Seed Media Group: Blog

Friday, February 26, 2010 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #

Science news in review

Every Thursday, Seedmagazine.com’s home page editor Evan Lerner comments on the course of science reporting and publishing. Week in Review is an ongoing analyses of how changes in media, publishing, technology, and science policy affect the scientific conversation; why science news are being reported the way they are, who is talking under which agenda, and whose point of view seems to be the most accurate.

In this week’s column, Lerner looks at the entertainment industry to ponder the role of movies as vehicles for scientific ideas.

Despite the compound scientific impossibilities inherent in its premise, Avatar is a movie about science, whereas Independence Day and its ilk are movies about blowing things up. After watching Avatar, one can talk about the scientist’s role in the technological dichotomy inherent to colonialism without getting into the economics of shipping magic rocks four light-years to hit quarterly profit targets. Likewise, as Perkowitz suggests, was The Day After Tomorrow a “teachable moment” on climate change, even if it got the science totally wrong.

Illustration: Mike Pick