![]() ![]() That aside, the promotion by the film’s crew of another issue is misguided: they want us all to believe that the film is about climate change. Research is vastly more productive and fun if students and advisers, who often spend a lot of time together professionally, get to know each other as people. I suspect some of my colleagues might have a visceral reaction to this, but I found it refreshing. In the film, Mindy and Dibiasky have a warm relationship. ![]() It is mutually caring, sometimes personal, but unquestionably professional. The student-advisor relationship, critical to the growth and development of scientists, has been shaken by the problem of harassment.īut one touching detail that she enabled was the relationship between the female graduate student and her male adviser. Mainzer spent months with the cast and crew and helped write some scenes.Īstronomy might be one of the first areas in academia that wrestled with what, years later, became the Me Too movement. Mainzer was the film’s “astrotech adviser” and is the principal investigator for NASA’s NEOWISE mission, which is tasked with finding and characterizing near-Earth objects (NEOs). Those gems of science pervade the film because of McKay’s insistence that a practicing scientist, Amy Mainzer, be part of the production. For science enthusiasts, easter eggs-the little hidden jokes -abound as well. Any professional astrophysicist need suspend disbelief for only a few minutes out of the movie’s roughly 130. My colleagues in astrophysics will surely nitpick a few scenes, and there are transgressions, but they have no effect on the film’s purpose and provenance, especially to anyone who understands the machinations of theater and the mechanisms of science. Many mainstream movies that include elements of science are ridiculous, but Don’t Look Up hits the right balance. It has the appeal, through an all-star cast and wicked comedy, to reach audiences that have different or fewer experiences with science. Funny, yet dead serious, Don’t Look Up is one of the most important recent contributions to popularizing science. “Let’s just sit tight and assess,” she says, and an outrageous, but believable comedy ensues, in which the astronomers wrangle an article in a major newspaper and are mocked on morning TV, with one giddy host asking about aliens and hoping that the comet will kill his ex-spouse.Īt last, mainstream Hollywood is taking on the gargantuan task of combatting the rampant denial of scientific research and facts. The astronomers try to alert the president, played by Meryl Streep, to their impending doom. It is about nine kilometers across, like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. An astronomy graduate student, Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), and her professor, Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), discover a new comet and realize that it will strike the Earth in six months. On a recent morning, in Lower Manhattan, 20 scientists, including me, gathered for a private screening of the new film Don’t Look Up, followed by lunch with the film’s director, Adam McKay. ![]()
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