Can Movies Inspire Kids To Be Future Scientists? 298
Hugh Pickens writes "MSNBC reports on a recent panel that discussed studies showing that people, especially children, often model their behavior on what they see on the big (or small) screen and science shows up in many Hollywood films. In fact, 22 of the 60 top-grossing movies of all time are science-fiction or superhero flicks, including history's No. 1 box office hit, Avatar. The movie science doesn't even have to be entirely accurate, some of the panelists added when asked to consider the role and impact of science in cinema. As long as it plants a seed of curiosity in viewers, it may spur them to investigate scientific issues on their own — and perhaps consider a career in science down the road. 'It's not an educational medium, it's an emotional medium,' says Seth Shostak, an astronomer with the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. 'Kids get turned on by the emotion.' Interestingly enough although movies work hard to get the science right, many make errors ranging from the understandable to the egregious, but that's ok, say the panelists. 'Even if a film or media product is not very accurate, that becomes a teaching moment,' says Arvind Singhal. 'So there's room for everything.'"
Avatar is what? (Score:2, Insightful)
Avatar is a modern fantasy, not science fiction. There's barely anything plausibly speculative about Avatar. The few pieces of plausible fiction (cold sleep, avatars, aliens, and mechs) are plot devices, not plot points. All of the actual plot is implausible speculative fantasy.
Pendulum swings both ways (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The problem in the US... (Score:5, Insightful)
It is that every kid with an IQ of 90 or more is told that they can be a doctor, lawyer, or scientist
Who is telling them that? Last I checked, we were telling our children that they should aspire to be either businessmen or celebrities.
Why become a scientist? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why become a scientist in the US today? You go to school forever, spend years in a dead-end postdoc, and then can't get a tenured position. You're then 35, a decade behind in starting your career, and overqualified for most jobs.
Inspire them with science. (Score:5, Insightful)
How about we inspire them with actual science rather than wasting their potential trying to condition them to be passive consumers. The latter is the ultimate goal of popular entertainment. This just sounds like an attempt to use science as a fig leaf.
Re:The problem in the US... (Score:4, Insightful)
Intelligence is not fixed at birth. The brain is a muscle that can - and must - be exercised to fulfil its owner's potential.
And only the top percentile of humanity gets to have a job in the medicine/science professions? What sort of Gattaca-fueled world do you live in?
Re:The problem in the US... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not just about inspiring kids to grow up and become scientists. It's also about how much the next generation will care about investment in a new fancy science fiction future. There are plenty of reason to want to cut government spending. And if you care nothing about space exploration and travel, you could easily see the budget of a government organization like NASA or the National Science Foundation as completely superfluous.
Pure science needs pure funding. If your lab is forced to spend more time worried about how to monetize an idea than to explore it's scientific ramifications, you end up in compromising positions of wanting to cut corners and fudge the numbers.
Re:Avatar is what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Didn't read the article, did ya? The protagonists in Avatar are all scientists. They go on to win the day. Ergo, kid scientists. The movie doesn't need to be about lab tests and submitting papers to have the desired effect...
No, because science != sci-fi/fantasy (Score:4, Insightful)
Good *science* movies are much harder to find. There's some vaguely interesting scientific issues raised in films like 2001 - where did life come from and what would extra-terrastrial intelligent life be like? Solaris perhaps? And film's like Lorenzo's Oil show science in a positive role. I did like Apollo 13 though for showing the engineers doing the almost impossible to save the astronauts. Can anyone help me make a list of others?
Short answer: No (Score:4, Insightful)
What's nearly as bad is the science career advice children receive at school. Almost no teachers anywhere have ever met a professional scientist. Even the few who might be married to one have no real idea what their partner does on a daily basis and they are in no position to advise on either the suitability of a child to try to become a professional scientist, nor on what that child could expect from a career in a scientific job.
The single biggest failing of science is that it does nothing to prepare the next generation for work in the field. Meaning that those children who leave school to attend a university science course, assuming it will be like the science they did in school, have one hell of a big surprise when it turns out to be completely different from what they expected. The surprise is nearly as big as the one science graduates get when they discover, in turn, that working as a professional scientist is again, nothing like what they thought it was when they were students.
