"A serious Man" is "fully based on the concept of Schrodinger's Cat" , what? It is a post-modern retelling of The Book of Job, not sure other than the main character being a physics professor. At one point a failing student states that he understands Schrodinger's Cat, to which he is immediately admonished, for the analogy being pop-physics, and without understanding the math it is useless.
I liked the scene in which a student complained to the teacher because he did not get a good grade. The student try to convince the teacher that he might get the math wrong but understands the story of the cat. The teacher reply that the physics is all about math and that he himself don't understand the cat.
This list is fun movies that have some kind of physics theme.
Coherence was a really fun movie shot an absolute shoestring budget but it's about like a magic comet that unlocks parallel universes at a dinner party. It's high-concept sci-fi and not realistic at all.
Yeah, I didn't get that comment either and even tried to do a web search on it. I've seen A Serious Man numerous times. It's one of my favorite movies.
But it isn't about physics. It's overall theme is somewhat cryptic but it is making statements. It is less cryptic than Coen's other films like Barton Fink.
If you haven't seen the Coen Brother's filmography, start with A Serious Man. It's the kind of movie that gives you nostalgia for loneliness. It probably could have helped me in my teenage years. It's undoubtedly a cathartic movie for those who have had unfortunate luck or feel misunderstood.
There is a pretty big theme throughout the movie of not knowing what's going on though. Although not really being about physics directly, there is also another theme of anecdotes and stories being (often comically) useless as ways of explanation.
The theme of the movie isn't so much "not knowing what's going on" as "not knowing why this is happening to _me_".
There's a phrase that's repeated again and again (in one way or another), which is "but I didn't _do_ anything".
I didn't mean the theme. I just meant a theme. Also, if I recall correctly, the phrase "what's going on?" is muttered throughout the film as well. So I think it's a little of both (and more), where the more global theme is one of trying to understand understanding.
This is a pretty good video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vDmWFTvzto
Although, I think a lot of the analysis of Coen brothers can sometimes fall flat. Coen brothers films are hilarious, often in extremely dark and non-obvious ways, so oftentimes their films are overanalyzed. I often think answers to "why did the Coen brothers put this in the film?" are simply "because they thought it was funny".
ânot knowing what's going onâ
In that case, it is about physics. More specifically, my experience as a graduate student sitting in QCD lectures.
Gravity is not for physics lovers. Its physics make no sense. And contact is more fantasy than anything else. A pretty poor list.
I don't get the love for Interstellar either. Their black hole rendering was about the only interesting thing about that movie. The rest of it was predictable and generic right up until the end at which point is felt like a jumping the shark movement with its ridiculousness.
Actual physicist here. Don't get me started on Interstellar. There is so much needlessly dumb crap in this movie that I don't even know where to start, and the fact that people think it's realistic is just a kick in the pants.
Just for one example...
The crew being sent to save the Earth blasts off in a big ol' chemical rocket with stages. Yeah, fine. I guess rocket tech hasn't advanced all that much in this future. Then they land a ship on a planet in a gravity well so intense that it causes big relative time differences (Note: the gravity alone should have killed them). Then they blast off with the same ship and no big clunky chemical rocket stages. Why didn't this ship just blast off of Earth as is? The energy to get off Earth is nothing compared to getting out of a gravity well that deep! I guess Nolan thought an oldschool staged rocket looked cool.
The SFX people did some actual science to figure out the black hole visuals but, other than that, this is a far worse movie than Gravity as far as science is concerned. The new age emotions resolution was just a big ol' F U to the crowd. Lazy, sloppy writing.
There are plenty of unrealistic movies on this list, and that's fine. Some are just damned fun movies (e.g. Back to the Future). Interstellar sticks out from the pack for it's pretensions and underlying ridiculousness.
> Then they land a ship on a planet with a gravity well so intense that it causes big relative time differences
Pedantically, no, they donât.
They land on a planet deep enough in a black holeâs gravity well to cause significant relative time differences.
(Obviously, this doesnât change the issue of delta-V to get back to the mother ship, though the difference is relevant to your âthe gravity alone should have killed themâ comment, since that would only occur of there was a hard surface not in free fall with respect to the gravity well for them to be crushed into.)
