputnik moment.

SPhD: So you think that science fiction is a good avenue for bringing people into science and getting them excited about it?

MK: We scientists don’t like to admit this, it’s almost scandalous. But it’s true. The greatest astronomer of the twentieth century became the greatest astronomer of the twentieth century because of science fiction.

We may owe the Hubble Telescope, and its majestic imagery, to the inspiration of science fiction.

His name was Edwin Hubble. He was a small country lawyer in Missouri and he remembered the wonderment and passion he felt as a child reading Jules Verne. His father wanted him to continue in law; he was an Oxford scholar. But Hubble said no. He quit being a lawyer, went to the university of Chicago, got his PhD and went along to discover that the universe was expanding. And he did it all because as a child he read Jules Verne.

And Carl Sagan decided to become an astronomer because of Edgar Rice Burrough’s John Carter of Mars series, because he dreamed of chasing the beautiful martian princess over the sands of mars.

Here’s what I don’t like about modern science fiction. A lot of the novels are sword and sorcery. Instead of creating a society for the future, they’re going back to barbarism, they’re going back to feudalism and slavery. Once in a while, yeah, I like to read it, but I get the feeling that it’s not pushing civilization forward.

When I was a young kid , it was called hard science fiction – rocket ships, journeys to the unknown, incredible inventions like time machines and stuff like that, it was less sword and sorcery, less about having big muscles chasing beautiful women and killing your enemies, less Conan the Conquerer. Science fiction stories that talk about the future are much more uplifting for young kids and also point them in the right direction. Sword and sorcery is not a good career path for the average kid.

SPhD: On average, what do you think of the modern media’s treatment of physics?

MK: The Discovery Channel and the Science Channel are one of the few outlets where scientists can roam unimpeded by the restraints of Hollywood, which says you have to have large market share and you can’t get big concepts to people. And one person who paved the way for that was Stephen Hawking and I think that we owe him a debt in that he proved that science sells.

I remember when I wrote my first book, the publishing world said ‘Look, science does not sell. You’re going to be catering to the select few. It’s not a mass market we’re talking about.’ But there were already indications that that wasn’t true. Discover magazine, Scientific American, they both have subscriptions of about a million. And then of course when the Discovery Channel took off, that really showed that there was something that the networks did not see, and it was right in front of their face. And that was science and documentary programming.

It was always there – like Nova was a top draw for PBS – but the big networks said ‘It’s too small, it’s underneath the radar.’ So then with cable television, all the things that used to be under the radar, jumped to the forefront, Stephen Hawking outsells movie stars.

And I think that really shows something. It’s a hunger for people out there to know the answers to these cosmic questions, like what’s out there? What does it all mean? How do we fit into the larger scheme of things in the universe? There’s a real hunger for that, and of course if you watch I Love Lucy all day, you’re not gonna get the answer.

Cavemen, Picture Phones, and Horses

SPhD: On the other hand, there is a basic human instinct to resist scientific and technological change. In your book you describe this as the Caveman Principle:

I wondered if those weren’t generational changes that we might see come to pass in children who have grown up reading and socializing through screens.

MK: Yes slowly. There is, of course, latitude in the caveman principle. More and more people are warming up to the idea of picture phones. Picture phones first came out in the 1960’s at the World Fair, but you couldn’t touch them with a ten foot pole. People didn’t want to have to comb their hair every time they went online. Now people are sort of getting used to it. It varies, like for instance now we have more horses than we did in 1800.

SPhD: Horses?

M: Yeah! Horses are used for recreational purposes. There are more recreational horses today than there were horses for a small American population in 1800.

Take a look at theater. Back in those days, people thought that theater would be extinguished by radio, then they thought television would replace radio, then they thought the internet would replace television, which would replace radio, movies, and live theater. The answer is we live with all of them.

We don’t necessarily go from one media or one thing to the next, making them previous and obsolete, there is a mix. You could become very rich if you know exactly what that mix is, but that’s the way it is with technology, we never really give up any old technology, we still have live theater on Broadway.

The Silicon Wasteland and Artificial Intelligence

SPhD: Regarding the creation of Artificial Intelligence in The Physics of the Future, you talk about the computer singularity and Moore’s law breaking down in about ten years—

MK: Silicon power will be exhausted for two reasons: first, transistors are going to be so tiny, they’ll generate too much heat and melt. Second, they’re gonna be so tiny they’re almost atomic in size and so the uncertainty principle comes in and you don’t know where they are, so leakage takes place.

SPhD: In the book you are very cautious in your treatment of quantum computers (Presumably the replacement when silicon breaks down) and how long it’s going to take us to develop them – what’s holding that technology back and why shouldn’t we think that they’ll replace silicon right away?

