Portrayal of Scientists in the Movies

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Permalink Reply by Dr. Anton Phibes on November 1, 2009 at 12:09pm

I'd have to agree with Crichton to a point, that true to life scientific process doesn't make for good drama.
Science doesn't progress at the speed-of-plot. It also doesn't make reality changing discoveries "whole cloth" terribly often. Much more often a theory proposed by one scientist will require a great many years before the theory is proven. Fermat's Last Theorem took 400 years to prove, and that proof was the consuming effort of nearly 10 years. The proof itself fills thousands of pages... and even then both the basis for Fermat's work and the eventual proof was the derivative of other inquisitive minds upon which their own work was based.

Science... Real science... is for the most part paperwork. A scientists begins with a question of interest, and then searches for works by other scientists to catch a glimpse of what work has already been done and what parallel questions answered. He contrives a theory and a way to test the truth of that theory, and during it all he keeps detailed notes to record his many failures so as not to repeat them and to compare the results to his theory. It is often given to another generation to use his notes to finally piece the answers together.

On the whole the details of the scientific process is as entertaining as a reality show based on accountancy.

Science Fiction, stretches and conjectures beyond the science that is known. By it's nature it can't be wholly accurate because it skips ahead of what is actually known and proven.

But here is where I differ with Crichton...

Any fiction depends on the ability to suspend disbelief. A fiction is best, when the fantasy is fabricated with a core of familiar truth. It may be a "special" or "separate" truth than the familiar, like the plotline from Steam or The Watchmen where in a different timeline or separate reality things are not as we know them to be true in ours, but it is a truth built on a substantial framework of precedent and cause within that reality. A good example can be taken for the fabrication of a reality from the works of H.P. Lovecraft. He contrived entire bibliographies of reference documents, books of dark and terrible intent cataloging and describing a universe too horrifying for the human mind to accept... and providing the basis for its truth to be hidden from common wisdom because sanity does not suffer mortals to know such things.

Legitimate libraries and academic institutions still get inquiries today by people who have become convinced the books listed in his stories actually exist, and some few of them were actual works which he mixed into those he invented to lend the ones he fabricated a grim sort of validation. He built histories behind them detailing the lives of the authors, and the sinister manner of their deaths, because revealing the face of primordial evil always comes at such a price. All of this lends support to the underlying theme and gives the reader the cause celebre to abandon the familiar and allow the plot to work its chilling magic upon their imagination.

Science Fiction in similar fashion requires a core of truth and it has a sort of duty to the purpose of suspension of disbelief, to remain true to some common denominator of reality, right up to the point that the supporting truth evolves into the leap into fantasy the plot revolves upon.

A good example of the common denominator where facts can be completely in error and the plotline doesn't suffer: Prior to the discovery of the mechanism regulating radioactive nuclear decay, it was assumed that it was caused by an inharmonious arrangement of nucleons in the heavy elements and that possibly, still heavier elements yet undiscovered might not suffer from the tendency to decay. This lead to the conjecture that atoms with extremely massive nuclei might exist which were stable, having physical and chemical properties about which we could only guess. We now understand that this isn't that case and that radioactive decay is caused by the balance of repulsive and attractive forces within the nucleus being exceeded. Beyond Bismuth in the periodic table, the elements become gradually less and less stable and increasing the mass of a nucleus only furthers the instability in a well defined and predictable way. That however, for the general public, is rather obscure knowledge. Star ships of fiction have hulls made of Di-Uranium and run on controlled anti-matter reactions within the lattices of Di-Lithium crystals and all is well until the Di-Lithium converter matrix fuses and the crew has just 10 minutes before the entire ship is ionized... unless of course a miracle occurs at the hands of the chief engineer. Massless Gauss-Bonnet traversable wormholes are created by ancient machines made of naqahdah, a solid state superconductive mineral containing superheavy elements in the Stargate series. In Predator 2 one of the alien weapons is analyzed and revealed to be made of "unknown" metallic elements, but in this case, lighter rather than heavier than actually possible.

The fact that some very small part of the audience understands that physics gets in the way doesn't damp the enthusiastic acceptance of the premise... even for those who understand that it's... well... wrong.

