Humanising Science with movies

Hello, Medium friends!

I've watched "The Imitation Game", that tells Alan Turing's story. Something that surprised me in the movie, beyond the homosexual problem related, was that the drama among scientific research was shown in a very realistic way: the intrinsic need of a group collaboration, nights spent thinking about the problem you need to solve, harming yourself and the others when things go wrong, department pressure for delivering something functional; tears on angry moments; the solitary passages you need to have to concentrate and focus; the magical and unexpected situations who lead you to have a great insight for solving a problem; the tears of joy when things go right, the unexplainable feeling that you created something new, the moments you feel as a hero; the moments you feel an enormous regret for putting aside your social life to dedicate your whole life to science; the moments you feel that none understands you and keep following your principles.

I believe there might be other movies like that, describing all these feelings, but honestly I do not watch many movies. Movies tend to have great heroes and a sophisticated drama built to touch people. Before the session, I've watched many high action movie trailers, that involve war, guns, fire, explosions, people running, and so on. Movie industry probably know this kind of things touches people.

Some time ago I've published this post (in Portuguese), talking about Math, Physics, heroes and my thoughts about Science. I feel that society in general tends to fear or have a big amount of prejudice on Science — people say that it's difficult, useless or boring. I strongly disagree; I think that besides the prejudice, we have an un-humanized group of teachers who do not have the necessary skills to motivate their young students to see the beauty behind Math and Physics. It's not teachers' fault, though. It's a cultural problem. What if we could 'humanise' Science?

A nice way to 'humanise' Science would be trough movies. So, there it goes, nice suggestions for Science movies — movies who could have a dose of a big drama and also show the beauty of science, the beauty os scientific research and other heroic stuff described in the first paragraph of this post.

1. Galois movie — OMG that would be a really nice one. Imagine a drama with the young Galois, who gave a great contribution to Algebra and died in a duel for marrying a young lady.
2. The great fight between Karl Pearson and R. A. Fisher on Statics research. That would be a great drama between two figures, both with original and totally new ideas for Statistics field. Each one with opposite political, social and educational views of the world.
3. William Gosset, Aka Student — A great drama about being employed on a company that requires you to keep research in secret and a man who wants to share the results of his work with the rest of the world.
4. Gerolamo Cardano — one of the first man to make and document a deep research on probability area. Also, that would make a great drama: he was a poor man, had a difficult life, and his children led him to ruins — a daughter who committed incest with her older brother and a younger son who enjoyed torturing animals, who arrested the own father, Gerolamo.
5. Bernoulli family — a movie that tells the story of Bernoulli family and their Mathematicians, starting with Jakob Bernoulli. Many members of the family contributed to polynomials, statistics, differential equations and others.
6. Emil Gumbel, Wassily Hoeaffding, Jerzy Neyman trying to to math among Nazi — a great list of contributors for statistics who lived over 2nd World War. Each one trying to move on their research and save their own lives during the war.
7. Thomas Bayes against the world — The bayesian theory. First steps to transform probability in theory, in a time where Religion would be the cause of everything and aleatory events would never have their own space.
8. Kolmogorov, the genius — a great drama of a genius child, his contributions to Math world and his interest for all areas — education, sports, religion, living in the old Stalin's Soviet Union. 'World needs more people with Kolmogorov's motivation' would definitely be a nice slogan for the movie.
9. Henri Poincaré and his contributions to humanise Science. Poincaré, beyond a giant list of theoretical contributions, made a first try on describing how scientific research gets developed by scientists. His contributions to Philosophy made him develop great communication skills and critical thinking.
10. Florence Nightingale — from a nurse to a mathematician. Great story of a woman who helped on the war and later developed great math skills.

Many others, such as Gertrude Cox, Quetelet, I. J. Good, Galton, Diaconis (the magician who became a mathematician), John Tukey (is FFT familiar to you? ☺ ), Stella Cunliffe, George Box, Martin Gardener, would also become great movies.

Do you know any movies containing one of the plots that I have mentioned above? I have quickly searched for them, but could not find any. Sorry, I did not even mention more scientists, such as Michelson, Faraday, Maxwell, Planck, Feynman, Pascal and others. Their space on mediais larger than the others, and I wanted to show that Science is full of brilliant people. Do a self test — for the scientists mentioned on the ideas above, how many have you already heard about before this post?

Before reading "The Drunkard's Walk", by Leonard Mldinow, and "The Lady Tasting Tea", by David Salsburg, I knew very few about those people. Many thanks to them; almost all the inspiration to write the ideas on this post came from these books. Also, as additional reference, I'd add Ian Stweart's books (I met Galois theory and biography by reading his works).

Science is beautiful. It touches very deep feelings on us. May be hate, for getting low grades on school, may be curiosity, may be affection, may be love, may be regret. Why don't we turn scientists as heroes too? I mean, I have nothing against Super Man, or Harry Potter, or X-men, I do like these guys too, but I think our scientists definitely need more space in media, in History, in our concept of 'hero'.

So, movie industry, what do you think of this?

☺