Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
If you can’t go, you can participate by nominating a cat video for screening at the festival. I hope some nearby WEIT reader will be able to attend and send us a report. (If it were a squid film festival, I think we know someone in Minnesota who could be relied upon.)
The cat video is the 21st century’s signature artistic form, transcending barriers of language and culture to produce an enduring record of humanity’s attempt to inaugurate an era of truly global connectivity based on the immanent, universal, and yet wholly locally-contextualized presence of the feline in all of our lives. With that in mind, here’s 43 seconds of my cat rolling around on the floor.
Continuing our consideration of science in the movies, here’s the first of my selections. It’s from 1959’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, starring James Mason as the uber-spelunker Prof. Oliver Lindenbrook, who, in the scene beginning at 1:55, has just returned to Edinburgh from the center of the Earth. (This is, by the way, how my typical undergraduate lecture begins– I am led in by colorfully-garbed, mace-wielding administrators, while hundreds of formally dressed students chant my name, demanding that I speak. Later, of course, they sing songs in my honor, acclaiming me “master of all natural history”.)
Lindenbrook’s key statement is:
“If they are meant as praise for a successful scientist, I must disclaim that honor. No, a scientist who cannot prove what he has accomplished has accomplished nothing. I have no records, no shred of evidence; I will never embarrass this distinguished university by asking that it take my word.”
I show this clip to my class on science and pseudoscience, a general education class on such things as UFOs, cold reading, creationism, and cryptozoology. It expresses very nicely something I stress in the class: that scientific claims are based on publicly available evidence. Having lost his notes, his specimens, and his artifacts during his escape from the center of the Earth via a volcano, Lindenbrook has nothing but his recollections, and this is mere testimony, an anecdote– nothing he can show to fellow scientists to examine for themselves. He does not have scientific evidence; and as the Royal Society puts it, nullius in verba. The one off-note here is the use of the word “prove”: colloquially this may be acceptable, and scientists do use it, but, strictly, proof is something reserved to logic and mathematics, not the empirical sciences.
Besides this, my favorite scene, I like the movie as a whole as well, although its scientific content is not especially plausible ( giant reptiles living on the shore of a sea inside a lighted cavern at the Earth’s center?). There are some wonderfully semi-cheesy early special effects: lizards with sails attached to their backs to make them look like Dimetrodons, for example. (The lizards, by the way were not ordinary green iguanas, but rare West Indian rock iguanas, Cyclura.) But the scene above captures a real and important aspect of science. In my own specialty of zoogeography, I’ve had debates with colleagues about where particular species of animals are found; but we all know that “take my word for it” just doesn’t cut it.
Among the readers’ favorites in the comments on the previous movie science post, there have been a number of interesting suggestions, some new to me, but also including some of my other favorites, like Contact and War of the Worlds. I’ll try to say more about these in a later post. In the meantime, keep commenting on your favorites.
Jerry recently posted on a piece by Carl Zimmer on the depiction of science in movies. Carl doesn’t think Hollywood films have shown very realistic views of science and scientists, and is not sure Hollywood can or should do anything about it. Carl’s more jazzed by the promise and accomplishments of smaller films of the type shown at the Imagine Science Film Festival. This got me to thinking about my own favorite science-y movies, and so, in the spirit of Jerry’s recent literary selections, I thought I’d mention some of my favorite depictions of science and scientists on film. I’ll be putting one up each of the next few days.
I invite WEIT readers to tell us in the comments what are their favorite scenes or films. The ones I’m thinking of capture something I believe to be true about the scientific enterprise; let us know what you found appealing in your favorite. It might be a kernel of truth, but it might be a ‘so bad it’s good’ (a la Plan 9 From Outer Space) kind of thing. I’ll put my first one up tomorrow.
(As an aside, I note Carl wondered why the acid in Alien didn’t burn through the hull of the Nostromo; much more fantastic is how the alien managed to put on about 500 kilos and grow ten feet longer without eating anything after emerging from John Hurt’s chest. The acid, after all, would be used up in the course of reacting with the metal in the hull, but where’d all that body mass come from?)
