My son made me watch Project Hail Mary. He thought I’d love it. Science writer here, remember?
Big mistake.
Halfway through I was ready to catch fire on screen. The main character—Ryland Grace, a molecular biologist who clearly forgot everything in grad school—dropped two plastic tubes into a centrifuge.
Right next to each other.
Think about it. The spindle isn’t steel-plated invincible matter. It vibrates. It stresses out. Any lab tech with less than two minutes of experience knows the golden rule. Balance it. Put the tubes opposite one another. Symmetry matters. Or are we all Luddites now?
Look. I get that movies bend physics. I don’t mind when they break laws of nature if it helps the story. That’s entertainment.
But small sloppiness? The tiny details nobody notices? That makes me angry. It makes me want to throw popcorn at the projector.
So forgive me if I ignored Rocky. The inorganic alien made of solid xenon. Fine. I accepted it. The “astrophages” living in a vacuum? Whatever. They power the ship. It moves the plot forward. I let it slide.
But that unbalanced centrifuge?
It spun in my brain for hours.
Take the Millennium Falcon. I don’t care if Han Solo beats Einstein’s speed limit. He’s busy. He has deadlines.
Why does it roar though?
There is no sound in a void. It’s quiet out there. Just silence. I still hear the engine though. And every time I do a little piece of me dies.
Jurassic Park gets away with big lies too. Dinosaur DNA in fossils? Impossible. The oldest DNA is 2 million years old. Dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago. Math doesn’t lie.
But I forgive that. It starts the adventure.
What I cannot forgive is the mosquito.
It has a downturned proboscis. You see that? That means it drinks nectar. It doesn’t suck blood. It never held a T-rex bite in its gut. The movie got the bug wrong. Not the epic concept. The insect.
Minutiae matter.
Science takes work. Real, gritty, hard work to get the details right. Don’t shortcut because something looks cool. Get it right. Or don’t make the film at all.
That is my stand.
I fall on my pipette