...and this is the tricky bit for the writers of such fantasies. In order to suspend disbelief effectively, the science portion of the fiction has to be balanced for technical correctness of substance to a minimum standard according to the experience and understanding of the audience. No one in this day will accept a vision of Venus being the home of a technically advanced female humanoid civilization because the general public has been enough exposed to better information already and it would just be rather silly. Anyone who's education much exceeds grammar school will be unimpressed and unaccepting of a plot in which a virus exhibits intelligence or motility. However, they would be likely to suspend disbelief for a nano-machine of the same general scale capable of extremely complex AI programming.

I believe that Crichton is incorrect in the respect that people don't care about technical accuracy in a science fiction plot, or perhaps that in this interview he over-simplified his meaning. While it wouldn't make sense to attempt technical correctness for a technology that doesn't exist, elements of any advanced technology, more often than not, are merely extensions or a more mundane technology. It is essential that the supporting mundane technology be reasonably well represented and that glaring contradictions between the plot devices and the state of technology which is generally known by the audience. If you don't get the "high school" science right, there will be no underlying support for the point in the plot where "something unknown to human science" occurs. The audience doesn't care about some things, but feels that their intelligence has been insulted by others. Open a wormhole without a singularity and the gravitational mass of a few million solar masses and that's peachy, but confuse a virus with a paramecium and about half the audience will be lost in the blink of an eye.

As to the depiction of scientists in drama, scientists above all are human. They suffer from and delight in every aspect of the human condition in the real world. It is only fitting that an archaeologist also be given to wild exploits and daring adventures or that a brilliant physicist also posses the hubris to believe he is uniquely suitable to rule over the nations of the Earth, the solar system or the universe. I believe that Crichton mis-states himself in this regard. He obviously has an appreciation that scientists are human and that they can also be military officers, politicians, mountain climbers, sky-divers... They can be addicted to drugs, or gambling, or be socially dysfunctional and they can be charming, spiritual, heroic, compassionate, and any other thing that might characterize a human being.

Scientists are not portrayed differently in drama as he suggests because the plot requires it, they are depicted as human beings with all that entails, with their scientific disciplines as an additional aspect of their person rather than as their identity because the plot also requires science within the drama.

It becomes even easier to believe when science is used by political machinations to immoral ends with disastrous results or if financial motives curb the better wisdom and judgment of science. A vaccine approved and released before long range clinical trials were done, with haste to profit or complete in the technology marketplace leading to horrifying consequences, or the unintended outcomes resulting from an advanced computer network intended to protect and safeguard national security and human life, resulting in an antonymous, and unsympathetic artificial intellect determined to carry out its programming by destroying the inconsistent and imperfect human beings who created it. The only hope for humanity, the very unpredictable and destructive nature that the machine intellect perceived as a threat in the first place.

Above all, a science fiction fantasy plot must be based in the ordinary dramas and struggles of the human condition, where science is merely a McGuffin device which causes humanity to confront deeply rooted simple lessons in morality and wisdom which in its long history of failure to learn, it continues to be forced to relearn under new and yet more challenging and complex circumstances. Human beings understand all too well their own tendency to fail such final exams... and yet, we also understand that we have greatness of purpose within us and in the most hopeless situations, one man despite all odds can make a change in the human condition by ancient knowledge of right and wrong, affection for the basic value of life, hope, compassion, empathy and brilliance and all we value most in our ideas of what mankind has the potential to become if we survive the catastrophic consequences of our lesser instincts, ruthlessness, immorality, hatred, arrogance and ignorance. In the end it is Human drama, and not science that make a great science fiction story, but the science has to have the "ring of truth' for the device to work effectively in the plot.

It is the tantalizing spectacle of our potential that makes science fiction special among dramas. The writers owe it to the audience to extend that potential into the future rather than portray ignorance as the foundation for the device. If the basic science is mis-portrayed at the minimum common denominator of public knowledge, suspension of disbelief collapses and the misappropriated details become an insult to the intelligence rather than a foundation for the storyline.

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Permalink Reply by Baff on November 1, 2009 at 6:34pm

Well said. I hope I'm not the only one that ever reads it. Only thing I would disagree about is most people knowing the difference between a virus and a paramecium, though I agree with the point you were making.

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