What Would a Movie to Inspire Future Physicists Look Like?

Today in "Reasons I'm Not a Screenwriter"

The Pip refracted through a sculpture at the Corning Museum of Glass

One of the more enduring elements of #discourse to come out of the movie Oppenheimer is the Sam Altman tweet lamenting that it’s too grim and won’t “inspire a generation of kids to be physicists.” This baby has been getting dunked on for a solid month:

We went down to the Southern Tier to visit family this past weekend, which meant a good deal of driving while the kids zoned out with headphones on. Somehow, this tweet came up in conversation again, and Kate and I spent a while discussing whether it would even be possible to make a movie to inspire kids to become physicists. It’s probably worth throwing a little of that out here, just in case anybody has any great ideas on that front.

To set the terms a little bit, what I’m trying to imagine here is a movie that has a chance at the kind of cultural cachet that Oppenheimer has (prestige cast and crew, critical acclaim, etc.), that features physicists as physicists in a central way (that is, it matters to the movie that they’re doing physics), and that might inspire young people to want to be a physicist. We’re looking for prestigious cinema here, not just fun nerd fare like Real Genius—that’s beloved by many physicists who were already on the science-nerd track before they saw it, but I doubt it inspired anyone else to choose physics as a career.

The obvious place to start with this, given the Oppenheimer phenomenon, would be with a biopic, but it’s kind of hard to think of good candidates whose stories are inspiring in the way that Oppenheimer’s isn’t. It’s not actually that physics lacks for interesting characters with fascinating lives— everybody immediately thinks of Feynman here, but you’ve also got folks like Chien-Shiung Wu, Vera Rubin, Jocelyn Bell, Paul Dirac, Luis Alvarez, Freeman Dyson, and Julian Schwinger, all of whom did great science and also feature in colorful anecdotes.

The problem is that movies need drama, and while all those people have done amazing things that are really fun to talk about, their lives are not, in fact, all that cinematic. They were, for the most part, basically happy and successful their whole lives, which makes for a stiff and boring biopic. Bell, Rubin, and Dyson arguably should’ve had Nobel Prizes, but that’s about the only dark spot on any of their careers. You could wring some pathos out of stories like Feynman’s first wife dying of TB while he was at Los Alamos (which, in fact, has been done) or Wu canceling a trip to visit her family in China so she could get the parity-violation experiment done over Christmas break, but I don’t think either of those is exactly going to make kids leave the cinema and run directly to their local university to sign up for physics classes.

So, the straightforward technique of telling the life story of somebody admirable doesn’t seem all that plausible. Your best bet might be Feynman during the Challenger investigation, which was dramatic and also featured the stunt with the O-ring in ice water, which is both cinematic and very physicist-y. But it’s ultimately still kind of a bummer story.

On the other hand, maybe an admirable person isn’t really what you want. In a follow-up tweet, Altman cited The Social Network as a movie that inspired a lot of kids to go into tech, and that’s very much not a movie about Good People. Maybe that’s the model to look to.

So, what is it about The Social Network that makes it inspiring to young people? Well, on the filmmaking side, I think there are two key elements: 1) Aaron Sorkin, and 2) David Fincher. The script for that movie is the most Sorkin-y script that ever Sorkin-ed, giving everybody in the cast incredibly witty dialogue (improbably witty, if we’re being honest), and Fincher accentuates that zippiness with the way he directs the actors and cuts between scenes and angles. Everybody in it is kind of an asshole (when SteelyKid asked to watch it for Movie Night, I prefaced it with “You’re going to hate everyone in this except for maybe two people”) but they all look incredibly cool thanks to the writing and directing.

So maybe it doesn’t matter so much who the subject is, provided it’s made by the right people. But at some level, you still need a story whose plot can inspire that kind of work, and then we’re back to the problem of what to put at the center. You might conceivably get somewhere with a story about lesser-known physicists— the principals at Facebook weren’t exactly household names before the movie of their lives came out, after all— but it’s hard to think of a really good subject. Something around high-temperature superconductors might have potential, but the actual, existing high-T_c materials from the “Woodstock of Physics” days are still frustratingly unresolved and haven’t had that much practical impact, and the more recent claims of room-temperature materials are somewhere between “disputed” and “debunked.” Maybe in a few years’ time there’d be something to work with; then again, given that there are claims of fraud being thrown around, I don’t know how inspirational any of that might be.

There’s also another secret ingredient in The Social Network that’s kind of lacking in physics, namely shitloads of money. Nobody really knew much about how Facebook worked before the movie (or after it, honestly), and there was really only one thing they knew about the people who made it work: that they got filthy stinking rich as a result. Which really is the source of the cool factor that inspired people to go into tech startups: to paraphrase Justin Timberlake’s character, there’s not much cooler than a billion dollars.

So maybe you want an emerging area of physics with a lot of VC cash sloshing around. Which would argue for something in the quantum computing space, which is arguably in a similar stage as where Facebook was when Sorkin and Fincher started doing their thing. I have a bit of a hard time picturing that, though, because I know several of the most likely principal characters at least a little bit, and trying to cast somebody to play a Sorkinized version of Scott Aaronson or Chris Monroe breaks my brain a little. (At least you could get Sam Elliott to be Dave Wineland…)

Of course, inspiration doesn’t necessarily have to come from real people; it might be possible to do something wholly fictional that would get young people fired up about physics. The problem there is that the problems that are the domain of physics proper tend to be a bit upstream of anything that has real-world effects: cracking the problem of room-temperature superconductivity would be an absolutely amazing physics achievement, but fashioning that into a technology that would change the world is an engineering problem. Which means you’re either operating at a level somewhat removed from real consequences and trusting your Sorkin-and-Fincher analogues to make everything cool, or you end up in a genre movie with a physics McGuffin. Some physicist has unlocked the secret of room-temperature superconductivity, but sinister forces want to prevent its publication for nefarious reasons, and hijinks ensue. Or some shady corporation is about to debut a quantum buzzword that will devastate civilization as we know it, and our plucky physicist hero is the only one who knows what’s coming and has to stop them. That kind of thing.

But at that point, you’re not making a physicist movie, you’re just making a genre flick. And, you know, it’s been done, badly.

So, at the end of the day, I still don’t really know what a prestige film that would inspire people to become physicists would look like. Other than, you know, that it would need to be made by a couple of genius filmmakers, which seems tricky to arrange…

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That’s your proof (as if more was needed) that I’m not the kind of writer who invents plots. If you like this sort of speculation, here’s a button to get more of it:

And if you have a brilliant idea for an inspirational physics movie that you either want to suggest or, better yet, want to hire me as a consultant on, the comments will be open: