What does this movie tell us about the modern university?

Last night, my wife and I watched the movie, Wit.

You can watch the full movie here (free with ads). I should warn that some of the content is quite disturbing and confronting.

I asked Google Gemini the following question:

"the movie wit, starring emma thompson, features two professors, one of oncology and another of english literature. the latter has terminal cancer. in spite of their academic credentials, neither seems equipped to cope with the human side of the suffering of the patient. alisdair macintyre was a critic of the modern university. what might have he said about this movie?"

Here is the answer.

"Alasdair MacIntyre, a prominent critic of the modern university and contemporary moral culture, viewed modern institutions not as communities dedicated to a shared human good, but as bureaucratic structures driven by specialization, technical expertise, and managerial effectiveness.

Based on his philosophical framework—most notably developed in After Virtue—MacIntyre would likely view the dynamic in the movie Wit as a quintessential illustration of the moral and intellectual failures of the modern university. Here is what he might say about it:

1. The Triumph of Bureaucratic Expertise Over Human "Telos"

MacIntyre argued that modern academic disciplines have abandoned any coherent notion of a unified human telos (purpose or ultimate goal). Instead, they have fractured into compartmentalized technical specialties.

• The Oncologist: Represents the epitome of modern "technocratic" or "managerial" expertise. To the hospital and the university, medicine is treated as a problem-solving science rather than a moral practice aimed at human flourishing. The patient is reduced to a data point, a mechanical puzzle, or a vehicle for research.
  
  
• The English Literature Professor: Though her field deals with the humanities, the modern study of literature has similarly grown hyper-specialized, detached, and academicized (focused on obscure analysis, such as John Donne’s holy sonnets, rather than wisdom or existential truth).
  
  

2. The Failure of Emotivism and Detached Rationalism

MacIntyre famously claimed that modern moral discourse has devolved into emotivism—the idea that ethical judgments are merely expressions of personal preference or feeling rather than rational truths.

• Neither professor is equipped to handle human suffering because their education has stripped them of a shared moral language.
  
  
• The literature professor spent her life analyzing deep themes of mortality and grace on paper, but because modern academia treats texts as objects of clinical critique rather than guides for living, she remains entirely unprepared to face her own mortality with actual grace. Her knowledge was purely aesthetic and intellectual, leaving a void where real moral virtue should be.
  
  

3. The Loss of Genuine Community

For MacIntyre, universities were historically meant to be traditions-based communities focused on cultivating virtues.  He viewed the modern university as having traded this for bureaucratic careerism and bureaucratic compartmentalization.

• In Wit, the coldness of the hospital-university complex highlights a complete absence of genuine human community. Interactions are transactional and analytical.
  
  

In short, MacIntyre would likely argue that Wit demonstrates the tragic irony of the modern academy: it produces hyper-competent specialists who know an immense amount about narrow subjects, yet are entirely illiterate in the art of being human."

That is a beautiful reflection. My enjoyment of it is somewhat overshadowed by my awareness that AI produced it. It also raises all questions about how to use AI in ways that do not diminish my own humanity.

More superconductivity in Hollywood

I wrote a post about superconductivity being central to the plot of the cult-classic movie, Joe Versus the Volcano. A commenter on the post kindly pointed out that the movie Avatar also features superconductivity. It is nicely captured in this scene.

The Wikipedia entry for Unobtanium is interesting as it describes the long history of the term, predating the movie by decades. I had not heard the term before. It does capture much of the hype and fantasy about research in "advanced materials".

About Avatar the entry states

In the 2009 film Avatar,^[23] "Unobtanium" is the common name of a rare-earth mineral found exclusively in the exomoon Pandora (where the movie takes place, being the fifth moon of the gas giant Polyphemus, which orbits Alpha Centauri A), highly prized (and priced) because of its application as a powerful superconductor material; because of its unusual magnetic properties, entire mountains with high concentrations of unobtanium "levitate" in the atmosphere of Pandora.

Superconductors in Hollywood

 Recently my wife and I watched the movie, Joe Versus the Volcano, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. What I did not expect was that making superconductors commercially viable was central to the (silly but amusing) plot. 

The plot summary on Wikipedia says

a wealthy industrialist named Samuel Graynamore needs "bubaru", a mineral essential for manufacturing superconductors. There are deposits of it on the tiny Pacific island of Waponi Woo, but the resident Waponis will only let him mine it if he solves a problem for them...

Here is the relevant scene...

The movie was made in 1990, just after the discovery of cuprate superconductors and at that time there was a lot of hype about commercialisation. I wonder if the scriptwriters drew on that.

Hollywood and a Physical Review paper

 I am not sure I have seen this before. If you watched the movie Oppenheimer, you may have noticed that a one point a student excitedly showed Oppenheimer the latest issue of Physical Review and the following image flashed across the movie screen.

On Continued Gravitational Contraction

J. R. Oppenheimer and H. Snyder

A beautiful blog post just appeared on 3 Quarks Daily,

 

September 1, 1939: A Tale Of Two Papers

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

The post describes the scientific and historical significance of the paper, including how it attracted no interest for twenty years, being eclipsed by a paper in the same issue of Physical Review.

The Mechanism of Nuclear Fission

Niels Bohr and John Archibald Wheeler

Have you ever seen a Hollywood movie that explicitly showed the page of a scientific journal article.

