A lot of the time, when I find myself critiquing scientific accuracy in movies, I have to remind myself that it had to get close enough to getting it right to get things wrong.
Interpretation
Movies often take creative liberties with scientific accuracy, but they must still be grounded in some truth.
Randall Munroe's quote highlights the balance filmmakers must strike between entertainment and accuracy in science fiction. While movies may exaggerate or simplify scientific concepts for storytelling, they often base their narratives on real science to create a semblance of reality, reminding viewers that even inaccuracies can stem from a foundation of truth.
In practice
In a discussion about a popular science fiction film during a lecture on media and representation in science.
I think the really cool and compelling thing about math and physics is that it opens up entry to all these hypotheticals - or at least, it gives you the language to talk about them. But at the same time, if a scenario is completely disconnected from reality, it's not all that interesting.
One of the nice things about the Internet is you can do a comic that's just for Ph.D. students, or for truck drivers, and you get to reach all of them without having to satisfy the other 99%.
A million people can call the mountains a fiction, yet it need not trouble you as you stand atop them.
News networks giving a greater voice to viewers because the social web is so popular are like a chef on the Titanic who, seeing the looming iceberg and fleeing customers, figures ice is the future and starts making snow cones.
Take wrong turns. Talk to strangers. Open unmarked doors. And if you see a group of people in a field, go find out what they are doing. Do things without always knowing how they'll turn out. You're curious and smart and bored, and all you see is the choice between working hard and slacking off. There are so many adventures that you miss because you're waiting to think of a plan. To find them, look for tiny interesting choices. And remember that you are always making up the future as you go.
Things are rarely just crazy enough to work, but they're frequently just crazy enough to fail hilariously.
Quality without science and research is absurd. You can't make inferences that something works when you have 60 percent missing data.
Any work of science, no matter what its point of departure, cannot become fully convincing until it crosses the boundary between the theoretical and the experimental: Experimentation must give way to argument, and argument must have recourse to experimentation.
On Venus you could cook a 16-inch pepperoni pizza in seven seconds, just by holding it out to the air. (Yes, I did the math.)
Fractal geometry is not just a chapter of mathematics, but one that helps Everyman to see the same world differently.
The terrible part of this looming catastrophe is that people have been working on solutions for years and have developed concrete steps to massively reduce our energy use, while stimulating whole new industries and technologies that are more efficient and affordable.
To consult the statistician after an experiment is finished is often merely to ask him to conduct a post mortem examination. He can perhaps say what the experiment died of.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.