Q&A with Sean Carroll Interviewed by Joelle Seligson

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Brianna McDonald
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1 Q&A with Sean Carroll Interviewed by Joelle Seligson Ron Howard and Natalie Portman are among the Hollywood elite whose work has been influenced by Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. Based in Los Angeles, Carroll counts working with television and movie bigwigs among his many extracurricular pursuits. The Science and Entertainment Exchange ( a program of the (U.S.) National Academy of Sciences, links Carroll and other experts with entertainment industry figures who are looking to add a scientific dimension to their productions. In a recent discussion with Dimensions, Carroll recounted favorite moments from consulting on box office smashes, as well as the importance of adding elements of science to unexpected realms. Sean, theoretical physicist is your official title but you have several different titles. What s a typical day or maybe even a week in the life for you? My typical week or day is pretty hectic. It depends on what s going on that day. If it s a regular old day, I will go into the office and after the usual nonsense of answering s and so forth, I ll be doing research, which for me means sitting down at a desk with a piece of paper and a pencil and sometimes talking to my students or collaborators. But I don t use computers, I don t have a lab or anything like that, I can do my work at Starbucks or anywhere else or at home, so it s quite flexible. I m thinking about where the universe came from, what it s made of, things like that. But at other times I might be writing a blog post or writing a book or doing a public talk or even helping someone with some science questions, anyone from teachers to movie producers and writers. And do you do that latter line of work primarily through the Science and Entertainment Exchange? Partially through them, and you know I certainly wouldn t call it a line of work either. This is not something that generally anybody gets paid to do. The kind of consulting that I do is somewhat informal, you know, it s not the movie people want to get things right if they can, but they re not doing science documentaries. When you re making a movie about the Avengers, you re not worried about getting all the

2 laws of physics exactly right. So they look for inspiration and for help in realism, but they re not sticklers for accuracy as you might have guessed. So this is something where I might go in and meet with someone for a couple of hours or read a script and offer some comments, but it s not anything like a lot of work and you get paid comparably little, usually nothing at all. How did you get into that non line of work? Well, when I moved to Los Angeles if you re a scientist in Los Angeles with a medium-high public profile, then they re going to find you before too long. And that s what happened. The very first thing I ever did was with [director] Ron Howard and [producer] Brian Grazer, and they were making the movie Angels and Demons, which is the sequel to The Da Vinci Code. And the movie has a theme and a lot of its plot points are based around physics, the Large Hadron Collider and CERN and antimatter and subatomic particles and wormholes to extra dimensions. So those two, Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, were doing a lot of work, talking to a lot of physicists, they visited CERN themselves, and they found my name so I got to go in and visit them and start talking. And then later on, the Science Entertainment Exchange came along and that was a much more formalized process by which Hollywood people can call them up and say, You know, I d like to talk to someone who s an expert on time travel or diseases or battleships or whatever, and they can find them the right person to talk to. So what are some more recent projects that you ve worked on? Well, one thing you discover in Hollywood is the number of projects being thought about and planned is enormously larger than the number that actually get on screen. So I ve been talking to plenty of people about plenty of ideas, and who knows whether any of them will actually come to fruition. The most recent one that actually appeared on screen that I was involved with was Thor 2, the sequel to the first Thor movie, and in both Thor movies it s a guardian god who s the protagonist, but they wanted to make sure that he lives in the same universe as people like Tony Stark, who is Iron Man, this guy flying around in a metal suit. So even though in the comics he s portrayed as a god, in the movies, he s more of a super powerful alien person, a member of a civilization with great technological capabilities. So there s that aspect of the science and also the love interest, played by Natalie Portman, in the comic books was originally a nurse and in the movies she is a physicist. So they wanted her to have some words to

3 say, have some opinions to have. So even the most comic book-ish of movies can have a real scientific angle in some way. Do you have any favorite examples of questions you were asked or problems you were presented with that you tried to solve? Well, my favorite story is for the first Thor movie, when they were talking about, OK, so it s a race of advanced alien beings who we think of Norse gods, and they live on Asgard, a planet very, very far away. How do they get from Asgard to Earth very, very quickly? And in the legend it s the Bifröst Bridge. So they wanted some kind of scientific version of that. And I said well, the way you get across space very quickly with some scientific plausibility is through a wormhole. And I was told by Kevin Feige, who was the president of Marvel Studios, that they can t use the word wormhole because it sounds too 90s. Even though scientists still use it all the time. So I said, OK, you can call it the Einstein-Rosen Bridge, which is exactly the same thing as a wormhole, it s just that that s what they were originally called. So if you watch the movie there s a scene in which Natalie Portman says, Oh my goodness, they must ve come over using an Einstein-Rosen Bridge! and her mentor, actually her intern says, What is that? and her mentor says, It s a wormhole. That s too funny. What did you think about the movie Gravity? Do you think that did science proud? Yeah, I really liked Gravity. I know that you could nitpick on this and that, but again they re not making science documentaries, they re trying to make interesting, fun films. So I think the fidelity to science in Gravity was way, way higher than average. They moved around some satellites and made the likelihood of being hit a little bit higher than it would be, but it s certainly no different than the distortions you get when lawyers or doctors are portrayed on movies. So I thought that they did a very good job. I could nitpick myself here and there, but it s in the way high percentiles of movies that try to get the science right. OK. So since clearly you re not in this for the big payday, why do you think this is important? Well, I think there s two things. Number one, let s admit that it s fun. I both have fun meeting and talking to these people who are very creative themselves, and also it lets me be a little bit creative, thinking

