Professor James Kakalios is a physics professor at the University of Minnesota. Known within the scientific community for his work with amorphous semiconductors, granular materials, and 1/f noise, he is known to the general public as the author of the book The Physics of Superheroes, which considers comic book superheroes from the standpoint of fundamental physics.

By James Kakalios

It began, as do many tales of travel, adventure, and triumph, with a librarian.

In June 2007, I was in Denver for the national meeting of the Special Librarians Association, to give a talk on my efforts using superhero comic books to teach physics. There I met a librarian from the National Academy of Sciences. Upon returning to DC, she passed my name along to Ann Merchant, who was in the early stages of setting up The Science & Entertainment Exchange program.

In August Ann called, having received a request for a science consultant from a superhero movie that was about to begin filming, asking if I would be interested. “Have you ever heard of Watchmen?” Ann asked. When I stopped vibrating like a gong, I replied that I was familiar with the graphic novel and would be happy to help out.

Now, I should explain that my excitement resulted from Watchmen, a 12-issue miniseries published in 1985, being considered by many fans as the Citizen Kane of superhero comic books. Director Zack Snyder, Production Designer Alex McDowell, and Art Director Francois Audouy took great care to make their film as faithful as possible to the graphic novel. If faced with a choice of antagonizing a million rabid Watchmen fans – or a physics professor from Minnesota – well, I know which choice I’d make (and I’m the physics professor from Minnesota!).

A conversation about science with Billy Crudup (aka Dr. Manhattan - pictured right), telephone calls, e-mails, and a set visit to Vancouver was the beginning of my consulting gig for Watchmen. But my real work as a physics professor began after filming had wrapped in the spring of 2008. As the filmmakers worked to edit and incorporate special effects in the film, I was asked by Warner Bros. to give a talk on The Science of Watchmen at the 2008 Comic-Con International in San Diego, California, an annual celebration of comics, science fiction, and fantasy that draws 125,000 fans over 4 days in July.

My talk Why So Blue, Dr. Manhattan turned out to be effective in presenting real physics to the filled-to-capacity room of superhero and science fans. At one point in my discussion of the physics underlying the amazing powers that Dr. Manhattan possesses, I informed the audience that I now needed to teach them Quantum Mechanics. And I had 10 minutes. Which left me with a problem of what do with the other 8 minutes.

For Quantum Mechanics involves strange, fantastic propositions, and that this was the perfect audience to accept strange, fantastic propositions! They not only believed a man could fly, but that a pair of eyeglasses could serve as a fool-proof disguise as well! (A point I then emphasized by removing my own glasses.)

My big opportunity for science outreach came in February 2009, when the University of Minnesota Public Relations office asked if I would be interested in making a short video to be posted on the university’s YouTube.com page, discussing the Science of Watchmen. After securing approval from Warner Bros. (who graciously provided us with HD clips from the film, some of which had not yet been shown online), we shot the video in a morning and posted it a few weeks before the film opened nationwide. It was cross-linked on sites from Aint-it-Cool-News to Pharyngula, from Richard Dawkins to Roger Ebert, and received more than 1.5 million views within a couple of months. I doubt that I could get 1.5 people to view a straight video demonstrating the particle-wave duality that underlies quantum physics, but by tying it to the interest in and marketing of a major motion picture, people who came for the fiction would stay for the science.

And then, in August we learned that the video had been nominated for an Upper Midwest Regional Emmy award, in the Advanced Media: Arts/Entertainment category (hence the title of this post – upping the ante on Jerry Zucker’s first post on this site). The award ceremony would be September 26 at the Pantages Theater in downtown Minneapolis, and I resolved that I would be up on that stage – either to accept the award or to inform everyone that Beyoncé had the best video of all time!

The above was written prior to the Saturday evening ceremony. Having just returned from the gala, I now have a new item to add to my CV. I wonder if I can get the phrase “Emmy-laureate” into common usage? Let me close this post with my acceptance speech I gave that night:

“I’m Prof. Jim Kakalios. Don’t worry - I won’t be giving a lecture. I wish to thank Justin Ware and Elizabeth Giorgi at the University of Minnesota, who conceived and created this video, as well as Brian Andersson, who provided the physics demos we used. I would like to thank the Academy – both the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, and Ann Merchant, who put me in touch with the Watchmen crew, and everyone on Watchmen and at Warner Bros. for their first-class treatment of me. And I wish to thank my wife and family, for their love and support. I am a lucky man.”

Jacob Clark Blickenstaff is Assistant Professor of Physics and Assistant Director of the Center for Science and Mathematics Education at the University of Southern Mississippi. His web site through the National Science Teachers Association is Blick on Flicks

By Jacob Blickenstaff

As teachers settle into a new school year, it seems a good time to provide some general tips and suggestions on how to make use of popular movies or television in the science classroom. Some of these ideas may be more appropriate for the high school setting, but I hope elementary and middle school teachers will also find some useful suggestions. I will use examples from Monsters vs. Aliens, which comes out on DVD today, September 29, to illustrate each suggestion.

