From black holes to black history

Q: Are there other essays that readers particularly clamored for?

A: Yes, another one is an essay called “Hollywood Nights,” which is my tirade about the failure of Hollywood movies to represent the science accurately. My lead example there is the night sky over Kate Winslet as she’s on this wooden flotsam from the Titanic. We know what time the Titanic sank, we know the longitude, the latitude, the day of the month, the year. She’s looking straight up. There is only one star field that she should have seen.

But the star field that was used in the movie “Titanic” was not only wrong — the left side of the sky was a mirror reflection of the right side. So the sky was not only wrong, but lazy.

Now, normally I wouldn’t care – except that the movie’s marketing angle was on how authentic everything was, from the wall sconces to the pattern on the china to the grand staircase to the gilded ornaments. We have to assume that the film’s director, James Cameron, got all that right, when you otherwise have no way to know. Meanwhile, anybody with a $50 computer program of the night sky could check what that night sky was, and assert without hesitation that he got lazy or he ran out of money. One or the other, or both!

Q: There are people who make a study out of all the impossible physics of the movies.…

A: Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not obnoxious to bring to a movie. I will only comment on a movie if there’s some pretense that they’re doing something accurately. For example, in Steve Martin’s “L.A. Story,” he had an interesting device to capture the passage of time. A month goes by, and rather than seeing a calendar and having the dates flash by, there’s a moon in the sky that runs through its phases. I applaud that. He’s tapping the universe to help him tell a story. I’ve got no problem with that. Except that the phases of the moon were growing in the wrong direction.

Now he could have called the local planetarium. This is not some obscure knowledge that only the high priests of science would know. Anybody who knows the night sky knows this. It would not have messed up his plot or the theme of the movie. It would have been a simple correction.

Another one: Hollywood aliens are pretty bad. They all have faces.

Q: Right, plastic prosthetics over human-looking faces.

A: So they’ve got eyes and a nose and a mouth and a head and a neck and shoulders and arms and fingers. OK, they might have three fingers instead of five fingers. But consider how many other creatures on Earth, with whom we have DNA in common, look nothing like us. Jellyfish have no faces. Trees have no faces. Earthworms have no faces. So what it tells me is that there are more exotic creatures among our genetic brethren than there are in the imaginations of Hollywood alien designers.

Q: Unless this is an example of convergent evolution.

A: It could be, but of course, they’re not saying that. If they said that, I’d give it to them. I’d say, “Boy, they’re good.”

Q: That’s the fun part about science. On one level, you’re being a movie critic, but on another level, it deepens your appreciation of natural phenomena.

A: Yes, exactly. I also talk about the original movie “The Black Hole” from the 1970s, one of my 10 worst films of all time. Then there are the two asteroid catastrophe movies, “Deep Impact” and “Armageddon.” “Armageddon” is the one where Bruce Willis saves the world. “Armageddon” didn’t care anything about the laws of physics — that was a secondary concern compared to the one-liners and the hunky men in the movie. Whereas for “Deep Impact,” they had science advisers.

One of the asteroids in “Armageddon” decapitated the Chrysler Building, and another hit a dam — and I’m thinking, these asteroids had amazingly good aim. Whereas the comet in “Deep Impact” hit the ocean, which takes up most of the world’s surface. You still get to destroy cities for cinematic purposes, but now you destroy them with a tsunami rather than with asteroid fragments that have good aim.

Q: All right, as long as we’re on the subject, what movie do you think does the best job of portraying the science involved.

A: I think “Deep Impact” was a fine example, and so too was Carl Sagan’s “Contact.” I would list those two movies as the best movies of the 1990s — and I’m still waiting for one for the 2000s. It just takes some intelligent, scientifically literate, creative people. Maybe you don’t often get all three of those qualities in the same person at the same time, but that’s what you need.

Q: They need to employ more astrophysicists.

A: Or film schools should have mandatory Astronomy 101. I’m a fan of what Mark Twain said: “First get your facts straight, then distort them at your leisure.” So once they understand the facts, then they can take their creativity and do interesting things with it. I’d be the first to sign up to teach that class, because I’d be doing a greater societal good for having done so.

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