> Then they blast off with the same ship and no big clunky chemical rocket stages. Why didn't this ship just blast off of Earth as is?
Maybe because the super drive it uses would have adverse environmental impacts used in Earthâs atmosphere, and Earth has enough of that to deal with, but they cut the exposition-that-doesnât move-the-plot-forward about that because they were making a movie, not a technical report on the missionâs decisionmaking.
The sci-fi author David Weber said something in an interview I read ages ago that stuck with me. It was something to the effect of: "don't spend paragraphs describing how a light switch works in the future." There's a place for true hard sci-fi, but it is niche. The bulk of sci-fi is quite justifiably going to be more or less accurate in places in relation to how well it services the overall combined goals fo the film.
It also somewhat bugs me that pretty invariably the folks that crap all over these movies are huge Trek or Babylon 5 fans, shows that have endless literal magic in them, and they're just fine with it. It's hard not to see this as another form of nerd sniping (note: not directed at you personally, just talking about a dynamic I've seen with many friends).
I'll agree about pretentiousness, but I do think Intersteller should be given credit for working to get more right than the vast majority of flims, but more importantly for doing an original concept where in many ways, GR itself is a main character. That was a bold bet in a world where we have 9 Fast and Furious movies.
Actual physicist here, too.
Yes, the movie isn't perfect scientifically, but a) it's extremely entertaining, b) gets people interested and listening to me talking about GR and c) saying Gravity is a better movie (in ref. to science) is imo ridiculous (imo Gravity is a pretentious "sciency" piece of drama set in space, but w/e).
Just respectfully disagreeing here. :)
My interpretation, Murph solved the gravity equation all by herself. Plan A was a success. She never really got over her father leaving her.
Probably he couldn't take it and just left. Maybe, they flew into the black hole and died. But she's a genius and needed closure. On her deathbed she had a fantasy or hallucinations about what could have happened. In any case, her super logical mind came up with a story that let her come to grips with the loss of her father. It's a bit grim, but gives enough room (for me) for lots of silliness. that's not what happened. they all died. But maybe, that could have happened. And that's enough for her to find some peace.
It's one of the few realistic scifi movies out there. No aliens eating your face. No sound in space. No unobtanium. No gravity plating. Etc...
It was made by someone with attention to detail. When Cooper looks out the window, it looks exactly like the real footage of Apollo astronauts looking out the CM window.
The music is great. That can't be understated. The organ music lends a gravitas that's missing in other scifi movies.
But most importantly, it goes to the core of what I want from science fiction: it changed my world view, permanently.
Remember Doctor Mann, and his desperation to return to Earth? No other piece of fiction has made me feel that way. That utter, unspeakable, unbearable isolation of being the only human on this side of the universe. To be so far from everything that it's hard to wrap your brain around it. And if you do... you experience a Lovecraftian horror that drives you mad.
That's why I like Interstaller. It's proper, classic science fiction!
Interstellar had plenty of unphysical/unrealistic/fantastical content. Five-dimensional descendants of humans tearing open an Einstein-Rosen bridge in the outer solar system to screw with causality? Their ship requiring multiple-stage launch from earth, but taking off without similar assistance from subsequent planets? "Love is the one thing we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can't understand it"??
I think the point we'd agree on is that sci-fi definitely doesn't need to adhere slavishly to known physics to be good.
âIt's one of the few realistic scifi movies out there. No aliens eating your face.â
This is quite the assumption on your part. We wonât know if aliens eating your face is realistic until we encounter aliens.
No unobtanium? The whole thing is premised on wormholes! Yes GR supports wormholes---sort of. They are dramatically unstable. Nobody knows how to make one, if such a thing is even possible.
There are a bunch of planets, and they choose to visit the one with the absolute worst time dilation first?
Doctor Hugh Mann and the whole narrative around him was one of the most cringe-worthy moments I've seen in a movie of that caliber/budget.
The motives behind the characters (Anne Hathaway's character deciding to sacrifice humanity to see her boyfriend, Caine's character withholding physics advancements for years, Murph's whole behavior... and so numerous others) was, objectively, bad writing. Of the kind that you really wonder how it got out in the public and into such a high profile movie. I can't think of a single person in that movie that acts realistically. To the point that I kind of believe that the "plot" was just a pretext for Kip Thornes awesome work on the visualizations of the wormholes.
The plotholes... well way too many. That was the movie that ruined Nolan for me. Up to that point I was a very big fan.
I love Interstellar despite some of the liberties it takes. For me the number one thing Interstellar did so well was communicate clearly that the universe does not care about us.
We are infinitesimally small and insignificant. I felt the scale of space and the unforgiving progress of time, as characters dealt with the emotional impact of time dilation on them, their colleagues, and family. And we, as viewers, get to experience it as we see minutes pass from our POV only to return to Endurance and realize Romilly has aged over 20 years in orbit, all alone; and Cooperâs kids have suddenly grown up without us noticing.
And as others have noted about the film before, it also relates to the phenomena we experience as we age and our perception of time accelerates. If youâre a parent, you feel yourself slipping farther and faster away from your children with each passing year. Chances are if you watched Interstellar as a parent, you felt the film deeply on another level.
I enjoy re-interpreting the movies by taking them at face value and assuming what happened happened but not for the reason we were told. This can sometimes mean burning things: a character is wrong about the gravity of a planet. It can also have more interesting results: Kowalski didnât have to die and he knew he didnât have to die and chose to die anyway while encouraging Stone to keep going.
> I don't get the love for Interstellar either
I enjoyed some of Interstellar, but disliked the anti-scientificism. When they need to pick planet, probably humanity's last hope, you know there will be two options -- the scientifically sensible option and the "go with your heart" one -- and of course the latter is the right one. When scientists follow the scientific method they end up making a mistake, because science is cold and uncaring but nothing can stop the power of the heart, I guess.
I would really like a scifi movie that showed instances where intuition, common sense and "love" mislead you, and sometimes you just have to follow the more methodical procedure and check your blindspots.
That's because films are about people, not science.
I would really like a scientific paper that showed instances where intuition, common sense and "love" don't mislead you, and sometimes you don't have to follow the more methodical procedure and check your blindspots.
Actually most science is intuition, followed by checking if it's correct.
Intuition misleads people all the time, and letting people in the spaceship after the xenomorph has infected them is illogical, and really bad.
While true, Gravity was an incredible spectacle when viewed in IMAX 3D. I would argue seeing it in a normal theatre or at home would be such a lesser experience, it would be as if you were watching a different movie.
The IMAX 3D movie conveyed the black emptiness of space, the splendor of Earth from orbit, the velocity of moving objects, and the inertia of a human body in a way that dazzled the viewer. It was astonishing.
True, the physics was wrong. By not as wrong as other films.
Watching this after Planates anime (2002) was so underwhelming. Its about an underequipped team tasked with retrieving space debris. It featured a kid born on moon with accelerated ageing, risk of cancer, inequitable fight for resources, token compliance of environment cleanup. Trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igmZSI3kILY OP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeBPzoilfQk
The first episodes (5-6 I think?) aren't spectacular. I hate the type of humor they use (which is actually quite common for anime of the same era). But when the main story gets going, it really is one of the best hard sci-fi shows I've seen. The trailer you linked is quite good and representative of what to expect.
Planetes is great, although I felt the ending cheapened the themes a bit. But the reintroduction of seemingly one-off characters to tie up loose ends and advance the plot, coupled with the fairly hard science fiction, was excellent.
+1 for planates
Though yes like the other comment says be aware that not all anime kicks off well, a few bad episodes at the start are pretty much expected at this point.
Perhaps "Chernobyl" and "Fat Man and Little Boy" (on the Manhattan project).
Came here to recommend Fat Man - a little overacting in it but still a really good movie without overwhelming the non scientific folks
There is also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_One_(1989_film), which I like better. I also really enjoyed Einstein & Eddington (from the list) for some reason.
For anyone looking for a documentary on the Manhattan Project, I'd highly highly recommend The Day After Trinity, a documentary by Jon Else with a bunch of interviews of the original participants (it was made in 1980). Really fantastic look at the personalities behind all the science.
