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Dec. 6th, 2009 07:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gmonkey42The video with the condescending whack job claiming to be some kind of doctor in my last post reminded me:
I've been watching Flashforward because 1) John Cho, 2) cool sci-fi premise! and 3) JOHN CHO and something has happened a few times that I've seen happen in other sci-fi things too: a (usually male) character says to a (usually female) character "have you heard of [insert science-y thing]?" and the second character says "no" so the first character can explain it for the benefit of the audience.
I remember it happening twice in Flashforward: once it was "do you know anything about string theory?" and the other was "have you heard of the many worlds hypothesis?" and in both cases I could have said "WHY YES, ACTUALLY!" Oh, also there was the timeMerry Dominic Monaghan's character acted like a huge, egotistical asshole in order to convince a stranger to sleep with him (and it worked). She hadn't heard of Schrödinger's Cat. WTF who hasn't heard of that? Anyway, that wasn't originally intended to illustrate the principle of quantum mechanics, it was to demonstrate the absurdity of trying to apply it to macro-scale objects. LIKE A CAT, FOR EXAMPLE.
A lot of people get that wrong. I'm not sure why a character who's supposed to be a genius physicist would. Ohh, right, it's because the writers are trying to make up cool physics things and can't even be bothered to look it up on Wikipedia and are relying on the assumption that most of the audience is even more ignorant about science than they are. And sadly, they're right.
I've been watching Flashforward because 1) John Cho, 2) cool sci-fi premise! and 3) JOHN CHO and something has happened a few times that I've seen happen in other sci-fi things too: a (usually male) character says to a (usually female) character "have you heard of [insert science-y thing]?" and the second character says "no" so the first character can explain it for the benefit of the audience.
I remember it happening twice in Flashforward: once it was "do you know anything about string theory?" and the other was "have you heard of the many worlds hypothesis?" and in both cases I could have said "WHY YES, ACTUALLY!" Oh, also there was the time
A lot of people get that wrong. I'm not sure why a character who's supposed to be a genius physicist would. Ohh, right, it's because the writers are trying to make up cool physics things and can't even be bothered to look it up on Wikipedia and are relying on the assumption that most of the audience is even more ignorant about science than they are. And sadly, they're right.