Fighting popular culture (Score:4, Insightful)
You can't win by fighting popular culture. Today science and technology are very, very low on the pop culture totem pole. Drug dealers aren't that great, but they score better than scientists. Hip-hop rappers are way, way up. Rock stars are out. Supermodels aren't cool, but pseudo-idol teens are in.
And none of them are getting A's in school.
Avatar is a horrible examine of a pro-science movie. The scientists for the most part got kicked off the planet in the end. The chief scientist for the Navi cause died. No, I don't think it is inspirational to present the idea of dying on a far off planet in a feud with a paramilitary force.
Face it, in the US today isn't respected to be a scientist. It is respected to be a drug-addicted rap singer that can't use the word "woman" but instead says bitch constantly. It hasn't been respected to get good grades in high school and to spend time studying. There are popular songs with phrases like "Should I be a straight A student? If you are then you think too much." This is the culture we have created and what we are going to have to live with for the next 20 or 30 years.
Look at Asian families where if the kid brings home a B they are beaten. The kid knows it, studys and doesn't get the beating so there is no awful social stigma. In the 1950s white middle class families did the same thing which is why we have science and technology companies in the US today. As a society we have lost that motivation and it is going to hurt.
Re:Why become a scientist? (Score:4, Insightful)
The main reason to become a scientist is because it is fun. Science includes a wide range of types of work, from purely theoretical to grungy hands-on work with real hardware (my favorite). Not everyone in science needs to go the academic path, some take staff positions after grad school, some work in science related fields after just an undergrad degree.
I think it does help when even vaguely science-related materials appear in the media, but at the same time the almost universal mis-representation of what science is like may cause a lot of people to either not choose it as a career, or to be unhappy after they do.
It takes a certain type of personality to find science fun, but some people have it. Seeing the fuzzy egg-crate pattern on a screen and realizing it is individual atoms. Seeing a faint smudge and realizing that it is a jet of gas millions of light-years long, or a spot on a screen that is a gigawatt X-ray beam, or realizing that a slight offset between the calculated center of mass from gravitational lensing relative to luminous mass means that you may have just spotted the missing 90% of the matter in the universe.
All of the above are very exciting (to the right person), but unfortunately none make good movies.
I've been a working scientist for 20 years, and its a great job. I briefly went to work for industry, but got so tired of the easy work and high pay, that I gave it up.
--- Joe Frisch
Re:The problem in the US... (Score:2, Insightful)
Ever read the Bell Curve?
Sure, it "is not fixed." Perhaps you can train your brain to perform a half of a standard deviation above your average. But that's about it. It's reality. It's fixed.
You may not like that reality, but the kind of thinking you seem to be espousing, is that which makes my niece with a 19 ACT think she can get into a good college and get a scholarship, without work. She thinks she's entitled to it. And that's about all she thinks.
And I didn't say "a job in the science professions." I wrote "a scientist." And the reality is, only 1% of the population, more or less, has the intelligence and wherewithall to perform as a "scientist" and not a "research assistant."
How many professors are there in the US population, for instance? How many undergrads are taught that they can become professors? The difference is over 1:1000, and that's a problem.
Re:No, because science != sci-fi/fantasy (Score:4, Insightful)
Buckaroo Banzai! You can be into particle physics and still rock out and save the world from the Red Lectroids.
Re:Avatar is what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why become a scientist? (Score:2, Insightful)
Do you know the real reason why it makes no sense to be a scientist in the West at this point?
It's because the West is not producing anything anymore. It's because the gov't has done enough damage to the economy, that businesses are not started, competition is impossible in the face of gov't subsidized/promoted/stimulated/bailed out/regulated for monopolies.
You cannot have science if you have no manufacturing. Manufacturing: capitalism + industrialization, is what made science possible and growing in the West in 19 century, it wasn't gov't, it was the push from the businesses to come up with new ways of doing stuff. At that point becoming an engineer was a very good idea for a new worker and becoming a scientist was really promoted, as engineers needed new stuff to be researched to do their jobs better.
The point is that a society cannot continue doing scientific research in production vacuum. It's not possible to have just a 'service based economy', without any production capacity and expect science to grow rather than to shrink and wither away.
Having the same cake and eating it... now that's a fantasy.