A list of Physics movies, without mentioning the most accurate depiction of Graduate School? No list is complete without the glory that is Real Genius. "Self-realization. I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said, "... I drank what?"" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/?ref_=tt_ch
Real Genius was great. Are there any other movies about graduate school? I canât think of any.
A bunch of movies suggested in this list actually suck and not really scientifically accurate either, as many others have already pointed out.
On a side note, if you go through the comment section on the blog, it's quite evident that the author have used paid commenters to increase its rating/impact.
Wow, I was unprepared for how incredibly obvious and embarrassingly fake that comments section is lol.
"Thanks for taking the time to discuss this, I feel strongly about it and love learning more on this topic. If possible, as you gain expertise, would you mind updating your blog with more information? It is extremely helpful for me."
Complete with spam link I've removed for safety. What a farce. How does content like this make it onto Hacker News? Probably bought fake votes too. Posted by an account with no history, created today. hmmm....
Those kind of comments are not paid comments, but just a way to get spam links on a site. My personal website (which has comments hidden, but clearly the API still works) is completely filled with comments like that.
I wish we could do the same for Computer Science/Software. Movies like "Travelling Salesman" or "Pirates of Silicon Valley" or "Imitation Game" would be great suggestions but typically things like the Matrix or Ghost in the Shell are recommended which for me are great movies but poor examples of the discipline.
Office Space is probably the most representative of this discipline!
Hello cm2187 what's happening. I'm gonna need you to go ahead and not recommend movies while at work. So if you could go ahead and get back to it.. that'd be great.
I'm probably a minority in this but I always thought "The Net" with Sandra Bullock was prescient about technology and its dangers, even if the wrapping was hokey.
We may be in a minority, but at least you're not totally alone.
My guilty pleasures for this genre are "Hackers" (Hack the planet!! WOOO!) and "Office Space".
One also cannot mention these without adding the excellent "Sneakers" with Robert Redford.
I re-watched Hackers recently and it isn't that bad. They clearly did the research, and then spiced things up for more enjoyable viewing. It's not accurate, but it wasn't trying to be, and I think they got the main points across perfectly well.
Eg, there's a lot of social engineering, and taking sensible precautions like not using your own connection. The villain's plot of hijacking a control system and extorting money is perfectly modern.
Sure, there's a bunch of colorful graphics they put on top of that, but it's arguably a visual representation of "being in the zone", and something that's done in virtually every other piece of media ever. Any real job includes lots of boring work that never ends up on the screen, and you just get the highlights.
> The villain's plot of hijacking a control system and extorting money is perfectly modern.
I mean, isn't that pretty much what happened this week with that gas pipeline?
I'm not sure why, but the two hackers fighting to get control of a tv station's tape robot is simultaneously the greatest and most ridiculous thing in that whole movie.
> I re-watched Hackers recently and it isn't that bad. They clearly did the research,
It's aged very well; it was slightly cringe-worthy in its time. I watch it over about once a year now.
I believe Emmanuel Goldstein consulted on the film.
RISC is good!
Mr Robot is a TV series about hacking where hacker simply uses social tricks and can't get past 2FA. It has lots of tech jargon.
Sneakers is about perfect for those kinds of movies. The major hacking facets are all represented by various specialists and it is all just barely plausible.
Short Circuit (mostly a kids movie) has some interesting aspects to it from a software engineer / hardware engineer perpsective.
Also some very very funny lines:
Newton Crosby: Where are you from, anyway?
Ben Jabituya: Bakersfield, originally.
Newton Crosby: No, I mean your ancestors.
Ben Jabituya: Oh, them. Pittsburgh.
----
No. 5: Stephanie, change color. Attractive. Nice software. Hmmmm.
Stephanie Speck: Boy, you sure don't talk like a robot.
----
edit: how do you add newlines?
My 6 & 8yr old kids adored that when I showed it to them recently. Ben's character more than a little out of place these days: he's used entirely as an object of comedy (and that as a target rather than a source), does nothing for the story, and his casting would definitely not be acceptable in 2021. The rest of the movie is fun and warm though, and the robot is endlessly quotable by little voices.
yeah that's a sad point about Ben's character. I'm going on about 35 years of memory since i last saw it and then just looked up a few quotes on rotten tomatoes. I like the dilemma facing engineers working on military weapons. Then also the theme around AI and those implications.
edit: how do you add newlines?
