Entertainment

Media Frenzy

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The final book club installment is still percolating, don’t worry. I’ve been traveling like a crazy person, which has pushed blogging into the background. In the meantime, here are a couple of interviews elsewhere in the infosphere.

First is a New York Times interview with me. It’s very short, but we cover a lot of ground — science education, time travel, entropy, the movies, and my love life. Such plenitude of topics in a tiny piece will necessarily lead to compression, and Jerry Coyne is already complaining that I give short shrift to the complicated reality of aging — and he’s right!

71020603Second and more fun, in Wired I am on the other side of the interviewer’s table, talking to Lost creators Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. How cool is that? That was a great time, as we chatted excitedly about time, narrative, wormholes, fate and determinism, the role of science in television, and so on. These guys have given an incredible amount of thought into their show at every level — the characters, the mythology, and what it all means. And they wanted to ask me questions about cosmology and how scientists think, which I’m always happy to talk about. I got hooked on the show only after participating in Lost University, but now Tuesdays at 9:00 p.m. is the high point of my week. Only a few more episodes to go — which means that people who haven’t seen it can finally order the complete DVD selection, which is really the way to see it. (Just note that Season Three drags a bit, especially near the beginning.)

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Life After LOST

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The LOST Slapdown videos are an excuse for Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, head writers on the show, to have some fun with the mythology and the fans. And occasionally the actors. Here we have Michael Emerson thinking about a spinoff for his character, Ben Linus.

And even if today weren’t April Fool’s, anyone who thinks there are real spoilers in this clip is looking for a slapdown of their own.

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Will Video Games Save the World?

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Jane McGonigal thinks they can help. She’s a game designer who gave a talk at the TED conference this year (although her talk isn’t up yet).

McGonigal makes some good points in this short video, especially about how dealing with things in a video-game environment — like failure, or social interactions — can be greatly helpful when one eventually has to deal with them in the real world. She also helped put together Urgent Evoke, a large-scale multiperson game where you collect achievements by performing world-saving tasks.

The kids these days, they love their gaming. So it makes sense to ask how that passion can be put to good use. Personally I’m fascinated by the prospects of using games to teach people science. Not just facts and features of the real world — although those are important — but the scientific method of hypothesis-testing and experiment. Games already feature exactly those features, of course; everyone who figures out the “laws of nature” in the game world is secretly doing science. It wouldn’t be that hard to tweak things here and there so that the techniques they were practicing connected more directly with science in the non-virtual reality.

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Time Travel in Lost: The Metaphorics of Predestination

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Fans of the hit TV series Lost are awaiting the big event next week: the premiere of Season Six on Tuesday night. The show is famous for its mysteries and plot twists, so this year has a special status: it’s the final season, where everything that’s going to be revealed will be revealed. That might not be absolutely everything, but it should be a lot.

Lost has always played with time and narrative — characters’ backstories were told through elaborate flashbacks, lending a richness of nuance to their behavior in the main story. But time travel as a plot device was established as a central theme during Season Five. One happy consequence was the invention of Lost University, through which fans could learn a little about physics and other real-world subjects underlying events in the show.

Naturally, scientifically-minded folks want to know: how respectable is the treatment of time travel, anyway? We are, as always, here to help. My short take: Lost is a TV fantasy, not a documentary, and it doesn’t try all that hard to conform to general relativity or the other known laws of physics. But happily, the most important of the Rules for Time Travelers is very much obeyed: there are no paradoxes. And more interestingly, the spirit of the rules is obeyed, and indeed put to good narrative effect. The potential for time-travel paradoxes helps illuminate issues of free will vs. predestination, a central theme of the show. And what more can you ask for in a time-travel story than that?

Details below the fold, full of spoilers. (Not for the upcoming season, of course.) See also discussions from io9, Popular Mechanics, and Sheril.

…

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Black and White and Blue All Over

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By now a lot of people have seen James Cameron’s Avatar, and a much larger number have formed an opinion about it. Anticipation had been building for months, as people were excited by the prospect that ultra-realistic computer animation would combine with dazzling 3D technology to produce a different kind of movie than anyone had ever seen.

It’s generally not a good sign when the buzz is about the technology behind a movie rather than the story within it, and in the case of Avatar the worries are justified. There’s no question that the moviemaking is truly impressive; not only is it a great technological achievement, but Cameron is an accomplished storyteller. The film is long but never ponderous, the set pieces are thrilling, and one’s heartstrings are tugged at all the right places. As a bonus, the acting is fantastic — Sigourney Weaver’s gruff scientist in particular is a great character.