4 about the scientific laws of nature in a different way, not necessarily trying to think about the right laws of nature but trying to find the laws of nature that would be appropriate to the circumstance in this movie we re trying to make. It s a very different challenge and it s fun to think about those directions. But also the other thing is that I think that it is a really high-impact way of getting science out there in the popular imagination. As much as again Natalie Portman s character in Thor is maybe not the most realistic scientist in the world, but she is a strong woman playing an experimental physicist. And she herself has said, Natalie Portman, in interviews, Who knows when some 12-yearold girl is going to see that movie and say, Hey, look at that, she s a physicist, I could do that, I wonder what that means? That s an important part of making science part of our larger conversation. When it comes to getting involved with the Science and Entertainment Exchange, how does it work? Do you have to be based in L.A. or is it something that science center professionals could do from anywhere? You don t necessarily have to be based in L.A. It certainly helps; I can go and meet with screenwriters. This is where the action is, this is where most of the movies and TV is created. But I would just say if anyone is interested, just let the Exchange know. Go to their website, they re easy to find using Google, just send them an saying, I m an expert in this area and I d love to be available to talk about questions in this area. And it s not a there s a lot of people who would like to chat with Ridley Scott and Christopher Nolan about how to improve their next movie, but the Exchange really tries to build relationships and find the people who are not only good at the science but good at appreciating what the filmmaker wants from the scientist. So it s everyone is welcome to put themselves forward but I can t guarantee whether you ll become a big hit or not among the Hollywood glitterati. From your experience, how would you recommend people go about balancing both the demands of the science facts and science knowledge and the needs of the filmmakers? That s a great question. It s the important question because, like I said, almost every filmmaker would like to get it right if all else were equal, but not all else is equal. If you really stuck to the laws of physics, you wouldn t be making a movie like The Avengers, which made a billion dollars. They have another set of concerns in mind. So I think from the scientist s point of view, it s very, very important to not

5 simply think of yourself as a copy editor, going around saying, No, you can t do that, you can t do that, you can t do that. It s crucially important to say, Well, OK, I see what you re trying to do why don t you try to do it this way? You have to be constructive rather than just destructive or pointing out all the mistakes. And like I said, that s a tough thing to do, but it s also fun, it s a challenge to see, well, how can we reconcile the way that reality works with the way that this plot point needs to work? Do you think you ve taken away your interactions with Hollywood into your own work? I certainly thought about this thing and that thing, this idea because of some question that had been raised in talking to screenwriters or something like that. I don t think I can actually point to any productive research that has come out of it, but it s certainly made me think a little bit, and you know, who knows? I mean, that s not why I m in it. If my goal were to only do research then I would definitely cut down on my time talking to Hollywood. But like I said, it s fun, it s entertaining to me, and I think it does some good. So not that you don t already have enough on your plate, but if you were to perhaps produce your own TV show or film, what do you think you d want it to be about? Well that s a tough one. It depends a lot if we re talking about a science fact kind of show or a fiction show. I like both of them. No one s going to hire me to produce my own fiction show, though. If I had a science fact show, I think that there is room on TV right now for more shows that get into the science as the scientists themselves think about it. There s lots of shows that spend time blowing things up or asking questions about aliens or whatever. I think that if you package it correctly and really make it entertaining and accessible, there s plenty of interest in the real science. And I m very excited about Cosmos debuting tomorrow [March 9, 2014] and I m hopeful that will be a shining example of how this can be done well. Beyond film and TV, what do you see as other important outlets of public engagement when it comes to informing people about science? Well I think they re all important. I think that writing books is important, that s why I write books. I think the internet is extremely important, from Twitter to blogs to online articles and websites and so

6 forth. I think that there s not one right answer. I think that museums are important and public lectures are important and documentaries are important because who knows when you re going to reach someone you wouldn t otherwise have reached? I wish it were easier for scientists to contribute to classroom materials and K 12 education. I ve dabbled in that a little bit myself and it s enormously frustrating how many rules there are and standards and does it fit into that curriculum point and so forth, so I think that a lot of potential creativity and productivity is stifled there. But it s still worth trying to do everything we can in every different way because there s no one way it s going to reach everybody. I think that s important for readers to know. Is there anything else you d want to suggest for science center and museum professionals that they could learn from your experience? I think the other thing is that not only do we need a variety of media, but we need a variety of communicators. I think that having scientists who are friendly and accessible and willing to talk to a wide audience is very important. And it s also important to have nonscientists who are upfront and enthusiastic about their love for science. A couple weeks ago, I had dinner with GZA, who is one of the rappers from the Wu-Tang Clan. And he turns out to have an absolute fascination for particle physics and cosmology, and his next album s going to be themed on dark matter. So he actually gave a talk in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and we got to meet him afterward. And that s a guy who can reach an audience that I could possibly never reach. So I have enormous respect for that, for the people who are reaching out to different communities and trying to make science have a place at the table in terms of what we re all talking about. This interview appeared in the May/June 2014 issue of Dimensions magazine, published by the Association of Science- Technology Centers,

Back to the English. Please Your Senses The Age-Old Debate: Books vs. Movies

Back to the English. Please Your Senses The Age-Old Debate: Books vs. Movies Please Your Senses : vs The Age-Old Debate: Books vs. Movies.. Host: First came the book, then came the movie, and now here s a debate over which one is better. Today, we ll be hearing arguments from two