Comment: Robert P Crease
physicsweb.org
Critical Point Science bloopers II
Robert P Crease relates your
responses to his call for
“science bloopers” – mistakes in
books, movies and other media
In the 1980s ABC News – the news division
of the American Broadcasting Company –
unveiled a new logo consisting of a stylized
image of the Earth, which was animated with
the continents moving from east to west:
from right to left on the TV screen. Soon
after the logo’s debut, someone pointed out
the error. The network’s producers made
the correction ceremoniously on air during
the late-night news programme Nightline.
First the existing logo was shown with the
globe revolving as usual east to west. Then
the globe slowed and stopped, and then
began to turn west to east, the direction in
which it continued to revolve until the logo East is west Some gaffes could have been avoided.
was retired some years ago.
Two months ago I discussed varieties of
scientific bloopers (April p19). These include “flubs”, which spring from scientific
illiteracy, and “gaffes”, which are committed
by those who should know better but are easy
to fix. The ABC News logo, of which my colleague Roy Lacey from Stony Brook’s chemistry department reminded me, was a gaffe.
Other common examples of gaffes include
textbook diagrams of DNA molecules spiralling in the wrong direction, rainbows with occasionally writes about botanical blunders
the colour sequence reversed, and so on.
in films, such as the appearance of tall,
flowering tomato plants in otherwise realistic-looking scenes that take place in ConGaffes in fiction
Dozens of respondents sent me bloopers necticut not in mid-summer but early spring.
Others collect hydrodynamic gaffes, such
of all kinds: in commercials, literature and
political speeches, variously involving facts, as clips from films that have incorrectly
instruments and procedures. This time I will scaled waves, and meteorological gaffes, inwrite about gaffes, which are interesting be- cluding hyping or misuse of the “wind-chill
cause the reasons why they are harmful are factor” that applies only to bare human skin
sometimes murky. Of course, a prominent exposed to wind for milliseconds.
Fred Cohn from New York City reminded
news agency needs to get the Earth’s spin
right, and textbook publishers need to get me of a notorious geographical gaffe in the
spirals and colours correct, because such title of the early disaster movie Krakatoa, East
mistakes would undermine their authority. of Java (1969). Just before the advertising
But are gaffes harmful in fiction? Those who campaign for the film opened, the producers
commit them are usually trying to make a learned that Krakatoa is actually west of Java.
scene prettier or at least look the way that an A correction was deemed to be too expensive.
Meanwhile, James Lamb, from the Owens
ordinary person expects. So does it really
Valley Radio Observatory at the California
matter if few notice or care?
Specialists do notice and care, however, Institute of Technology, noticed an optical
and each field has its gaffe collectors. Greg gaffe in William Golding’s novel Lord of
Budney, curator of the Macaulay Library of the Flies, in passages where Piggy’s glasses
Natural Sounds at Cornell University, has a are said to be used to start fires. Since Piggy
list of movies (Black Hawk Down, Raiders of is myopic, the lenses would have been dithe Lost Ark) that include noises from birds verging and thus ineffective. Lamb finds this
that do not belong to the region in which the disturbing since Piggy is generally taken to
film is supposedly set. The New York Times represent science and human intelligence.
Thermal physics is a “constant source of
garden columnist Anne Raver, meanwhile,
We need to get the
seemingly trivial
features of nature
right, even in fiction
18
science bloopers”, according to Sami Franssila of the Micro and Nanosciences Laboratory at the Helsinki University of Technology.
He cites films such as Icestation Zebra, where
the Arctic conditions magically transform to
a pleasant indoor environment inside an
abandoned research hut, and Cliffhanger, in
which Sylvester Stallone camps overnight in
snow-covered mountains in little more than
a wet T-shirt.
My favourite blooper is entomological. In
the movie Anaconda (1997), a camera crew
ventures “deep into the Amazon” – a location, it seems, that is entirely free of flies
and mosquitoes. This allows Jennifer Lopez
and the other female lead actor to dress in
skimpy clothes – and for male lead Ice Cube
to be sweat-drenched and stripped to the
waist – as they prance around the rainforest
and splash in the river. Mosquitoes would
have killed this movie.
In my April column, I cited a gaffe from a
biography of the jazz musician Charles
Mingus, which claimed he once blared his
horn in a tunnel to hear the Doppler effect.
Several readers said this was not a gaffe. So,
on a recent pass through the Lincoln Tunnel
I blared my horn. I heard reverberations, but
no Doppler shift. Either I do not drive as fast
as Mingus, or my ears are not as sensitive as
those of a jazz musician. Both, surely.
The critical point
Such gaffes are amusing – but are they harmful? To explain why this is the case requires
me to shift to a more serious tone. We need
to get the seemingly trivial features of nature
right, even in fiction, because of a muchunderrated virtue that the philosopher Paul
Woodruff wrote about a few years ago in his
remarkable book Reverence: Renewing a
Forgotten Virtue.
Reverence, Woodruff says, has fallen out
of favour, being absent from recent discussions in ethics, political theory and other
areas. Reverence, he thinks, sounds too spiritual and too religious for many people, who
value irreverence instead. But in the context
of science bloopers, exercising reverence
means showing that we value nature. Making
public our desire to get the details right is
healthy because it underlines that the fundamental features of the world are not up to
us. Reverence is a virtue because it cultivates
in ourselves and in others the sense that we
constantly need to reconfirm – and keep testing – what we think we know.
Robert P Crease is chairman of the Department
of Philosophy, Stony Brook University, and historian
at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, US,
e-mail rcrease@notes.cc.sunysb.edu
Physics World June 2007