Alas, in a world that one would like to see fleshed out in shades of gray, Cameron’s contrast knob is stuck resolutely at eleven. (Spoilers henceforth.) …

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Whiplash

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My favorite example of a recent Hollywood blockbuster that scientists should like is Iron Man. Yes, it’s implausible that a prisoner in a cave in Afghanistan could build a lethal flying suit out of scrap metal, etc. But plausibility should never be the criterion for judging a science-fiction/fantasy scenario; sometimes you just have to bend the rules of the real world to get the required dramatic effects. Consistency, on the other hand, is crucial; the non-real world you invent should follow some set of rules, even if they veer away from the actual world. (Nobody complains that the Enterprise travels faster than light, but there are plenty of complaints about the bizarre use of time travel in the Star Trek franchise.)

Even better is when a film does a decent job at reflecting the practice of science. And that’s why I loved Iron Man — the whole second act revolves around Tony Stark in his lab, engineering designs and using trial-and-error to determine experimentally what works and what doesn’t. It makes for compelling viewing, which should be a lesson to people.

So we’re all excited about Iron Man 2, right?

The Science and Entertainment Exchange had a small hand in this one — apparently they needed a particle physicist to help get some of the scenes right. I don’t think it was the scene with the whips.

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The Big Blog Theory

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Recent years have seen a notable increase in the number of successful TV shows with some sort of scientific component — Numbers, CSI, House, Bones, Lie to Me, Fringe, and so on. But there’s no doubt which network show has the most accurate science on TV; that would be the CBS comedy The Big Bang Theory.

And it’s not because the writers are all physics Ph.D.’s who have traded in equations and laboratories for a glamorous life in Hollywood. It’s because the Big Bang Theory is one of the very few shows to have a full-time science advisor: David Saltzberg, a particle physicist at UCLA. David confers with the writers, reads every script, provides complicated-looking equations for the white boards in Sheldon and Leonard’s apartment, and suggests the occasional physics joke.

And now David, encouraged by some of his well-meaning friends, is going to be explaining the science behind the show in his new blog:

The show is a comedy, but the science here is completely serious — read about dark matter, quantum mechanics, monopoles, and all sorts of good stuff. I’m sure much of this was explained carefully in the original scripts, but landed on the cutting-room floor in interests of time.

The Big Bang Theory, of course, raises strong feelings among scientists. Right here at Discover, you can read both pro and anti feelings about the show. The complaints are mostly about the cheerful reliance on various stereotypes that we would just as soon see stamped out. All four of the main scientist characters are socially maladjusted guys; the one main non-scientist is a blonde woman with severe science-phobia.

I think the critique of sexism is mostly fair. In the real world, plenty of brilliant socially-maladjusted scientists are female! (To be fair, Penny represents the everyperson character to which the audience is supposed to relate; in almost every activity not related to science or technology, she is much more competent than the boys.) The critique that all these nerdy scientist characters somehow damage the image of science I find much less compelling — even though, in the real world, plenty of brilliant scientists aren’t socially maladjusted at all. It is, after all, a sitcom, not a public-service announcement; sitcoms get a lot of their mileage out of stereotypes. And as socially awkward as the scientist characters are, they are also portrayed as lovable and warm people at heart. Shows like this humanize science, and who knows what ten-year-old kid will see an episode and start thinking that physics is a career to which real people can actually aspire.

Now if we could just get across the idea that even young girls can aspire to these careers, we’d be getting someplace.

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LOST University

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Here at Cosmic Variance we love our teaching moments. Science is everywhere, and there’s no need to be stuffy about it. One of the best ways to communicate the excitement that we feel about science to a much wider audience is to connect it to popular culture in all sorts of ways — whether it’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, NUMB3RS, or Angels & Demons.

LOST University So it’s great to see the producers of ABC’s hit TV show LOST jump on the bandwagon. This fall they will be releasing the DVD collection of the fifth season, and the Blu-ray edition is going to feature a special treat: mini-“lessons” on various academic subjects related to the show. (The final season of the show begins early in 2010.) One of those subjects is time travel, and you have a pretty esteemed group of professors guiding you through this fascinating subject: Nick Warner of USC (who taught me general relativity back in the day), our old friend Clifford Johnson, and myself. Suffice it to say, I’ve seen the rough cut, and they did a good job — and we had quite a bit of fun. I was only included because having all the professors speak with British accents would have seemed a bit posh.

And along with that, they’ve just launched an associated website: LOST University. You can see what the other courses in the curriculum are going to be, including Philosophy and Foreign Languages. At the moment the website is essentially promotion for the DVD’s themselves, but I’m hoping more content will appear over time. LOST has a tradition of enhancing the show with quite elaborate online activities, in the form of alternate reality games. So hopefully this new site won’t simply be an advertisement — one of the lessons of new media is that giving away cool stuff for free makes it more likely that people will pay money for the even cooler stuff.

To be clear: the science of time travel on LOST does not necessarily obey all the rules. None of us had anything to do with the show itself, and I have no idea what the writers did in terms of seeking science advice. But understanding how the rules are broken can serve as fodder for teaching moments just as easily as seeing them obeyed. That’s life here “on the cutting edge of tomorrow.”

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