It was 80 degrees under a cloudless sky in St. Charles, Illinois. Thunder boomed. Lightning flashed, striking a kite and shooting down the string to a bald scarecrow. Its giant eyes glowed. “What’s that?” asked a Girl Scout working on a nearby display.
As Clark Cully watched the movie Déjà Vu with his parents, something about the movie’s time machine—with its bright blue wedges of metal spewing a ring of wires—seemed eerily familiar.
JoAnne Hewett’s most recent paper is a collaboration between physicists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, the University of Chicago, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The next big experiment in particle physics won’t need an accelerator, detector, or other big machine. It doesn’t even involve subatomic particles—unless you count the electrons that flow through electronic circuits, carrying bits of information from one human brain to the next.
Physicist Brian Cox has been watching science fiction movies since he was a small child. He always scoffed at the imprecise nature of the science in movies. But over the past year, he learned a lot about the balance between making a movie entertaining and making it scientifically correct.