MK: Quantum computers remedy both those defaults because they compute on atoms themselves. The problem with quantum computers is impurities and decoherence. For quantum computing to work, the atoms have to vibrate in phase. But when you separate them, disturbances take place. This is called decoherence, when they vibrate out of phase. It is very easy to decohere atoms that are coherent. The slightest breath, a truck traveling by, even interference from a cosmic ray will ruin the coherence between atoms. That’s why the world record for quantum computing calculation is 3 times 5 is 15 – it sounds trivial, but go home tonight and try that on 5 atoms, take 5 atoms and try to multiply 3 times 5 is 15 – it’s not so easy.

SPhD: What is your definition of artificial intelligence?

MK: Well, that gets us into consciousness and stuff like that. My personal point of view is that consciousness is a continuum, and the same with intelligence. I would say that the smallest unit of consciousness would be the thermostat. The thermostat is aware of its environment – it adjusts itself to compensate for changes in the environment. That’s the lowest level of consciousness – beyond that would be insects, which basically go around mating and eating by instinct and don’t live very long. As you go up the evolutionary scale, you begin to realize that animals do plan a little bit, but they have no conception of tomorrow.

To the best of our knowledge, animals do not plan for tomorrow or yesterday, they live in the present. Everything is governed by instinct, so they sleep, they wake up, but they’re not aware of any continuity – they just hunt or whatever day by day. We’re a higher level of intelligence in the sense that we are aware of time, we’re aware of self, and we can plan for the future. So those are the ingredients of higher intelligence. Since animals have no conception of tomorrow to the best of our knowledge, very few animals have conception of self. For example, you get two fighting fishes and put them together, they’ll try to tear each other apart. When you put them next to a mirror, they try to attack the mirror – they have no conception of self. So we’re higher up. So artificial intelligence is the attempt to use machines to replicate humans.

SPhD: Do you think we’ll need to completely model human intelligence in order to create a satisfactory artificial one?

MK: No, but I think we made a huge mistake. Fifty years ago, everyone thought that the brain was a computer. People thought that was a no-brainer, of course the brain is a computer. Well, it’s not. A computer has a Pentium chip, it has a central processer, it has windows, programming, software, subroutines, that’s a computer. The brain has none of that. The brain is a learning machine.

Your laptop today is just as stupid as it was yesterday. The brain rewires itself after learning – that’s the difference. The architecture is different, so it’s much more difficult to reproduce human thoughts than we thought possible. I’m not saying it’s impossible, I think maybe by the end of the century we’ll have robots that are quite intelligent. Right now we’ve got robots that are about as intelligent as a cockroach. A stupid cockroach. A lobotomized, stupid cockroach. But in the future, you know, I could see them being as smart as mice. I could see that. Then beyond that, as smart as a dog or a cat. And then beyond that, as smart as a monkey. At that point we should put a chip in their brain to shut them off if they have murderous thoughts.

SPhD: The landscape for artificial intelligence seems very fragmented – the research branches in a lot of different directions. Do you think there will be some sort of unification for a grand theory of A.I.?

Could computers and artificial intelligence replace humans, such as the recent supercomputer 'Watson' winning on Jeopardy? Dr. Kaku isn't too afraid. Image courtesy of Carol Kaelson/Jeopardy Productions Inc., via Associated Press.

MK: It’ll be hard, because everyone is working on one little piece of a huge puzzle. Take a look at Watson, who defeated two Jeopardy experts – after that the media thought, ‘Uh oh the robots are coming, we’re gonna be put in zoos, and they’re gonna throw peanuts at us and make us dance behind bars.’

But then you ask a simple question. Does Watson know that it won? Can Watson talk about his victory? Is Watson aware of his victory? Is Watson aware of anything? And then you begin to realize that Watson is a one-trick pony. In science we have lots of one-trick ponies. Your hand calculator calculates about a million times faster than your brain, but you don’t have a nervous breakdown thinking about your calculator. It’s just a calculator, right? Same thing with Watson – all Watson can do is win on Jeopardy. So we have a long ways to go.

Burning Books and Teaching Principles

SPhD: You also talk about education and how the United States will be coming to the end of a brain drain on other countries because of our unmatched universities and the so-called genius visa. You claim that in order to maintain our position in the global economy, we’ll need to produce more qualified graduates from primary education. What changes you think need to be made to our education system to produce those graduates?

M: I don’t wanna insult them or anything, but education majors have the lowest scores among the different professionals on the SAT test. The brightest and most vigorous, the most competent of our graduates do not go into education.

In Japan for example, a sensei is considered very high in society. People bow before them—they give them presents and so on. In America we have the expression, ‘Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.’

First, we have to raise the education level of the education majors, then we have to throw away the textbooks. The textbooks are awful. My daughter took the Geology Regents exam in New York State, and I looked at the handbook – I felt like ripping it apart. Really stomping on it, burning it. It was the memorization of all the crystals, the memorization of all the minerals.