Monsters vs. Aliens tells the story of Susan Murphy’s transformation from normal woman into Ginormica, a 15-meter tall, white-haired version of herself. Susan’s transformation was caused by being struck by a meteorite on her wedding day. (I really appreciate that the writers got that right: the object that hit Susan is a “meteorite,” since it reached the ground. While still in space, rocky objects like this are “meteoroids” and while in the atmosphere are “meteors.”) She is captured by the military and taken to a secret facility where she meets several other monsters based on 1950s science-fiction films. There is Bob, a blue gelatinous mass, à la The Blob (1958); The Missing Link, who bears a striking resemblance to The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954); Insectasaurus, who is a giant mutated larva not so different from Mothra (1961); and, finally, Dr. Cockroach Ph.D., who is the result of a teleportation experiment gone wrong, as in The Fly (1958).

First, and probably my favorite way to use movies in class, is to have students collect some data from a short segment and use that data in a quick calculation. Actual data collection in this film is hard to come by, but it is possible to estimate the kinetic energy of the meteorite that hits Susan at the start. Students can estimate the size of the meteorite if you pause the film just before the collision, and you could even get a rough speed number by advancing frame by frame. Combine the estimated volume with a density of about 3 grams per cubic centimeter, and you have the approximate mass of the meteorite. Then the kinetic energy is ½ mv^2, and can be compared to the energy of a soccer ball or moving car.

As a check on students’ ability to apply a science concept in a new context, you might show a short scene from a film and ask students to “spot the errors.” For this application, the film you use depends on the topic you want to review, and Monsters vs. Aliens is especially good to check on students understanding of scale.

A classic way to make a movie monster is to put an actor wearing a rubber suit in a model city. He stomps around knocking down buildings and power lines until confronted by another actor in a different suit who stops him. The problem is that simply scaling up an animal does not work for a variety of physical and physiological reasons. First, consider the volume (and if the density is maintained, also the mass) when an object is doubled in size. If you take a cube 1 cm on a side and double all the dimensions, you get a cube 2 cm on each side, with a volume of 2×2×2=8 cubic centimeters. That means doubling the size of the cube made it 8 times more massive (23=8). Susan/Ginormica went from being a normal height (say 1.7 meters) to approximately 15 meters tall. That’s a factor of about 9, so her mass would increase by a factor of 93 or about 730. Her mass would go from a very reasonable 60 kilograms to over 43,000 kilograms. This might not seem so bad, since she has larger bones and muscles as well. The problem is that the strength of a bone is determined by its cross section, not its volume. When she grew by a factor of 9 in all directions, the cross section of her bones grew by a factor of 81 (9×9). While Ginormica’s mass has gotten more than 700 times larger, her bones have only gotten 80 times stronger, and her skeleton would collapse. For a more complete treatment of the biology of science fiction movies, check out Michael LaBarbera’s article at http://fathom.lib.uchicago.edu/2/21701757/.

Finally, you can use films to initiate a class discussion of how science is perceived by the public. Monsters vs. Aliens perpetuates a stereotype of the “Mad Scientist” common in science fiction and the media generally. (Try an image search on the Internet for “scientist” and see how many of them show a man in a lab coat with wild eyes and crazy hair.) As a follow up to the discussion you might invite a real scientist to your classroom for a visit, or arrange for an online video chat so that your students can see that scientists are real people, not caricatures.

I hope these ideas will inspire some of you to try incorporating at least a bit of Hollywood science into your classroom as a way to bridge the gap between school science and students’ everyday lives.

Another version of this column was originally published by NSTA. See www.nsta.org/publications/blickonflicks.aspx.

With Julie and Julia being a surprise hit this summer, Julia Child has once again rocketed to the forefront of the national consciousness. Child is the iconic figure of popularizing haute cuisine, blazing a trail on television long before anyone dreamed up The Food Network or Top Chef, and publishing her bestselling classic, Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 1961. Her entire kitchen is now on permanent display in Washington, DC, at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

Popular science books have been around at least since the Middle Ages, when illustrated "bestiaries" were a big hit, highlighting the most bizarre creatures found in Nature. Many such books mixed reality with myth, but entomologist May Berenbaum, who also serves on the Exchange's advisory board. shows that truth is definitely stranger than fiction in her new book, The Earwig's Tail: A Modern Bestiary of Multi-Legged Legends.

Particle physics -- especially the research being done at CERN's Large Hadron Collider -- seems to have captured Hollywood's imagination these days. First, the collider was featured in director Ron Howard's Angels and Demons. And on Thursday, sci-fi novelist Robert J. Sawyer's novel Flash Forward makes its network debut on ABC. The novel starts out at CERN's LHC, and many of the central characters are physicists and engineers.

