My daughter (7) wants to be a scientist. She also loves movies. Therefore mom and I are looking for movies about scientists and them at work.
And don’t worry about age-appropriateness in your selections - that’s our job. We’re pretty liberal about what we allow Sophie to see, movie-wise, and the more to choose from, the merrier. Also, she has no problem watching black-and-white films and, in fact, remembers them in color (This is particularly true of “Yankee Doodle Dandy”).
So, let me start the list with a movie Sophie has seen, one of my wife and My favorite popcorn films, and while it’s about “scientists” at “work”, the selection is still a bit tongue-in-cheek…
Twister rates a 6.0 at IMDB, which is really pretty bad for a big-budget film. If you watch it from a “serious scientist” perspective, it’s much, much worse than that.
The film shows scientists working in very real world ways given it’s SF premise. They feature electron microscopes, biological isolation, mass spectrometers, bacterial cultures incubated under different environmental conditions.
Yeah, well, I would honestly have her watch Twister than Contact, if the message I want to give her is to affirm the scientists’ worth to the world. In that manner, despite it’s cartoonish air, Twister is head-over-heels superior to the ultimately disappointing Contact.
I’vementionedthisbefore. (That last really explains why Contact isn’t a movie “for” evidence and the scientific process, but a movie that is “for” superstition and faith.
How about October Sky? Set at the beginning of the space race, it’s about a group of boys designing and building rockets to win a science fair so they can get scholarships to go to college. It’s based on Homer Hickam’s memoir, and very inspiring.
Oh Yes! The book (Rocket Boys) October SKy is one of my all time favorites. The film shows a good example of the scientific method and the geeks are the heroes.
If you can find it, Race for the Double Helix with Jeff Goldblum. The science and people behind the discovery of the DNA structure. I am sure your daughter would have an impressive role model in Rosalind Franklin.
I’ve always maintained that biomedical research scientist will be the absolute last profession in the US to get its own reality show. The first forty-five minutes would be spent trying to explain to the audience what it is your experiment is trying to show, and then the last fifteen minutes would be adding a few drops of liquid A to liquid B and saying, “OK, we’ll come back tomorrow and see how it looks!”
Arrowsmith (1931) with Ronald Colman. Except for that part when his wife dies from smoking a plague-tainted cigarette, it makes being a research scientist seem pretty exciting. And a very early depiction of a black character with an advanced education who did not speak in vernacular but who was shown as a peer of the title character.
Background:
Leonard, a physicist, is having dinner with his new girlfriend, Stephanie, a surgeon. She tells him about her day, then inquires about his.
Stephanie: How was your day?
Leonard: Hm, you know, I’m a physicist. So I thought about stuff.
Stephanie: That’s it?
Leonard: Well, I did write some of it down.
Not that I’d necessarily endorse Big Bang Theory as a primer on the working life of a physicist, but…
