Using Movies to Teach Science

March 13th, 2009

This is a favorite topic of mine.   I love stories and I love science, and science fiction movies combine these.

Unfortunately one or the other usually suffers from the combination.   Still, for the purposes of education, getting the science wrong can be as instructive as getting it right, if not more so.

I have been giving public talks and class lectures for years using movie scenes, primarily from science fiction films.   I’m not opposed to using more mainstream films, but science issues don’t come up so frequently as we know how things are supposed to happen here on Earth and mostly things are right.   When they’re not right, it’s usually obvious fantasy anyway and not a good example to use.

Some of my favorite movie scenes for physics involve artificial gravity.   2001 A Space Odyssey does a great job of getting realistic gravity from spinning a ship or space station, while Armageddon somehow gets almost everything wrong, and even school children can figure it out.   Things are shown to estimate scale, and you can get some real numbers for how strong the gravity should be and in what direction.

Another topic that comes up a lot is what happens when someone is exposed to vacuum.   Again, 2001 gets it pretty much right, as do some other movies and even TV shows like Battlestar Galactica.   I seem to recall someone blowing up in Outland, although I haven’t seen it in years, and the super-tough aliens in the Alien movies seem to pop whenever there’s the slightest whiff of vacuum.

Contact and Apollo 13 are pretty scientifically accurate movies that do a lot of things right and have some illustrative scenes.   Deep Impact is better than Armageddon, but still has some boners that are good to learn from.   There are some very basic scientific concepts, like chaos theory and the 2nd law of thermodynamics, that movies like Jurassic Park and the Matrix don’t seem to understand.

Anyway, I am giving another talk on this topic next week and here in Brazil I have a more limited suite of movies than normal.   I’ve already bought a lot of DVDs here, and I can find some more things on You Tube, but I thought I’d get some input from you about the things you’d like to see.   A year and a half ago I gave one talk here on this topic, and this one I want to get into more physics.   I am sure I will do gravity in the 2001 space station, getting the audience to help estimate numbers from the film, and I will for sure talk about what happens if you get tossed out an airlock, but beyond that I am still thinking.

Below I have some ideas for some things to show and discuss.   Let me know which ones you like and feel free to suggest others, especially if there is a You Tube video to go with it (leave a link, and bonus for a Portuguese version!).   Pick up to five.   I’d love to get some new ideas, so get creative.

What Movies/Topics Should Mike Feature in his Talk?

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