In the future you’ll have a contact lens with the internet in it – you’ll blink and you’ll see as many minerals as you want. You’ll blink and you’ll see all the crystals. Why do we have to memorize these things and force students to learn it? Then my daugher comes to me and says something that really shook me up, she comes up to me and says, ‘Daddy, why would anyone want to become a scientist?’

I really felt like ripping up that book. That book has done more to crush interest in science – that’s what science curriculum does, science curriculum is designed to crush interest in science. Science is about principles. It’s about concepts. It’s not about memorizing the parts of a flower. It helps to know some of these things, but if that’s all you do that’s not science, science is about principles and concepts. So we gotta change the textbooks.

SPhD: Given these contact lenses, or any form of uninterrupted access to the internet where we can access information like that and don’t need to memorize anything anymore, what should we be training young people to do?

MK: First they have to know the principles and the concepts, and they have to be able to think about how to apply these principles and concepts. For example, how many principles and concepts are there in geology? Here’s this big fat handbook, memorize this, memorize this, it goes on and on and on, right? But what is the driving principle behind geology?

Continental drift, the recycling of rock, that’s what they should be stressing. What’s the organizing principle of biology? It’s evolution. What’s the organizing principle of physics? Well, there’s Newtonian mechanics, but then there’s relativity and the quantum theory behind that. So we are talking about really a handful of principles, but you’d never know it taking these courses, because they’re all about memorizing stupid facts and figures.

Let me give you another example. I teach astronomy this semester at the college [Dr. Kaku is a professor of theoretical physics at the State University of New York]. Astronomy books are written by astronomers. I have nothing against astronomers, but they’re bug collectors. Every single footnote, every single itsy bitsy thing about this star, that star, this planet – you miss the big picture. So when it comes time for final examinations, I tell the students: ‘I wanna talk about principles.’ galactic evolution, that’s what I teach the kids about. I don’t teach them to memorize the moons of Jupiter. I don’t even know the moons of Jupiter, I could care less, but that’s what an astronomy test was a generation ago.

SPhD: Would you say that we need to educate humans from the top down and machines from the bottom up?

MK: I think that with machines we should go top down, bottom up, both. And maybe we’ll meet in the middle someplace. That’s how people are, think about it. When you’re very young you learn bottom up, you bump into things. But by the time you’re in school you learn top down and bottom up. Top down because a teacher stuffs knowledge into your head and bottom up cause you bump into things, you have real-life experiences. People learn both ways, but in the past, we’ve only tried to stress top down, realizing that bottom up is common sense.

Physics of the Future is a fantastic read for anyone interested in what’s in store for us over the next century (yes, this time there really will be flying cars). These aren’t Dr. Kaku’s pet predictions, but extrapolations based on the current cutting edge from the experts in every involved discipline. Readers will be shocked at how close these tantalizing technologies really are, and thrilled at the realization that most of us will live to see this amazing future.

Grateful thanks to Dr. Michio Kaku and Josh Weinberg and Joanne Schioppi at The Science Channel for facilitating this interview and our book giveaway. Catch Dr. Kaku on The Science Channel’s Sci Fi Science and read his two books, which are both available for purchase.

~*Stephen Compson*~

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ScriptPhD.com covers science and technology in entertainment, media and advertising. Hire our consulting company for creative content development.

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The Google Science Fair: the first-ever global internet science competition is sure to have a tremendous impact on science education and innovation.

In his State of the Union speech in January, US President Barack Obama proclaimed that “we need to teach our kids that it’s not just the winner of the Super Bowl who deserves to be celebrated, but the winner of the science fair.” A noble (and correct) assessment, to be sure, but one mired in numerous educational and cultural obstacles. For one thing, science fairs themselves are at a perilous crossroads. A New York Times report issued in February stated that not only is participation in science fairs among high school kids falling, but that the kind of creativity and independent exploration that these competitions necessitate is impossible under current rigid test-driven educational guidelines for teaching mathematics and science. Indeed, an interesting recent Newsweek article on “The Creativity Crisis” conveyed research studies showing that for the first time, American creativity is declining. How appropriate, then, that this April (national math education month) brings the culmination of the Google World Science Fair, the first ever competition of its kind transpiring online and open to lab rats from all over the globe. ScriptPhD.com discusses why this could be a game-changer for the next generation of young scientists, under the “continue reading” cut.