Well, The Science & Entertainment Exchange has been up and running for almost a year now. And so far, The Exchange has done a remarkable job of connecting the great minds of science with the great minds of TV and film! Of course, that “great minds of TV and film” list isn’t exactly phonebook length. So having pretty much exhausted that pool, The Exchange has now begun pairing brilliant scientists with the “reasonably competent” minds of TV and film, and will soon move on to the “mildly unstable” minds of TV and film. Or so they’ve promised me.

But there’s still plenty more work to be done! Which annoys me because frankly, when I attack a problem I expect to solve it quickly, like we did with that whole health care brouhaha. So if The Exchange really wants to fulfill its mission and improve the way science and scientists are depicted in popular entertainment (obviously I mean “popular” from a sociological perspective – I’m certainly not implying that anybody enjoys it) then we must reassess. Reassess. That second one was for emphasis.

What if we’re approaching the whole thing backward? Putting the cart before the chicken or the egg? Actually, before is probably best because otherwise the cart runs over both of them. I mean, I guess the chicken could get away but more likely it sacrifices itself trying to save the egg … or it doesn’t, but then spends the rest of its life haunted by the cart incident and plotting revenge! See? Internal conflict. Which is exactly what I’m talking about. Here we are trying to package existing science to make it more entertaining for a mass audience, when instead we could be getting down to the root of the problem and actually transforming science itself to make it more exciting and fun.

Let’s face it, nobody’s going to pay money to watch Stanford biologist Irv Weissman conduct lineage analysis or clone stromal cells of the hematolymphoid microenvironments – not even if he’s played by Zac Efron, the obvious choice since they look so much alike (although Zac would have to be willing to grow a Talmudic style beard and gain a few pounds). I suppose you might get a few people to shell out for a romantic horror adventure about virologist Ann Simon’s work with the Turnip Crinkle Virus, since “The Turnip Crinkle Virus” is such a kickass title. But it probably wouldn’t win the weekend unless we make them zombie turnips that can only be killed by strippers … hang on, I have to write that down.

Just last year, Allen Bard and Yuli Tamir got the Wolf Prize in Chemistry for coming up with something called single molecule spectroscopy and imaging. I don’t know what the wolves gave them, money or a statuette or what, but I don’t see any reason why we can’t do the same and create entirely new branches of science, specifically designed for a mass audience with a short attention span. Here are just a few examples of what I’m talking about:

Adolescent Chaos Theory. What would happen if you never cleaned your room? Wouldn’t it be awesome to find out? My son is a pioneer in this field.

Megan Fox Genome Project. Eventually, we’ll be able to breed Megan Fox in a dish like sea monkeys. The only question is: who’s going to do it first? Us? Or the Russians? I predict almost unlimited government funding.

Quantum Detonation. The study of really massive explosions where things blow up into a million extremely tiny bits. I understand Michael Bay recently received a grant in this area.

Thermodynamic Behavioral Entomology. Combines several disciplines in order to determine what various bugs do when you fry them with a magnifying glass. Huge appeal in the preteen market. Great potential for merchandising tie-ins featuring adorable talking bugs that ignite.

Nocturnal Terrestrial Astronomy. Leading theorists believe high-powered telescopic equipment could be repurposed in order to observe the activities of hot chicks in their natural environment without unnecessarily disturbing them. Practical applications abound, like watching them shower to make sure they don’t slip. More than 170,000 people are injured in tubs and showers each year in the United States alone. We can all help. We must help.

Feline String Theory. Kittens love string. Everybody loves kittens. Do the math!

See? The possibilities are truly endless. Clearly, some of these emerging, new scientific fields have the potential to better all humanity by furthering our understanding of the mysteries of our universe, curing diseases, and mitigating the suffering of millions of people around the world. And at the same time we can fulfill the more important and immediate goal of creating great entertainment for a mass audience. So let’s all get to work!

- Hey, X-Change Files fans, let us know your favorite "new branch of science!"

Is there a scientist in history more misunderstood in modern times than Charles Darwin? His seminal work, The Origin of Species, revolutionized the biological sciences and led to a tension between science and religion that still exists today. The story is ripe for the biopic treatment, and director Jon Amiel obliges with Creation, debuting tomorrow at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Lawrence M. Krauss, the director of the Origins Initiative at Arizona State University, is the author of “The Physics of ‘Star Trek.’” Below is an article he wrote, originally published in The New York Times on August, 31, 2009.

Now that the hype surrounding the 40th anniversary of the Moon landings has come and gone, we are faced with the grim reality that if we want to send humans back to the Moon the investment is likely to run in excess of $150 billion. The cost to get to Mars could easily be two to four times that, if it is possible at all.

