Sci-fi movies tend to capture children's imaginations and have long been part of students' excited chats in the schoolyard. But now a scientific journal has urged at least one sci-fi movie to be shown in class by science teachers.

 

Scientific papers published in the American Journal of Physics (AJP) and in Classical and Quantum Gravity have seen merit in the way the movie Interstellar portrays¹ wormholes.

 

Dr David Jackson from AJP said publishing this paper "was a no-brainer". He added: "The physics has been very carefully reviewed by experts and found to be accurate. The publication will encourage physics teachers to show the film in their classes to get across ideas about general relativity".

 

In fact, one of the executive producers of Interstellar was Kip Thorne, a professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). For him, films such as Interstellar, Contact and 2001: A Space Odyssey² can inspire young people.

 

Blockbusters are improving when it comes to portraying³ scientific theories. An initiative by the US National Academy of Sciences has been putting proper scientists in touch with movie people to achieve a better result - which is vital in the internet age. Interstellar's director Christopher Nolan says: "Consumers have a lot more immediate⁴ access to information. If you go and see a film about a particular subject, particularly a true life story, you can go home and look it up on Wikipedia and see if the basic things portrayed⁵ in the film are true or not. The same is true of science in the films".

 

Professional scientists may no longer cringe in their seats when they watch sci-fi movies. Today, getting the science wrong is no longer an option.

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