{"id":238386,"date":"2025-10-25T03:41:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-25T03:41:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/238386\/"},"modified":"2025-10-25T03:41:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-25T03:41:07","slug":"the-sci-fi-films-that-physicists-love-to-watch-from-interstellar-to-spider-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/238386\/","title":{"rendered":"The sci-fi films that physicists love to watch \u2014 from Interstellar to Spider-Man"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Nature has interviewed a multitude of physicists this year in celebration of the 100th birthday of quantum mechanics<\/a>. Although many of them disagree wildly about how the century-old theory describes reality<\/a>, something they seem to agree on is their favourite science-fiction films. Throughout several interviews, two were consistently highlighted for their depictions of science: 2014\u2019s Interstellar<\/a> and 2006\u2019s The Prestige \u2014 both of which were directed and co-written by Christopher Nolan.<\/p>\n

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Happy birthday quantum mechanics! I got a ticket to the ultimate physics party<\/p>\n

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Nolan, who won an Academy Award for directing 2023\u2019s Oppenheimer \u2014 a deep dive into the scientists behind the atomic bomb<\/a> \u2014 credits his initial interest in physics to being introduced to science fiction as a child by watching the Star Wars films and television programmes such as Carl Sagan\u2019s Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. \u201cIt was something that stuck with me, and it was something I applied very much to films like Interstellar,\u201d he told online interview website The Talks<\/a> in 2023<\/a>. \u201cIt showed us the dramatic possibilities, that looking at the universe from a scientific perspective could be very, very engaging.\u201d <\/p>\n

Nolan declined to be interviewed for this story; we can assume that\u2019s because he\u2019s busy filming The Odyssey, a retelling of the Greek epic, slated for a 17 July 2026 release. Here, we delve into why physicists love his work. (Warning: spoilers ahead.)<\/p>\n

The Prestige (2006)<\/p>\n

The plot: Robert Angier (played by Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) are rival magicians in late 1890s London, who each dazzle audiences with a \u2018teleportation\u2019 trick. Borden pulls his off by hiding the fact that he has an identical twin, with whom he shares the same identity. Angier, however, gets help from famed scientist Nicola Tesla (David Bowie) to build a teleportation machine, which creates a new version of Angier every time he does the trick.<\/p>\n

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The science of Oppenheimer: meet the Oscar-winning movie\u2019s specialist advisers<\/p>\n

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\u201cIt\u2019s a brilliant movie,\u201d says Barry Luokkala, physicist and author of the 2013 book Exploring Science through Science Fiction, who also teaches a course with the same name at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n

Luokkala, who in his class shows a clip from the film, says this for a few reasons: first, it picks up on the fascination with illusions and magic that he experienced as a child. Second, it takes an ambitious, fictional leap from what we know about the actual science of teleportation, and third, it\u2019s an \u201cinteresting character study to show Hugh Jackman\u2019s character, who is a brilliant showman, next to Christian Bale, who is not, and how highly competitive they are\u201d. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s a story that also lingers. \u201cThe Prestige lives rent-free in my brain: it\u2019s like a steampunk representation of science that we still don\u2019t know,\u201d adds Rithya Kunnawalkam Elayavalli, who studies space-time evolution of fundamental particles at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. \u201cWe know how to teleport information \u2026 but it\u2019s not a representation of science that we know.\u201d<\/p>\n

Interstellar (2014)<\/p>\n

The plot: Joseph Cooper (played by Matthew McConaughey) is a retired NASA scientist tapped to pilot a mission through a wormhole to save humanity by colonizing a habitable planet near a black hole named Gargantua. Cooper later learns that those on the mission were never meant to return, and realizes that the presence of the wormhole was caused by actions of scientists in the future, including himself. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s real science, and it\u2019s based on real physical phenomena pushed to the limit,\u201d says Claudia de Rham, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London, who also made a podcast about the <\/a>film.<\/p>\n

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Why Oppenheimer has important lessons for scientists today<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

The idea of space, time and parallel universes presented in the movie are fascinating, says Kai Liu, a materials physicist at Georgetown University in Washington DC. So is the concept \u201cthat you can go back in time and see the Universe with a different light\u201d, he adds.<\/p>\n

Interstellar also inspired physicists\u2019 group-watch events. Kunnawalkam Elayavalli was a PhD student at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, when the film came out, and saw it with her fellow students. \u201cWe took up a whole row in the movie theatre,\u201d she says. \u201cWe were the most annoying people to watch that movie with.\u201d Manuel Calder\u00f3n de la Barca Sanchez, who studies heavy-ion collisions at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, told Nature that he, too, organized a group outing of scientists to see it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nature has interviewed a multitude of physicists this year in celebration of the 100th birthday of quantum mechanics.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":238387,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[49,48,569,1099,1100,5964,66,50295],"class_list":{"0":"post-238386","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-culture","11":"tag-humanities-and-social-sciences","12":"tag-multidisciplinary","13":"tag-quantum-physics","14":"tag-science","15":"tag-scientific-community"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=238386"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238386\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/238387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=238386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=238386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=238386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}