by, Ian Sample {sydney morning herald}
February 23, 2010
 
SAN DIEGO: Science fiction movies should be allowed only one major transgression of the laws of physics, says a US professor who has won backing from a number of his peers after creating a set of guidelines for Hollywood.
 
The proposals are intended to curb the film industry's worst abuses of science by confining scriptwriters to plotlines that embrace the suspension of disbelief but stop short of demanding it in every scene.
 
The guidelines are by Sidney Perkowitz, a professor of physics at Emory University and a member of the Science and Entertainment Exchange, an advisory body run by the US National Academy of Sciences.
 
Professor Perkowitz said he liked Starship Troopers, but criticised its giant insects, saying if you scaled up a real bug to that size it would collapse under its own weight. He hated The Core, in which a team of scientists travel to the centre of the Earth and detonate a nuclear device to start the planet's core spinning again.
 
The Science and Entertainment Exchange is backed by Dustin Hoffman, a Harvard psychologist, Steven Pinker, and Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote the screenplays for The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Professor Perkowitz said: ''The hope is that it will get better science into film while still making them interesting.''
 
Most recently, the exchange has advised on the Watchmen movie and the TV series Heroes.
 
''I am not offended if they make one big scientific blunder in a given film,'' Professor Perkowitz said. ''You can have things move faster than the speed of light if you want. But after that I would like things developed in a coherent way.
 
''If you violate that you are in trouble. The chances are that the public will pick it up and that is what matters to Hollywood. The Core did not make money because people understood the science was so out to lunch.''
 
Ron Howard's production of Dan Brown's Angels and Demons last year also fared poorly among scientists. In it, Tom Hanks's character, Robert Langdon, has to protect the Vatican from being destroyed by an antimatter bomb that is confined in a glass vial by a magnetic field produced by a small battery.
 
''The amount of antimatter they had was more than we will make in a million years of running a high-energy particle collider,'' Professor Perkowitz said.

If they were more faithful to the laws of physics then they would be stuck in ...reality. Hence the 'Fiction' part.
 
I'm still wondering about how we're going to get over that 'minor detail' of shielding humans from cosmic rays when they're out in space - and from stopping the massive increased risk of cancer and mutation. Maybe nano-robotic re-engineering when a crazy cell decides to go start replicating like bacteria, a nano-robot will go to work and de-active the signalling. Or, slightly more dramatic, the nano-robot proteineic hero will be activated and just kill the cell - 'splat', like a little clint eastwood speck of colloidal chemistry, silencing the rebel scum. :P
 
This could be the start of a new science fiction paradigm shift...

A good old gamma burst should take care of everything.