I enjoyed watching the movie Hidden Figures. It is based on a book that recounts the little-known history of the contributions of three African-American women to NASA and the first manned space flights in the 1960s. The movie is quite entertaining and moving while raising significant issues about racism and sexism in science. I grimaced at some of the scenes. On the one hand, some would argue we have come a long way in fifty years. On the other hand, we should be concerned about how the rise of Trump will play out in science.
One minor question I have is how much of the math on the blackboards is realistic?
Something worth considering is the extent to which the movie fits the too-common white savior narrative, as highlighted in a critical review, by Marie Hicks.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Rudolph Marcus (1923-2026): theoretical chemical physicist
Rudolph Marcus died last week. He was 102. There is a nice obituary in The New York Times . He was best known for his theory of electron tra...
-
This week Nobel Prizes will be announced. I have not done predictions since 2020 . This is a fun exercise. It is also good to reflect on w...
-
The Ising model is a paradigm in both statistical mechanics and condensed matter physics. Today for most theorists it is so familiar that so...
-
Is it something to do with breakdown of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation? In molecular spectroscopy you occasionally hear this term thro...

The mathematics on the board in the movie were courtesy of a Georgia Tech graduate......details here: http://www.news.gatech.edu/features/film-figures
ReplyDeleteThanks David. That is a nice article.
ReplyDeleteThis realism is in contrast to the TV show, Third Rock from the Sun, where the physics professor spouts nonsense and writes nonsense equations on the blackboard.