<br/>The movie “Alien” made famous the line “in space no one can hear you scream”, though there was plenty of screaming in that classic space pic, as well as plenty of ominous rumbling of spaceships. It became fashionable to poke fun at Star Wars and other space films for the noisy explosions and roar of engines, because in space no one can hear anything at all. Of course, in space there aren’t orchestras playing soundtracks either, nor are there movie cameras floating around to capture all the action. And anyway, who really wants all the spaceships in Star Wars to be silent? Science fiction can be divided into two categories: one in which it is plainly fantasy adventure and not an extrapolation of our own society, and one that portrays events that could plausibly lie in our future. Getting science right in the former is almost irrelevant, while egregious errors in science in the latter category can promulgate long-standing misconceptions about how the universe works in all areas, from biology to chemistry to physics and astronomy. I’ll discuss my experiences as a technical advisor on the movie “Deep Impact” (which lies in the second category) and compare it to “Armageddon”, which lies in the same category but took a very different approach to scientific realism.<br/>

Science and science fiction: The boundary between fantasy and futurism

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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