Radioactive science for the masses

 My wife and I watched the movie, Radioactive, based on the life of Marie Sklodowska Curie. She was an amazing scientist who showed incredible perseverance, particularly in the face of discrimination by the scientific establishment in France at the beginning of the twentieth century, and attacks in the media because of her gender, nationality, and personal life.

 

The movie is good entertainment and creative, maybe a bit too creative at times. But they be a matter of personal taste. There were many things that I learnt, some substantial and others just interesting trivia, particularly after reading more on Wikipedia. Here are a few.

Curie did not only discover radioactivity, the elements radium and polonium (named after her native Poland), but also was the founder of nuclear medicine. 

One can easily forget that more than a century ago, chemistry labs were very basic and that producing pure samples was a tedious process. For example, a tonne of pitchblende (uranium oxide ore) had to be crushed and processed to produce just one-tenth of a gram of radium chloride.

Back then the boundaries between physics and chemistry were fuzzy. Marie received a Nobel Prize in both. I wonder whether the legacy of joint chemistry-physics institutes in France was essential to de Gennes's work in soft matter.

Both Curie's started out in solid-state physics. Pierre Curie and his older brother discovered piezoelectricity. Pierre discovered the transition temperature for ferromagnetism (Curie temperature), and the Curie law for the temperature dependence of the magnetic susceptibility in a paramagnet. He followed his wife into nuclear research.

After her husband's tragic death, she had an affair with Paul Langevin and was vilified in the press.

A strong critique of the movie is by Geraldine McGinty. On the one hand, I agree with her concerns. On the other hand, I am just happy that "Hollywood" is exposing people to this extraordinary woman and her science. Maybe my hopes and expectations are just too low. 

This relates to an ongoing debate about to what extent movies based on historical figures have to be historically accurate in every detail. The Crown (which I love) has brought these debates to the fore. Simon Jenkins states The Crown's fake history is as corrosive as fake news. Recent movies about scientists also raise the question to what extent the science must be absolutely accurate.

What do you think?

I welcome other comments on the movie, particularly from women.

Laughing at your life in science

I watched Ph.D Movie 2: Still in Grad School, which is based on the legendary Ph.D comics, written by Jorge Cham.



It is worth watching as it is quite funny. On the other hand, some of the caricatures are getting a little too close to reality....

While on the funny side of science, my wife and I have been enjoying watching Young Sheldon. I am a Big fan of The Big Bang Theory, but was not sure whether this new show would be as good. This was partly influenced by a moderately negative review in the New York Times (albeit based on one episode). I disagree as I think that both shows do have an interesting cast of characters.
On the other hand, Young Sheldon does not have as much science as TBBT, at least for the first six episodes that I have seen. Here Schrodinger's cat gets discussed.

Some awkward history

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.

We need a TV satire of universities

Today is the last day of my vacation and so on monday I will be back to serious (?!) blogging about science. In the mean time...

On a recent long flight I enjoyed watching many episodes of Silicon Valley, a TV sitcom (?) that is a satire of start up companies. I thought it was pretty funny. [But maybe that was the long flight...]
This clip is a good sample.


The show reminded me of Utopia, an Australian TV satire of government bureaucracy.
Both shows do well at pillorying the personalities who peddle management, marketing, money, and metrics (M^4! ) and have a disproportionate influence on the direction of things. Universities are fertile for similar satire.

A starting point for ideas could be The Department, a play written in 1975 by David Williamson, one of Australia's best-known playwrights. He had been a lecturer in mechanical engineering and social psychology for a number of years before writing the play.

Real science props for Hollywood

There is an interesting blog post Yes the equations are correct about how the latest Ghostbusters movie used props from the MIT physics department.

The Big Bang Theory is also known for using real science and equations, as I have noted before. This week Anne McCoy, who is a Deputy Editor of the Journal of Physical Chemistry A, told me about another prop, shown below, a Festschrift issue for Sheldon Cooper.

The story of how this came about is described here. It is not totally accurate, because these Festschrifts are normally for people on their 60th birthday and Sheldon is a string theorist, at least until recently, not a Physical Chemist. 

Below are a couple of screen shots from the show where you can see the prop in the background in Sheldon's office.

The joy and mystery of discovery

My wife and I went to see the movie, The Man Who Knew Infinity, which chronicles the relationship between the legendary mathematicians Srinivasa Ramanujan and G.H. Hardy. I knew little about the story or the maths and so learnt a lot. I think one thing it does particularly well is capturing the passion that many scientists and mathematicians have about their research, including both the beauty of the truth we discover and the rich enjoyment of the finding it.

The movie obviously highlights the unique, weird, and intuitive way that Ramanujan was able surmise extremely complex formula without proof.


I subsequently read a little more. There is a nice piece on The Conversation, praising the movie's portrayal of mathematics. A post on the American Mathematical Society blog discusses the making of the movie including a discussion with the mathematician Ken Ono, who was a consultant. Stephen Wolfram also has a long blog post about Ramanujan.

I enjoyed reading the 1993 article Ramanujan for lowbrows that considers some "simple" results that most of us can understand, such as the taxi cab number 1729.

The formula below features in the movie. It is an asymptotic formula for number of partitions of an integer n.

It is interesting that this is useful in the statistical mechanics of non-interacting fermions in a set of equally spaced energy levels, in the micro canonical ensemble.
Indeed it is directly related to the linear in temperature dependence of the specific heat and the (pi^2)/3 pre factor!

This features in Problem 7.27 in the text by Schroeder, based on an article in the American Journal of Physics. See particularly the discussion around equation 8, with W(r) replaced by p(n).