Tales from the Industry XXXXII – Equation Wrangler (Again)

Those pages of notes are from a couple of weeks back (I did not get time to post about it – been busy). I’ve had to blur pretty much everything on them since although they were real physics computations, they are for an episode of the TV show Agent Carter, and a few of you might be able to read the equations and with a bit of educated guesswork perhaps figure out elements of the show. I don’t reveal details of that sort without permission, as you know by now. Anyway, it was interesting to do (on this and some other occasions for this show), since from the scripts I get to interpret what I think the scientist involved is thinking about and working on at a very technical level, and then create some of their scribblings that you’ll see when looking over their shoulder. This case was particularly fun to do since a lot of the material is going to fill a lot of wall and desk space and so I got to lay out a lot of a computation that they’d be doing carefully by hand, and the camera pans over it so you’ll see the details… Maybe.

While it was tempting to throw in some of my own research work, just for fun, (and nobody would know!) I resisted. I wanted to put in some stuff that really fit nicely with the plot of the show, and those people watching who know this sort of physics might see that it (kind of) would be the kind of thing the character would be tinkering with*. I like helping put in levels of detail that lend a bit of weight and reality to the overall look of the show, as I have tried to do for the whole of this upcoming season, and writing plausible looking equations is one of the good opportunities to do so. I’m tired of seeing shows where there’s just F=ma or Schrodinger’s equation written neatly on an otherwise blank page or board, aren’t you?

I’ve no idea how much of this will end up on screen, but it’ll be a blast if some of it does. And who knows… a few of the viewers might be inspired to learn more about those scribblings they saw.

I’ll be visiting the set soon and so maybe I’ll see some of the stuff I wrote or helped design actually being used…

-cvj

(Re the “Again” in the title: See here.)

*As some of you know it is a period show, so on occasion I also tried to make some of the physics musings match the time period, at least loosely – but not always, since this is Marvel Science after all.