Is that a bomb in your pocket?

US: Science-fiction films deal with fantasy subjects such as time travel, supernatural beings and alien monsters. Should they also be required to stay within the boundaries of real science? Physics professor Sidney Perkowitz says yes.

Perkowitz is a member of the Science and Entertainment Exchange, an advisory organization run by the National Academy of Sciences in the US. The exchange offers guidelines to film makers and screenwriters, and has the support of actors including Dustin Hoffman, and screenwriters such as Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back. The exchange has advised the makers of the 2009 film Watchmen as well as the popular television series Heroes.

“I am not offended if they make one big scientific blunder in a given film,” Perkowitz told The Guardian. “You can make things move faster than the speed of light if you want. But after that I would like things developed in a coherent way.”

Stanley Perkowitz"One big scientific blunder is OK. But it has to be developed coherently." 

One film that did not obey this principle, according to Perkowitz, is The Core, about scientists who detonate a nuclear device in the centre of the Earth to start the planet spinning again. The 2003 film was a box office bomb. “The Core did not make money because people understood the science was so out to lunch,” Perkowitz says.

Still, the general public does not always reject movies because of bad science. The 2009 film Angels and Demons, based on the Dan Brown novel andstarring Tom Hanks, was a box office hit. This despite the fact that a key plot element was an antimatter bomb that is kept inside a glass vial thanks to a magnetic field that is powered by a small battery.

“The amount of antimatter they had was more than we will make in a million years of running a high-energy particle collider,” Perkowitz says. “You can’t contain it using an iPod battery.”