One of the most chilling chapters in Thomas Friedman’s brilliant 2005 book “The World is Flat” discusses the ramifications of the globalization of science, and how quickly America is getting left behind. In addition to global “flatteners” (connectors) such as the internet, outsourcing, and yes, even access to free information via Google, Friedman details how hard third-world nations such as India and China work to attain supreme educations in math and science. On the one hand, they are producing more raw talent than ever, which often (due to lack of job opportunities and world-class facilities) finds its way into American (and Western) laboratories and corporations. On the other hand, it leaves American students and scientists ill-prepared to compete in a globalized economy based on information rather than raw production. (See Tom’s talk about global flattening at MIT here.) China will surpass the United States in patent filings by scientists by 2020. They are set to overtake the US in published research output even faster – in 2 years! Disturbingly, US teens ranked 25th out of 34 countries in math and science in the most recent world rankings, prompting President Obama to direct $250 million dollars towards math and science education. How that education is conveyed in classrooms is a subject of quite ardent debate.

Clearly, science education, in its current incarnation, is not working successfully. Unorthodox curricula have been proposed by numerous academic institutions, and even implemented with success in some countries. Furthermore, the idea of iconoclasts and self-taught geniuses, left alone to ferment their creativity, is not new. Albert Einstein famously clashed with authorities in primary school (which he barely finished), noting that “the spirit of creativity and learning were lost in strict rote learning.” In 2009, self-taught college dropout Erik Anderson proposed a major new theory on the structure of spiral galaxies and published it in one of the world’s most prestigious journals. (See ScriptPhD.com’s excellent post on whether creativity can really be measured in the lab.) Enter the Google World Science Fair. Capitalizing on the web and social media-driven knowledge of the current generation, they aim to not only expand on traditional well-known science competitions like Intel and Siemens, but to catapult them into the modern Internet era. Concomitantly, and even more importantly, as the fair’s organizers relayed over the weekend to the New York Times, they wish to improve science and math education in America incorporating a brand that many kids are already familiar with and use with ease. Why not infuse the excitement of a Google search into the staid, antiquated methodologies afflicting much of math and science curricula today? The impacts of science and independent experimentation are wide-reaching and powerful. During a gathering of scientists, students and judges on the day of the science fair announcement at Google headquarters, African self-taught scientist William Kamkwamba shared how from a library book, he was able to build a wind mill that powered his large family’s house, brought water to his impoverished village, but then taught other villagers to build wind mills, and by proxy, improved schools and living conditions. Who knows how many of this year’s global entrants will make such sizable contributions to their communities, or even, as they’re encouraged to do, solve global-scale afflictions?

Beyond the originality factor, he Google competition is important in several ways. It’s virtual and literally open to anyone in the world so long as they are a student between the ages of 13-18, thereby negating the most obvious roadblock to participation in many science competitions: location and affordability. (Though studies argue that internet access is still an overwhelming factor in economic and social equality, which is a not insignificant hurdle for aspiring third world participants.) Secondly, the competition is being judged on a passion for science and ideas, especially those relevant to the world today. In an age when we’re trying to ameliorate diseases, epidemics, the effects of global warming and violently changing weather patterns, urban sprawl and overpopulation, along with an ever-frustrating lack of access to water, food and sanitation by the poor, a few extra ideas and approaches can’t hurt. After all, a 15-year-old Louis Braille invented a system of reading for the blind, 18-year-old Alexander Graham Bell sketched rough ideas for what would turn into the telephone, 14-year-old Philo T. Farnsworth invented the television, and the modern microscope that many entrants will likely use in their experiments was invented by a 16-year-old Anton van Leeuwenhoek! (See more here.)

In the same spirit of hip novelty and digital cleverness that they’ve infused into the age-old science fair, Google hired the team from Los Angeles-based Synn Labs, the same team behind the viral OK Go music video, to create a thirty-second Rube Goldberg-themed video promoting the science fair. It is, perhaps, the highlight of the competition itself! Take a look:

The submission deadline for the 2011 online global science fair is today, April 4, 2011. All information about submission, judging, prizes, and blogs about entries can be found on the Google Global Science Fair homepage. The site also offers resources for teachers and educators looking to gain ways to bring the essence of Google’s science fair into their classrooms. You can also track all projects, as well as interact and exchange ideas with other science buffs, on their Facebook fan page and Twitter page.

ScriptPhD.com encourages all of our readers, clients, and fans who either submitted entries by the deadline, had their kids enter, or know someone who entered the competition to come back and tell us about the experience on our Facebook page. We’d love to hear about it! We wholeheartedly support programs that promote science and innovation, especially applicable to mitigating global social and technological obstacles. Our consulting company mantra is that great creative enterprises are fueled by great ideas. So, too, are science and technology. As such, we applaud Google for reinventing (and virtualizing) science outreach to encourage ideas and transform an entire generation of scientists, regardless of location, education or perceived ability. And if you’re bummed that you missed out on this year’s competition, think of it this way: you have plenty of time to prepare for 2012!

This post was sponsored by Unruly Media.

~*ScriptPhD*~

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ScriptPhD.com covers science and technology in entertainment, media and advertising. Hire our consulting company for creative content development.

Subscribe to free email notifications of new posts on our home page.