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1 You're Listening to Imaginary Worlds, a Show About How We 1 You’re listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief, I’m Eric Molinsky. I have a soft spot for good technobabble -- not just the technobabble itself, but scenes where the actors really sell the technobabble, and you believe what they’re talking about. And I imagine for actors that must be really hard to pull that off because most of the time that actor has no idea what they’re talking about. I mean not only are they not scientists, but it’s not even real science what they’re saying. In fact that phenomenon was made fun of in the movie Galaxy Quest, where Sigourney Weaver’s character keeps repeating all the technobabble that the computer says back to the crew even when they’re in the middle of a crisis. CLIP The gold standard for good technobabble, I think, is probably this scene from Back to the Future. CLIP Now a Giga-watt is a real thing, but apparently nobody in the cast and crew knew it was pronounced GIG-a-watt. Which made me wonder why does one poorly understood pseudo-scientific term feel right to me and help bolster my suspension of disbelief while I’m watching a movie or TV show, while another technobabble scene does exactly the opposite? To help me figure this out, I decided to turn an expert. Helen Zaltzman. Her podcast The Allusionist is like mine in that it’s relatively short and comes out every other week. But her focus is on language. Or as she puts it: CLIP MONTAGE Now Helen is not a sci-fi fan. But she did have a run-in once with a Darlek, the clunky robot villains from Doctor Who. HZ: I once was at the BBC and I got to witness someone try to get a Dalek through a revolving door. It was a prop I assume? 2 HZ: Yeah, they keep one in the foyer for people to have pictures taken with but they’re just as ungainly. As you would imagine. HZ: As onscreen, yeah. But when I asked her if she wanted to do an episode together about Technobabble, she was intrigued. HZ: What I was particularly piqued by is that a lot of words in real science did originate in science fiction, so words like robots and ST came up with warp speed. Astronauts came from a story from the ‘30s, which was before astronauts were a possibility in real life. I guess someone has to come up with terms anyway to fulfill the need to describe something, particularly something new. It was probably easier to pick something that was already familiar from fiction I understand that you talked to a physicist? HZ: I talk to a physicist very regularly because I’m married to one. But one you’re not married to. HZ: Yeah, he allowed me out to talk to other physicists. I spoke to the astrophysicist Katie Mack. KM: I study cosmology, you know the early universe dark matter black holes the end of the universe galaxies or all of that. HZ: So we have a spoiler alert from Katie Mack! She’s been studying the end of the world! KM: I just I really love this topic and I think there's something wrong with me but it's so much fun to think about how the universe might end. HZ: It’s nice to prepared as well KM: Yes! Definitely! HZ: She feels quite a lot of annoyance about technobabble because she says in reality a lot of the terms we have for space stuff are extremely basic like Big Bang and black hole. They’re elegant or exotic or polysyllabic terms. KM: Like if you watch something like Star Trek there's always there's always words like you know the inertial compensators and you get - these really like multi-syllabic construction's. And that's how you know that you're not supposed to understand it. And you're supposed to just file it away as you know that's a complicated thing. You know, there's oh there's this thing about if you have a particle you put the syllable on the end 3 of it. HZ: Like what? KM: I mean so when we started this in physics right so we had the proton is a word that actually makes sense but then all the others like electron and neutron and Tachyon and on all of those are kind of compound words of some things to do with the nature of the particle plus on. So that's something that we started it. But I've definitely seen if they need a new particle you know it might be like the invisiblebon. I don't know something like that. But I've seen when you need a new element you put and in the end like unobtainium. I remember that from Avatar CLIP Well one thing that I hate is when there is a logjam of technobabble and then one of the other characters says can you say that in English, please. That’s such a cliché that drives me crazy. HZ: Yeah, and she felt that’s a failure of the imagination. KM: Yeah. Because it would be like you know walking up to somebody who doesn't speak Italian and speaking Italian to them it would be really rude and it's not because you're smarter it's just because this is a language that you work in all the time and it's not something that other people do. And so you change how you speak when you're talking to different audiences so as not to be a jerk. HZ: Yeah. I'm married to a physicist. And that never happens. You never just spools out jargon. HK: Yeah. I mean I'm a physicist but so I'm not a good audience sort of thing like I'm clearly not objective, But I also feel like sometimes that that kind of thing can kind of scare people away from real science because sometimes we do have to use complicated terms and sometimes we do have to use jargon just so that we know we're all on the same page you know. But when scientific jargon it stands in for you know that's too complicated I can't possibly understand it. I think that kind of makes people think like oh science is too complicated I can't possibly understand it. When Katie said it looks like scientists are apart from society – aren’t they? How are they not and why is that a negative stereotype? HZ: She doesn’t want people to think they can’t be scientists, if you have a kid thinking I’m not this super intellectual socially inept person which means I’d fail if I wanted to do science, it seems so exclusive and exclusionary. And also there are ways in which science relates to our real lives and yet it gives the opposite impression. 4 Because I remember when the Mars landed a long time ago, the first time it landed the late ‘90s, early 2000s, there was some rock they named Scooby Doo, some rock formation, and I remember thinking that’s funny, that’s not something you would imagine scientists in a movie would ever do. HZ: I think in a movie, the writers wouldn’t want you to think the writers were that playful and they weren’t taking it super seriously because the audience wouldn’t believe that’s how things really were. Well it’s funny because I talked to – I talked to some people as well. HZ: Oh yeah? I talked to Jennifer Ouellette who is a science writer but she’s also director of the science and entertainment eXchange in Los Angeles. JO: Its’ basically the scientific world and the Hollywood world coming together to create what is essentially a cultural exchange program. They set up scientists to work with Hollywood directors, TV and movies, because obviously they need their technobabble. JO: Yeah I think audiences are a much better intuitive scientist than we give them credit for seriously. They can tell when something's wrong. They can tell when something doesn't quite work. HZ: I’m fascinated by those kinds of job where there’s someone with real expertise who is drafted to add this stuff to an elaborate fiction. Her husband is a physicist named Sean Carroll. HZ: Oh! You know him? HZ: No, just physicist husbands. And her husband worked on the movie Thor. JO: They were trying to figure out how Thor get to Earth, he said a wormhole but they said a wormhole And it’s the kind of thing you were talking about earlier where these are the kinds of words scientists actually use. HZ: And also I’ve seen the Matt Leblanc Lost in Space where wormholes were a big plot point there. Oh yeah, and Jodie Foster in Contact. But that was the problem. They said it was too 1990s. 5 JO: And so Sean said you could call it Einstein-Rosen Bridge, which is what it was originally call, and so they ended up using that and at one point someone says, so it’s a wormhole but it sounded cooler. HZ: And yet most people would struggle to identify the Einstein Rosen bridge when that’s a wormhole Yeah, if you told me the Einstein Rosen bridge connects Minneapolis to St.
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