The notion hit Bridget Lewis after she watched a tape of The Invisible Man. If you can’t become invisible from the inside out, how about from the outside in?
It was just the kind of spark Barry Luokkala was looking for. He teaches Science and Science Fiction, a course in the Mellon College of Science that requires first-year students to watch science fiction like Star Trek, Mission to Mars, The Matrix and Jurassic Park. The principal physics lecturer reasons that looking at science fiction improbabilities may motivate students to pursue real-life solutions.
Luokkala developed the six-week course to examine topics like robotics, teleportation, genetic engineering and time travel using examples from popular films and television shows. The course has been a hit with students in the five years that it's been offered. "I’ve found that it helps to teach complex scientific concepts by using examples from sci-fi films that students already may be familiar with and that are ingrained in popular culture,” said Luokkala.
Students also seem to enjoy poking holes in the science of their favorite films. But Luokkala quickly points out that not all science fiction contains bad science. He offers the 1968 original “Planet of the Apes” as an example of a film that gets its science mostly right. The treatment of special relativity and time dilation at the beginning of the film is done quite well, Luokkala says, but the writers attribute the theory of relativity to a fictional person instead of Albert Einstein.
But most science-fiction films get it wrong. During one class, students watched the opening scene of “Star Trek V: The Final Frontier,” in which Spock rescues Captain Kirk from a freefall by grabbing his ankle. After estimating Kirk’s velocity, the time it took Spock to slow Kirk’s fall and (after much heated discussion) Kirk’s mass, students used laws of natural physics to determine that Spock had to exert more than two tons of force on Kirk’s ankle to stop his fall, an amount that likely would have ripped Kirk’s leg from his body.
Learning from these pop culture examples, students like Lewis developed their own solutions to real science problems. She thinks the answer for invisibility may be a coating of nanobots—millions of them—that can mimic their surroundings well enough to allow you to blend into the background. While nanotechnology still has a long way to go to match her vision, Lewis has already designed an invisible “suit" made of three superimposed layers of nanobots. The first layer would absorb and emit light, the second would facilitate communication among the first layer’s bots and the third computational layer would process all the environmental information the suit needs to absorb light and simulate invisibility.
Who knows? In twenty years, invisibility suits might be on sale at your local discount store with Lewis' name on them.