This is the issue being wrestled with by a NASA panel, convened this year and led by Norman Augustine, a former chief executive of Lockheed Martin, that will in the coming weeks present President Obama with options for the near-term future of human spaceflight. It is quickly becoming clear that going to the Moon or Mars in the next decade or two will be impossible without a much bigger budget than has so far been allocated. Is it worth it?

The most challenging impediment to human travel to Mars does not seem to involve the complicated launching, propulsion, guidance or landing technologies but something far more mundane: the radiation emanating from the Sun’s cosmic rays. The shielding necessary to ensure the astronauts do not get a lethal dose of solar radiation on a round trip to Mars may very well make the spacecraft so heavy that the amount of fuel needed becomes prohibitive.

There is, however, a way to surmount this problem while reducing the cost and technical requirements, but it demands that we ask this vexing question: Why are we so interested in bringing the Mars astronauts home again?

While the idea of sending astronauts aloft never to return is jarring upon first hearing, the rationale for one-way trips into space has both historical and practical roots. Colonists and pilgrims seldom set off for the New World with the expectation of a return trip, usually because the places they were leaving were pretty intolerable anyway. Give us a century or two and we may turn the whole planet into a place from which many people might be happy to depart.

Moreover, one of the reasons that is sometimes given for sending humans into space is that we need to move beyond Earth if we are to improve our species’ chances of survival should something terrible happen back home. This requires people to leave, and stay away.

There are more immediate and pragmatic reasons to consider one-way human space exploration missions.

First, money. Much of the cost of a voyage to Mars will be spent on coming home again. If the fuel for the return is carried on the ship, this greatly increases the mass of the ship, which in turn requires even more fuel.

The president of the Mars Society, Robert Zubrin, has offered one possible solution: two ships, sent separately. The first would be sent unmanned and, once there, combine onboard hydrogen with carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere to generate the fuel for the return trip; the second would take the astronauts there, and then be left behind. But once arrival is decoupled from return, one should ask whether the return trip is really necessary.

Surely if the point of sending astronauts is to be able to carry out scientific experiments that robots cannot do (something I am highly skeptical of and one of the reasons I don’t believe we should use science to attempt to justify human space exploration), then the longer they spend on the planet the more experiments they can do.

Moreover, if the radiation problems cannot be adequately resolved then the longevity of astronauts signing up for a Mars round trip would be severely compromised in any case. As cruel as it may sound, the astronauts would probably best use their remaining time living and working on Mars rather than dying at home.

If it sounds unrealistic to suggest that astronauts would be willing to leave home never to return alive, then consider the results of several informal surveys I and several colleagues have conducted recently. One of my peers in Arizona recently accompanied a group of scientists and engineers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on a geological field trip. During the day, he asked how many would be willing to go on a one-way mission into space. Every member of the group raised his hand. The lure of space travel remains intoxicating for a generation brought up on “Star Trek” and “Star Wars.”

We might want to restrict the voyage to older astronauts, whose longevity is limited in any case. Here again, I have found a significant fraction of scientists older than 65 who would be willing to live out their remaining years on the red planet or elsewhere. With older scientists, there would be additional health complications, to be sure, but the necessary medical personnel and equipment would still probably be cheaper than designing a return mission.


The largest stumbling block to a consideration of one-way missions is probably political. NASA and Congress are unlikely to do something that could be perceived as signing the death warrants of astronauts.

Nevertheless, human space travel is so expensive and so dangerous that we are going to need novel, even extreme solutions if we really want to expand the range of human civilization beyond our own planet. To boldly go where no one has gone before does not require coming home again.

Director Neill Blomkamp's sci-fi film, District 9, is getting rave reviews for its gritty, hard-edged depiction of a futuristic world where stranded aliens are being evicted from one dismal slum and forced to move to another -- when all they really want is to get the mother ship back up and running so they can return home. Among the the more useful alien technologies is an "energy weapon" based on a Tesla coil.

One of the more compelling X-Men is Logan, a.k.a., Wolverine -- so much a fan favorite that he merited his own "Origins" story earlier this year with Wolverine. He's the one who had adamantium grafted onto his entire exoskeleton as part of a military experiment, surviving the procedure because his "mutation" enables him to heal and regenerate repeatedly. It makes for a cool Hollywood movie, but surely it has nothing to do with real science, right?

Los Angeles has plenty of landmarks: the Capitol Records building, Graumann's Chinese Theater, and of course, the famous Hollywood sign. But as a wildfire raged through the national forest over the last few days, the flames threatened a lesser known bit of local history: the Mount Wilson Observatory.

There are personal stories associated with the observatory as well. Hubble was assisted in collecting the spectrograph images of galaxies he used to make his conclusion by one Milton Humason -- a former janitor who married the boss's daughter and eventually found himself promoted to staff scientist, earning a small footnote in astronomy history books. (You can read more about him here.) That's the stuff movies are made of.