Ghostbusters: Particle Physics, Parapsychology, and the Art of Technobabble · 5:08pm Jul 16th, 2016
July is traditionally the silly season, when a lack of serious news forces media outlets to report UFO sightings and such like.
This week we have a new British Prime Minister who apparently considers Belarus a model to follow for human rights, and a new foreign secretary whose past diplomatic activities include: describing Barack Obama as a ‘part-Kenyan’ with an ‘ancestral dislike of Britain’; Hillary Clinton as a ‘sadistic nurse in a mental hospital’; and black people as ‘piccaninnies’. While the opposition Labour party MPs have decided now is the best time for a leadership battle, and are preparing for a standoff with the membership, which—if we are lucky—might just be resolved before the Brexit negotiations are complete. This was the situation on Wednesday. But, I thought, surely Thursday would be a quiet day. It’s not like anything revolutionary ever happened on July 14. And we finished the week with a terrorist attack in Nice and an attempted coup in Turkey.
It seemed like a good time to go to out the pictures. So I went to see Ghostbusters.
I was looking forward to this reboot of a classic from my childhood, and ready for a good romp around New York blasting spectres with lasers. But I hadn’t realised that this new version has an exciting new twist—an important reinterpretation of old characters.
The new ghostbusters are particle physicists!
In the film, we meet the character Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig) as a physicist standing in front of a whiteboard full of equations related to proton decay (a hypothetical idea, which no one has ever seen), and then move on to visit the lab of Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy) and Jillian Holtzmann (Kate McKinnon) with all the electronics, vacuum pipes and laser kit you could find in any particle accelerator or detector lab. All described with terms which could have come out of the design report of any experiment at CERN. Check out some of Holtzmann's lines in this vignette:
The original film had some brilliant technobabble, including some vague particle references – proton beams and such like. But in the new version this has been raised to a whole new level. The art of true technobabble is perhaps an under-appreciate skill among script writers. The ability to make a completely nonsensical description sound like technical jargon, and carry the audience along with the suspension of disbelief, requires more attention than you might think. An amateur might just pluck suitable sounding words from a technical dictionary, while a professional will identify a suitable field to emulate and seek advice from the experts to make it self-consistent nonsense. And if you tie it together with a bit of absurdist logic, you can weave a masterpiece of pseudoscientific reasoning to justify any random failure of logic your plot may require.
After returning home I picked up this on the Fermilab twitter stream: Who you gonna call? MIT physicists! which gives a lot of background into how science was injected into the film.
And this:
Coincidentally, I met a real life parapsychologist a few weeks ago. Real research in this field has nothing to do with high energy physics. Susan Blackmore had an amazing story of how, after dramatic personal out-of-body experience, she became convinced that psychic phenomena were real, then spend years conducting rigorous experiments convinced that she would be the one who would show the stuffy academic world how closed-minded they were. Eventually after find no evidence, she accepted that such phenomena probably don’t exist and became a sceptic. At this I could just smile and say, that’s life. We all get null results. In particle physics we get them most of the time. What you do is still valid research, and the important thing is not to let your beliefs cloud your thinking and let you delude yourself into finding evidence where there is none. She was clearly far more passionate about her work than any career academic, driven by an enormous desire to get to understand out-of-body experiences and get to the bottom of paranormal phenomena.
Back to Ghostbusters, I'll finish by saying the all-female leading cast made it even more awesome. In addition to giving an original twist to a reboot, giving young girls heroes they can relate to is desperately needed. As Lauren Faust and many others have pointed out, this photo says it all:
If I’m honest with myself, I think cheesy films like Ghostbusters and Back to the Future did play a role in inspiring me to spend my teenage years messing around with bits of electronics in my attic, which led on to a career in science. Let’s hope this film inspires some future scientists and engineers and helps redress the gender imbalance.
Theres a lot more weirder stuff in normal physics than what they dare show the average person. Any of the advanced theoretical maths, or even the non simplified physics equations. Why use F=Ma when you can use change in velocity and momentum, using calculus?
This is one of the best eamples. An entire collection of occurances in various branches, and they say they cant describe it accurately.
https://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S39/32/02E70/
How elements are arranged to form quasichrystals etc.
