Category: art

The previous post had a couple of seconds of this fantastic film and I had to go root it up, since maybe you haven’t seen it. It could even been that you haven’t seen it because you were born too late. It’s also relevant to Eppy’s link to Merzo, which shows the relative sizes of various science fiction objects, from Yoda and R2 to the Enterprise to a Dyson Sphere.

This is by the same guy as A Glorious Dawn, John Boswell. Not only are these beautiful and sincere, but they address something that Robert Krulwich said in a graduation speech at the California Institute of Technology: we have to learn to tell stories about science. The underlying logical beauty of the process is not enough. Because there are other people with better stories, and the stories are what get people to think, to accept, to challenge, and ultimately to act.

It looks like we can have beautiful music about science, too.

I’ve always considered the phrase “Pictures can’t lie” to be charmingly naïve. This technology exists now, Photoshop has existed for decades, darkroom techniques have been around for as long as there’s been photography, and there’s always been recontextualization. “You provide the pictures. I’ll provide the war, ” is one of the most famous quotes in journalism, after all.

I have a bit of a “White Hat” view of this. Now an audience knows that they can be fooled. They have to figure out for themselves if they trust the source.

This is one of the most perfect moments in science fiction history. It gives such a sense of scale and wonder, and in ways that had never before been seen onscreen. The choice of music and the synchrony with the visuals is absolutely amazing.