Black Holes and Time Travel in your Everyday Life

Oh, look what I found! It is my talk “Black Holes and Time Travel in your Everyday Life”, which I gave as the Klopsteg Award lecture at AAPT back in July. Someone put it on YouTube. I hope you enjoy it!

Two warnings: (1) Skip to about 6 minutes to start, to avoid all the embarrassing handshaking and awarding and stuff. (2) There’s a bit of early morning slowness + jet lag in my delivery here and there, so sorry about that. 🙂

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Abstract: […] Click to continue reading this post

A Chat with Henry Jenkins!

Yesterday Henry Jenkins and I had a great chat as a Facebook Live event. The video is here. The conversation started with the movie Black Panther, but wandered into many topics related to culture, media, science, representation, and beyond. Among other things, we talked about what we enjoyed about the movie, what graphic novels and comics we’re reading now, and what comics source material we’d love to see given a film treatment. Oh, yes, we also mentioned The Dialogues!

Enjoy!

-cvj Click to continue reading this post

Conversation Piece

I wrote a piece for The Conversation recently that is making the rounds, drawing on lots of research sources (including reading some comics from the 1960s!). You might like it. Here it is:

The hidden superpower of ‘Black Panther’: Scientist role models

File 20180207 74473 zbs0ny.jpg?ixlib=rb 1.1
King of a technologically advanced country, Black Panther is a scientific genius.
Marvel Studios

Clifford Johnson, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

I’m not the first to say that the upcoming Marvel movie “Black Panther” will be an important landmark. Finally a feature film starring a black superhero character will be part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe – a successful run of intertwined movies that began with “Iron Man” in 2008. While there have been other superhero movies with a black lead character – “Hancock” (2008), “Blade” (1998), “Spawn” (1997) or even “The Meteor Man” (1993) – this film is significant because of the recent remarkable rise of the superhero film from the nerdish fringe to part of mainstream culture.

Huge audiences will see a black lead character – not a sidekick or part of a team – in a superhero movie by a major studio, with a black director (Ryan Coogler), black writers and a majority black cast. This is a significant step toward diversifying our culture by improving the lackluster representation of minorities in our major media. It’s also a filmmaking landmark because black creators have been given access to the resources and platforms needed to bring different storytelling perspectives into our mainstream culture.

Last year’s “Wonder Woman” forged a similar path. In that case, a major studio finally decided to commit resources to a superhero film headlined by a female character and directed by a woman, Patty Jenkins. Female directors are a minority in the movie industry. Jenkins brought a new perspective to this kind of action movie, and there was a huge positive response from audiences in theaters worldwide.

Above and beyond all this, “Black Panther” also has the potential to break additional ground in a way most people may not realize: In the comics, […] Click to continue reading this post

BBC CrowdScience SXSW Panel!

They recorded one of the panels I was on at SXSW as a 30 minute episode of the BBC World Service programme CrowdScience! The subject was science and the movies, and it was a lot of fun, with some illuminating exchanges, I had some fantastic co-panellists: Dr. Mae Jemison (the astronaut, doctor, and chemical engineer), Professor Polina Anikeeva (she researches in materials science and engineering at MIT), and Rick Loverd (director of the Science and Entertainment Exchange), and we had an excellent host, Marnie Chesterton. It has aired now, but in case you missed it, here is a link to the site where you can listen to our discussion.

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On Arrival…

Arrived at your (Thanksgiving) destination yet? I hope all went well. Now, here’s some exciting news… This year’s Thanksgiving episode of Screen Junkies is another Movie Science special! This means, as usual, that I sat down with presenter Hal Rudnick to talk about some science ideas and portrayal of scientists in the movies.
movie_science_screen_junkiesThis time, the film is Arrival. We actually had a great in-depth conversation, and a lot (not all) of it made it to the episode, so have a look. (Most of the episode assumes that you have seen the film since there are a lot of serious spoilers that will take away from the movies intended unfolding as you view… There are mild spoilers in the form of general discussion about the film to start, and then Hal stops and warns you that we’re going deeper into the details.)

The embed is below, and then after that I say a few spoiler-y things to end this post:

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Super Nailed It…

quick_sketch_of_black_pantherOn the sofa, during a moment while we watched Captain America: Civil War over the weekend:

Amy: Wait, what…? Why’s Cat-Woman in this movie?
Me: Er… (hesitating, not wanting to spoil what is to come…)
Amy: Isn’t she a DC character?
Me: Well… (still hesitating, but secretly impressed by her awareness of the different universes… hadn’t realized she was paying attention all these years.)
Amy: So who’s going to show up next? Super-Dude? Bat-Fella? Wonder-Lady? (Now she’s really showing off and poking fun.)
Me: We’ll see… (Now choking with laughter on dinner…)

I often feel bad subjecting my wife to this stuff, but this alone was worth it.

