There’s this scene in the movie Arrival where Jeremy Renner’s character, who's a scientist,
is brought in to try to help the military deal with alien spaceships that have landed
across the globe.
And in an early version of the script, he asks if the aliens have responded to Fourier series
sent out by the humans.
Problem is, that wasn’t really the right math reference.
“Well, a Fourier series is a mathematical concept, but it's not, like, a series of numbers
so I, I changed that to Fibonacci series — which is in fact a series of numbers that aliens
might actually send us as a way of getting our attention.”
Phil is an astronomer and science blogger, and he’s also part of the Science and Entertainment
Exchange, an organization that connects creators in Hollywood with scientist script advisors.
They set up a phone number for screenwriters like Arrival’s Eric Heisserer, who want
their scientific references to sound right.
“Here’s one of the things I wanted to make sure to do with this movie — and that’s
not to be embarrassed about complicated ideas, not to be embarrassed or ashamed of hard
science.
That these are the words and the terms that people in this position would be sharing
with each other.”
Phil’s advice to use “fibonacci” added that extra bit of credibility.
“And a I didn't really think much of that but then you know, I go see the movie, and
Jeremy Renner actually says that….
“Have they responded to anything — shapes, patterns, numbers, Fibonacci?”
“… and I'm nudging my wife like, pointing, pointing to the screen, pointing, like yeah,
he said what I wrote, that's so cool!”
There’s a lot of really bad science in TV and movies.
“I’m getting hacked!”
There’s bad computer science, bad geology, bad physics.
So in 2008, the Office of Communications at the National Academy of Sciences launched
the Science and Entertainment Exchange.
Here’s how it works: you call the number, you describe your question, and then the team
filters through their database of 2,400 scientists and engineers to put you in touch with the
right person.
They estimate that they’ve done between 1700 and 1800 consultations since they started.
That includes almost every Marvel movie, and two 2017 Oscar nominees.
A lot of times, the consultation boils down to changing a line to include a scientific
concept.
In early discussions for the 2011 Thor movie, producer Kevin Feige needed a way to represent
the “rainbow bridge” that reaches between Earth and the realm of the Gods in Norse mythology.
So he met with Sean Carroll, a physics professor, who later paraphrased their conversation in
a blog post.
Carroll suggested they describe the bridge as wormhole.
Feige didn’t want to do that, because it sounded too Nineties.
MERCHANT: And he said, “Well, there is this thing called the Einstein-Rosen bridge.”
“Einstein-Rosen bridge?
What is that?”
Einstein-Rosen Bridge is the technical name for a wormhole.
And they said “We LOVE Einstein-Rosen bridge.”
Listen to the dialogue in the movie, and you can hear where they added in the concept of
an Einstein-Rosen Bridge.
"An Einstein-Rosen Bridge is a theoretical connection between two different points of space-time."
"It's a wormhole."
But the team’s focus isn’t just about what characters are saying — it’s also
about who is saying them.
In the original Thor comics, Natalie Portman’s character — Jane Foster — is a nurse.
The physics professor who consulted the filmmakers argued that it would make more sense for
the plot if she was a physicist studying the wormhole that brought Thor to Earth.
And for the Exchange, that sounded like the perfect opportunity to break down gender stereotypes.
“We love nurses, but we also really love the idea of a strong female character who
was an astrophysicist.”
So the writers changed it.
“You're an astrophysicist, not some storm chaser.”
"I'm telling you, there's a connection."
Two years later, that character was the focal point of a contest hosted by Marvel and the
Science and Entertainment Exchange, where young women interested in STEM careers could
interview female scientists in the Exchange’s database for a chance to tour laboratories
and film sets.
“We are very concerned with the way that scientists are portrayed onscreen.
We want them to be — I mean, you always want them to be the hero, that’s the best
thing — and a main character is fantastic.
But we want to see women, we want to see people of color, and we want to see them woven into
the fabric of the everyday life that you see onscreen.”
Since 1983, repeated studies have shown that when children are asked to draw a scientist,
they overwhelmingly draw old, white men.
Children usually cite film or cartoon characters as their main source of inspiration.
In the original research, children drew these stereotypical characteristics more and more
frequently as they got older.
Science has had another image issue in Hollywood, too.
A survey of over a thousand horror movies distributed in Britain between 1931 and 1984
found that scientists and their work were the villains of 41 percent of films.
Scientists were heroes less than 1 percent of the time.
In the decades since then, perceptions of science have gotten better.
An analysis of over 3,000 interviews on public opinion about scientists found that American
adults in 2001 were much less likely to hold negative stereotypes about scientists than
they were in 1983.
And they were much more likely to believe that a science career was a good choice for
their children or for themselves.
“I mean, people do learn from film and television.
Whether you want them to or not.
We often refer to it as an ‘accidental curriculum.’”
One of the most talked-about examples of that is what’s called the CSI Effect — the
idea that chart-topping crime shows increased interest in forensic science, but also spread
a lot of misinformation about the field.
CSI didn't just launch a franchise, it created a false impression when it comes to solving crimes.
Researchers in 2010 found that watching the show is associated with perceptions of DNA
evidence as much more reliable than it actually is.
The Exchange wants to mobilize that kind of effect — and hopefully make science more
understandable and more accessible for everyone.