My googleFu fails once again, in trying to find that published article from a couple years back, where randomly packed spheres in a tube were CT analyzed to measure them preciccely, then models were applied to compute pacjing functions.
The Perfect Packing function was 4 spacial dimentions.
Various cross sections give arrangements of various quasicrystals and complex regular mineral structures.
Noone like 4 spacial dimentions, ever since Kaluza and Klein showed back in 1923 that using it let you relate gravity and electromagnetism, but had extra undefinable terms.
Apparently perfext quasicrystal emulsions can be foremed by vibrating the material at a certain, resonant frequency.
Strange, as apparently applying a shock at just the right time, amplitude etc, causes waves to reverse their direction.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2096595-water-waves-travel-back-in-time-to-retrace-their-ripples/
There was also something a while back about storing data in structures that oscilated in agiven temporal lockstep manner. Chronological crystals?
Id love to see a quasycrystal array used to detect SETI signals, with the 4D transmformation function, and see if anything is picked up in that manner. Or at least tried for deep space probe communication.
Then again, theres stochastic signalling which is now appearing in several places, that is, Im assuming any technology that suddenly gains two orders of magnitude bandwith to power is stochastic, which also would make SETI etc more intresting.
Lots of really good ideas and technology etc, but none of its ever any good if its never used due to being denied because of Course we dont live in four spacial dimentions. The world is still flat.
From what I have seen from people I like to watch on Youtube and the like and whose opinion I find I generally agree with say the movie is alright, certainly NOT worth getting angry about in either way like it has been in the comments of the trailer (also they said it was far better than the trailer which they all disliked).
The biggest dislikes came when it compared itself to the original when it brought back many plots and the like from the first movei which broke their immersion and forced them to compare it to the original and when they essentially tried to shut the trolls up (which we all know never works when you do it like that and usually only serves to remind us that the trolls were there in the first place). Where they thought it was best was when it was doing its own thing such as when they used the new weapons near the end. They all seemed to love the idea of punching a ghost.
So they seemed to like it alright. Just tweak it essentially by making it a more original story and using new ideas and ignore the idiots out there and any more movies may be in the very good range.
Bad technobabble drives me bonkers. Good technobabble… slightly less bonkers.
That picture is awesome!
I did not plan to watch it because I heard that it is not funny, but if you say that it is full of inside jokes only scientists get, then I shall watch it. I hold your opinion in higher regard than all of the critics. This talk about physics and movies reminds be about a few years ago:
A biography about Professor Stephen Hawking came out which was light on physics (I saw it but it did not leave enough of an impression on me for remembering its name). The movie makers figured that they would get all of the people into physics by default. At about the same time, Interstellar came out which was much more physics-heavy. Audiences gravitated to Interstellar with all of its physics, killing the physics-light biography about Hawking. I have a funny anecdote about seeing Interstellar with friends:
I saw Interstellar with friends after the movie, one of them found the aliens confusing. I stated that for the aliens, are 3 spatial dimensions and are 1 temporal dimension are all spatial dimensions and they have a separate temporal dimension, meaning that they have 4 spatial dimensions (our 3 spatial dimensions and our temporal dimension plus their separate temporal dimension, thus having 5 dimensions (4+1). ¡My friend looked at me like I grew another head!
Good to hear you enjoyed it! I was a bit unimpressed by the trailers, but a lot of people are saying that the movie is better than the marketing has made it look.
I saw the movies. It is short on mathematics, physics, science, and engineering and long on pseudoscience. It started out funny, but after half an hour the laughs fell off:
Half an hour into the movie, they hire Kevin as a receptionists because he is easy on the eyes. The next hour is a stupid running joke about Kevin being too stupid to use the telephone. This was funny the 1st time Kevin could not work the telephone was funny, but after that, making it into a running joke, just kills the next hour of movie. It does not even make internal sense:
If Kevin would be a good receptionist, keeping him on the payroll would make sense. If he would provide "horizontal services" keeping him on the payroll would make sense. Ass it is, he costs them an hundred dollars a day in wages and every time he screws up on the telephone, that costs them several thousand dollars. Keeping him on the payroll makes no sense.
The movie started funny, but the hour-long running Joke of Kevin was not funny and killed the comedy.
I conclude that the movie does not have enough mathematics, physics, engineering, science, and laughs and too much pseudoscience.