For those who know the answers and are wondering, I held off on launching into a discussion about the fascinating history of Marvel, representation of people of African descent in superhero comics (and now movies and TV), the […] Click to continue reading this post

Competition Results!

design_film_competition_logo_mediumThis year’s USC Science Film Competition saw another crop of films with a great variety of approaches, with live action and animation, comedy, drama and documentary, and all sorts of hydrids of those forms. Thanks to all who took part. As for the results, and seeing the films (do take a look!) I’ll repeat here the post I did over on the competition’s blog:

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We had a lot of fun at the screening and showcase last Thursday. The films looked great on the Imax screen. Many thanks to Matt Scott for working hard to make sure it all looked great, and also to him and the Large Format Cinema Club for co-hosting the event! Once again, thanks to the Burg Foundation for supporting the competition financially with prize money, grants for helping with the filmmaking, and funds for refreshments and logistics.

The results are as follows: […] Click to continue reading this post

Great Big Exchange

great_big_story_piece

Here’s a fun Great Big Story (CNN) video piece about the Science and Entertainment Exchange (and a bit about my work on Agent Carter). Click here for the piece.

(Yeah, the headline. Seems you can’t have a story about science connecting with the rest of the culture without the word “nerd” being used somewhere…)

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Space at the Movies

first_fridays_nhm_space_movies_eventWell, that was a fun event. Here’s a photograph* of Sean Carroll and me as guests of the always-excellent host Patt Morrison at the Natural History Museum as we talk about aspects of the science of space (and time) as it appears in the movies, how we go about giving advice to filmmakers, and so forth. It was part of the First Fridays series which has a special focus on […] Click to continue reading this post

Best Jury Duty Ever!

embrace_of_the_serpent_ceremonyWell, I’m back from the Sundance Film Festival, where (as you’ll recall from previous posts) I was serving on a jury for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation prize for science in feature film. It involved a lot of sitting and watching movies in theaters all over Park City, discussion and deliberation with fellow jurors (and what a wonderful group to hang out with!), and then a public panel discussion about the importance of science in film (and how to do it “right”) and then announcements, questions, photos, more photos, even more photos, press, etc.

As you may know (it is all over the corner of the press that cares about this sort of thing) we awarded the prize to the film “Embrace of the Serpent” (director/writer: Ciro Guerra*), which happens to also be Colombia’s Oscar-nominated entry in the Foreign Language film category. Here was our citation, read out during a reception on Tuesday:

“for its original and provocative portrait of a scientist and a scientific journey into the unknown, and for its unconventional depiction of how different cultures seek to understand nature.”

I recommend seeing the film because there’s excellent […] Click to continue reading this post

Breathe…

Off-The-Wall-michael-jacksons-short-films-10646021-600-436Well, that was a double bill I don’t think my emotional infrastructure should be put through again any time soon. Nate Parker’s “The Birth of a Nation”, about that crucial Nat Turner -led uprising, was a remarkable piece of work, made all the more powerful by the huge and engaged audience of the Eccles Theater that I saw it in. Then I had to duck out (missing the Q+A sadly) in order to get across to the Library theatre in 20 minutes to see Spike Lee’s brilliant new documentary about Michael Jackson’s transition from Motown to the spectacular “Off the Wall” album. A proper music documentary for music lovers, really digging into all the musical details, reminding me of my formative years and beyond, and […] Click to continue reading this post

In Other Science meets Entertainment news…

sundance_logoVariety and other such entertainment news sites are abuzz with the news that Sundance has now announced its list of who’s on the various Juries for prizes at the festival this year. As you may know, the Sloan Foundation gives a prize there for science in feature film, and I’ll be on the Jury this year. It should be fun – watching all those films will be a bonus, but I’m most looking forward to talking with Kerry Bishé and Shane Carruth about science/engineering and film. Kerry plays a computer engineer character on AMC’s “Halt and Catch Fire”, and in my view really helps set a new high standard for the level of depth and nuance you can bring to such a character while staying well away from every tedious engineer/scientist character trope that actors usually are expected to bring to […] Click to continue reading this post

Happy Centennial, General Relativity!

general_relativity_centennial_kip_thorne(Click for larger view.) Well, I’ve already mentioned why today is such an important day in the history of human thought – One Hundred years of Certitude was the title of the post I used, in talking about the 100th Anniversary (today) of Einstein completing the final equations of General Relativity – and our celebration of it back last Friday went very well indeed. Today on NPR Adam Frank did an excellent job expanding on things a bit, so have a listen here if you like.

As you might recall me saying, I was keen to note and celebrate not just what GR means for science, but for the broader culture too, and two of the highlights of the day were examples of that. The photo above is of Kip Thorne talking about the science (solid General Relativity coupled with some speculative ideas rooted in General Relativity) of the film Interstellar, which as you know […] Click to continue reading this post

That Serial Film Crime…

After all these years, I still have that little pain inside about what I think is one of the greatest missed opportunities (nay, crimes) in the history of film: that Guillermo del Toro did not get to direct the Hobbit due to all the delays in New Zealand over strikes (if I recall correctly), and so after two years of development he (and all his staff) packed up and moved on with their lives…. leaving Peter Jackson to take over the reins. That pain is right there next to those three jabbing pains inside that still feel a bit raw every time I get a reminder about how the films actually turned out overall. Just seeing a poster can set me off. (There are of course some nice set pieces in them here and there, but memory of them is rapidly erased by the overall wrong tone, silliness, and pandering to the need for pointless action sequences at the expense of common sense.) It’s old news now, but it still really hurts.

And it is nothing to do with the fact that […] Click to continue reading this post