I’m often quite shocked at how bad the portrayals of science are even in high-budget movies. Sometimes I can see that getting the science wrong is necessary in order to have the story work. But often the bad science seems to be quite gratuitous. And I have to believe that for extremely little extra effort there’d be an extra market for these movies etc. if they got the science right.

A few years back, my company made the math content for a TV show called Numb3rs—and people really seemed to appreciate the “real math” (see http://numb3rs.wolfram.com/). The Wolfram Language and Mathematica get used a lot to create effects and sometimes displays for movies (e.g. by Kip Thorne et al. for Interstellar: https://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/customer-stories/academy-award-visuals-mathematica-wolfram-language.en.html).

About a year ago I happened to get involved in doing science consulting for a fairly big-budget movie that’s now called Arrival that’s supposed to be released this fall. It was an interesting experience; I’m very curious how the actual movie will come out. Who knows, perhaps some of my mannerisms will even wind up portrayed by the actor who’s a physicist in the movie… (Oliver Sacks once told me what an uncanny experience he’d had watching Robin Williams portray him in a movie and interpret his various mannerisms so well…)