As a computer programmer I rarely watched movies about computer technology gone amok for many years. Friends and family only gradually persuaded me to watch "The Matrix". Will Smith helped me see past the issues I might have had with "I, Robot". Now I can pretty much watch a computer tech movie and not flinch.
But some scientists still have a hard time with the science in so-called science fiction movies. The Guardian has a story about Sidney Perkowitz, a physicist based at Emory University in Atlanta.
Perkowitz and some fellow scientists have proposed that Hollywood only violate the laws of physics no more than once per film. Otherwise, ... well, I don't know what will happen. Perhaps Reality will turn in its universal franchise or something.
You know, "Starship Troopers" disappointed me in a few ways but the size of the bugs was not one of the problems I had with the movie.
The "laws of physics" are not exactly laws in the sense that they must be enforced or even respected. Physicists today are developing experiments that will hopefully lead to practical technologies enabling us to travel to the stars safely, live longer lives, perhaps study the past in a more personal way, control the raw forces of nature, and otherwise do things that supposedly violate the "laws of physics".
It seems impractical -- no, unrealistic for a scientist to criticize the entertainment industry for making up its facts in order to tell interesting stories. Truth be told, science is constantly discovering new properties of things both natural and artificial that were previously relegated to science fiction and fantasy.
Hence, now we're talking about developing "invisibility cloak" technology for soldiers that will render them invisible on the field of battle, creating magnetic force fields to protect spaceships and astronauts from Solar radiation and other nasty things, teleportation technology, and even personal flight technologies (have you heard of the Martin Jetpack?).
It seems okay for science to challenge itself but for some reason Hollywood has to rein itself in and respect the boundaries that keep scientists from getting up and walking out of cinemas in disgust.
Perhaps where we need to set down some boundaries is in how seriously members of the scientific community take themselves. We should limit the scientific community to criticizing entertainment no more than once per decade.
That seems reasonable to me.
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