New York Times

Now that New York City is relatively safe from muggers, Hollywood has resorted to monsters and meteors to trigger end-of-the-world fears in urban movie-goers. But unlike romantic comedies or action-adventure thrillers, most disaster films pluck the fruits science for their storylines. Deadly viruses, out-of-control DNA, evil aliens, and killer asteroids are all common themes in recent films. Unfortunately, a film's scientific literacy hardly ever measures up to its plot.

Am I the only one who cares?

I'm not talking about simple bloopers, such as when a Roman Centurion happens to be wearing a wrist watch. These mistakes are inadvertent. I'm talking about ignorant bloopers, like reversing the sunset to pretend you have filmed a sunrise. These are not time-symmetric events. Are cinematographers too sleepy to wake up before the Sun and get the real footage? And why is it that movie meteors have such good aim? Earth's surface is seventy percent water and over ninety-nine percent uninhabited, yet an incoming meteor decapitates the Chrysler Building in one of this summer's movies.

And why is it that James Cameron took the time to get every imaginable detail correct about the Titanic—from the rivets to the dinnerware—yet he got the wrong nighttime sky? Actually, he comes close. What could be the constellation Corona Borealis (the Northern Crown) is shown overhead on that fateful night. But it has the wrong number of stars. Why? I'd bet the costumes were researched to be precisely the styles of the period. Had someone been on board wearing love beads, bell-bottom jeans, and a large afro, you know that viewers would have complained loudly that Cameron had not done his homework. Am I any less justified in my outcries?

My gripes are not just with Hollywood. What about those majestic stars in the ceiling of New York City's Grand Central Terminal? Rather than just admitting that the backwards constellations were a mistake, a sign in the lobby tells us, Said to be backwards, [the ceiling is] actually seen from a point of view outside our solar system. But a second error has now been committed in an attempt to cover up the first: no point of view in our galaxy will reverse the constellation patterns of Earth's night sky. As you leave the solar system, and travel among the stars, all that happens to Earth's constellations is that they become scrambled and wholly unrecognizable.

What society needs are scientifically literate reviewers. Why should a critic be limited to saying things like, The characters stretched credulity or the tonal elements clashed with the emotional flavor of the set designs? Just once I want to hear a critic say, Flying saucers don't need runway lights (as was depicted in Close Encounters of the Third Kind), or The Moon phases grew in the wrong direction (as what happened in LA Story), or An asteroid the size of Texas would have been discovered two hundred years ago (as was shown in Armageddon). Only then might the public begin to appreciate the role that the laws of physics play in everyday life.

If you want to write a book, make a film, or engage in a public art project, and if this work makes reference to the natural world, all I ask is that you call your neighborhood scientist and chat about it. When you seek scientific license to distort the laws of nature, I would prefer you did so knowing the truth, rather than inventing a storyline that is cloaked in ignorance. You may be surprised to learn that valid science can make fertile additions to your storytelling—whether or not your artistic objective is to destroy the world.

The time has come. The New Year is upon us and there'll be no escape from the relentless comparisons between the space-faring future world of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and our measly earthbound life in the real year 2001. I take a different view. Even though we've got no lunar bases and we haven't sent hibernating astronauts to Jupiter in outsized space ships, I think we have done quite well for ourselves.

People sometimes wax nostalgic over the Golden Age of space exploration: the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs led to the first moon landing in 1969. No doubt those were special times and special moments, but are they more special than the events of today? The greatest obstacle to the human exploration of space, apart from funding and other earthly political factors, is surviving biologically hostile environments. We need to engineer a version of ourselves, an emissary who can somehow withstand the extremes of temperature, the high-energy radiation, and the meager air supply, yet still conduct a full round of scientific experiments.

We've already invented such things.

They are called robots, and they conduct all of our interplanetary exploration. You don't have to feed robots. They don't need life support. And they won't get upset if you don't bring them back. Our current ensemble of space robots includes probes that are, at this moment, monitoring the Sun, orbiting Mars, intercepting a comet's tail, orbiting an asteroid, orbiting Jupiter, and on their way to Saturn. Four of our earlier space probes were launched with enough energy and with the right trajectory to escape the solar system altogether, each one carrying encoded information about humans for the intelligent aliens who might recover the hardware. And NASA is now soliciting proposals from the scientific community for the first robotic mission to Pluto.

We have compelling evidence for the existence of barely frozen water on Mars and of liquid water deep within Jupiter's moon Europa. These worlds hold tantalizing prospects for the past or present existence of non-Earth-based life. This news was, of course, beamed to us by semi-intelligent, robotic probes endowed by humans with the capacity to ask and answer many of the questions that humans would ask were we the ones making the trip. We also maintain, at any moment, hundreds of communication satellites as well as a dozen space-based telescopes that see the universe in bands of light from infrared through gamma rays. One of these pass bands, the microwaves, allows us to see evidence for the Big Bang, coming from the edge of the observable universe.

Just because we have no interplanetary colonies, or other unrealized dreamscapes, it doesn't mean that our presence in space has not in fact grown exponentially. We should not measure our space-faring era by where footprints have been laid. Nor should we measure it by how many people deify our astronauts or follow the progress of our launches. We should measure our era by how many people take no notice at all. A legacy rises to become culture only when its elements are so common that they no longer attract comment-not because people have lost interest, but because people cannot imagine a world without them.

As for the real year 2001: apart from our flocks of robotic probes, we have a silent ballet of hardware in the heavens. The International Space Station is under construction, just like the one portrayed in 2001 the movie, and it will never know a day without an astronaut on board-our human presence in space is now permanent. The Space Station is being assembled with parts delivered by reusable, docking space shuttles, each of which say NASA on the side panels instead of Pan Am. Further similarities include zero-G flush toilets with complicated instructions, and the platters of unappealing astronaut food.

As far as I can tell, the only thing Kubrick's movie has that we don't have is Johann Strauss's Blue Danube Waltz filling the vacuum of space and a homicidal mainframe named HAL.

To the Editor:

People cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey schoolteacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah's ark carried dinosaurs.

This case is not about the need to separate church and state; it's about the need to separate ignorant, scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers.

To the Editor:

When I think of anniversaries, I think of occasions to remember people, places, and events that have been largely forgotten over the previous year. For me, however, not a day has gone by when I did not think of the World Trade Center and the thousands of lives lost in its rubble, just four blocks from my home. So maybe I'll use the anniversary as an excuse too try and think of something else for a day.