Two presses of the Enter key. If you just do one press, like this (I swear I pressed it), it will annoying stay on the same line. But
two
presses gives that sweet, sweet paragraph separation you seek.
I would add "The Arrival", which I enjoyed a lot (rare for a movie based on a story I love). Even though it dropped the crucial physics reference, which was the turning point in "The Story of Your Life".
Still, physicist or not, if you are interested what is time, I couldn't recommend a better writer than Ted Chiang.
Yeah, my #1 problem with Arrival was that it completely sidestepped basically the entire point of the short story - free will doesn't exist and how the characters come to grips with that (or don't) as they start thinking as the aliens do.
SPOILERS
The single most crucial part of it was the way her daughter died. In the story, she dies in a (very preventable) climbing accident, to make the point that her mother knew about it and could have just told her not to go (or go a bit later), whereas in the movie she died of cancer, which just completely invalidates the entire point.
In the story this climbing accident is a powerful example.
It is preventable in the case of not knowing the future (yet it this case we have no idea that it will happen). If we are in the state of knowing the future, it is a part of the reality fabric, it IS, just separated by an interval of time.
The presence of time vs free will is present in a few other stories by Ted Chiang. However, I read it somewhat differently. (Even though myself I am agnostic when it comes to free will.)
It is not that free will does not exist. It is that free will is a perspective (i.e. not something true or false), one mutually exclusive with knowledge of the future. It is like the rotation of an object, which one we can see only one of its facets. In "The story..." Louise learning the different perspective is gradual.
To some extent, it matches some other tropes like Lovecraftian that learning about the Great Old Ones brings insanity. Or maybe it's not that it fries one's mind, but rather - give a perspective incompatible with everyday human thinking.
It also threw in a bunch of predictable Hollywood action and military stuff. It's still a pretty good movie but the short story is better.
You're talking about "Arrival", not "The Arrival", which is a 1996 movie staring Charlie Sheen about an alien invasion.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115571/
Strangely enough the Charlie Sheen "The Arrival" is also a really good physics movie. I've yet to see a movie do the SETI/Astronomy/physics stuff better :-).
I love him building a radio telescope control in his attic, using local people's roof satellite dishes as the array !
The scene with the mountains and the cloud was really cool. After that, there was some build up but kind of just went nowhere. "Here's some circles, now you can hallucinate the future" was overall a pretty underwhelming drift into fantasy.
I would also add Chernobyl (2019 mini-series) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt7366338/
This is more of a historical drama than a physics flick. It's chock full of dramatized versions of the actual events and physics.
While they took some liberties, the gist of the story is very close to actual events. There is also a companion podcast that goes in depth on where they deviated from actual story.
The tips were indeed not made of graphite.
Chernobyl was one of the best series Iâve seen, period. Regardless of whether youâre a physics lover, this is a well done series.
Chernobyl is a fantastic show. They portray the disaster as having more far-reaching consequences than it did, which is a bit annoying, but it's extremely well-made and great to watch.
Man, Contact is excellent. It gives me a bit of a "Seinfeld" effect where in the modern day it feels like it leans heavily on tropes but the movie itself is likely one of the founders of those tropes, if that makes sense
For the ultimate example of that effect, watch Casablanca if you havenât already. The entire script feels like itâs made of movie quotes.
Or read Shakespeare.
Wizard of Oz as well, like every other line is a memorable quote.
It's one of the most quoted movies in history.
Yeah, well, you know, that's just like, uh, your opinion, man.
I also like Contact, which I think of as Saganâs struggle with reconciling religion and science for himself. Also, I nlike what the article mentions, I recall the book being based on the script.
IMHO that was a fatal weakness to both the book and movie
Spoiler Alert
The book went further by accusing Arroway of engineering a fraud instead of the "you want us to have faith" bit from the movie. But that made no sense in the context of the story. The radio signal unequivocally came from Vega and the message contained instructions for technology completely unknown on Earth. It made no sense to dispute that contact was made and something happened.
It makes very little sense to argue whether respiratory infections might be limited by wearing face-masks, and yet... here we are.
The book came out about 11 years before the movie. Are you sure that's correct?
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