Okay,
Sherman, set the Wayback Machine for seven months and change ago. It’s the end
of the spring semester, when I get an email from a former student and friend
who invited me to see Neil DeGrasse Tyson, live. I kind of geeked out at the
offer. The guy is one of my heroes. I will meet him in person and thank him for
all the work he’s done not just in science, but in education, and, well, the
world.
Anyways, I
leaped at the opportunity. It was not to be missed, and I was not disappointed.
Not long afterwards, I got his book Death
by Black Hole—everyone should read or listen to this book, right now! I
learned more about science, which is always awesome, heard some great things
that he also went over in his show, and I’ve definitely got a bug.
That bug,
as everyone who has looked at my recent posts about science fiction, has been
to work out the little details, the ones that can be worked out. In his live
show—and the book—Neil poked at the scientific faux pas of films. One of the
most famous ones was about the film Titanic,
and how they got the stars in the night sky wrong. Not just wrong, but insanely
wrong. Someone had taken a random picture, and mirrored it to put it into the
film.
It was lazy
and completely avoidable. I don’t want to be that author. Yes, I know I’m going
to get things wrong, it’ll happen. I’m human. I don’t claim perfection
(wouldn’t want it, anyway). But I think the small details matter more than the
big ones.
Now for a
niggle of my own, Interstellar. They
promised that the movie would be scientifically correct. This would be hard
sci-fi. They brought in people to consult so that the black hole and wormhole
looked scientifically correct. And, yes, it did. The effects for the black hole
and the wormhole looked great.
But the
rest of the film had a lot of simple problems. The rocket they used to get the
ship in orbit was massive, much like a Saturn V. No problem. That ship was
pretty big. They’d need that much fuel to get up there. And the rest of the
ship was already in orbit. Great. I’m behind that. Cut to descending to the planet
near the black hole. Houston, we have a problem. The ship is able to descend
and then re-ascend without any kind of assistive propulsion. If that’s the
case, why didn’t they send it up without the overly-large rocket?
That’s just
one example of many for this film that completely ruined my enjoyment of it.
The science behind the time dilation was completely ruined because the
characters, who were supposed to be the brightest engineers and scientists the
planet had left, were not very bright.
Again, my
takeaway is to get the small stuff right. I think it’s more important to
accurately calculate fuel for a rocket than to worry about the visual effects
of a black hole. If I can be correct on a detail, then I should be correct on a detail, as much as I am able.
Now if only
there was a way to get Neil on my speed dial. . . .