Science extends an educational olive branch to Hollywood

This week's issue of the journal Nature includes a lovely editorial about science in the movies, riffing on the newly-announced title of the next James Bond flick, Quantum of Solace. As the editorialist points out, the phrase refers to what's necessary for love, not for building a Bose-Einstein Condensate. And more's the pity. But check out what Nature says:

Science has useful things to say about our relationship with violence...but it is the science that enhances violence, rather than seeks to understand it, that interests filmmakers. Why is that masked man doing all these impossible things? Radioactivity! Aliens!
Genetic-modification experiments gone horribly awry!

Naturally there are exceptions. This year's Sundance Film Festival was awash with earnest science documentaries, all children of An Inconvenient Truth. A forthcoming Meryl Streep picture, Dark Matter, attempts with mixed success to dramatize the life of hardworking
Chinese graduate students in cosmology — although it does feature bloodshed too. Russell Crowe has twice been nominated for an Oscar for playing real-life scientists in serious films — mathematician John Nash in A Beautiful Mind and research chemist Jeffrey Wigand in The Insider. But he won his Academy Award for Gladiator.

And then it's down to brass tacks. Science, says the journal, might help salve the Writers' Strike! Join me, won't you, after the jump?

Here's the strikey stuff, riffing on the notion that screenwriters never get science right, and now they have nothing but free time.

What better moment to saunter down to your local picket line, gather up a couple of film and television writers, and introduce them to the fascinations of the scientific life? Buying them a round might not hurt either; some of them have taken a serious financial hit.

Wow. From James Bond to teaching science to screenwriters. That is some British disquisition, right there.

(So, thought experiment: Let's say you have a locked, closed box full of cats. And let's say that the emission of a quantum of solace will trigger the release of a poison inside the box. Do we then have a box of half-pitied, half-unpitied pussies galore?)

Image: newswires