www.cmu.edu/news: Carnegie Mellon University Physics Teaching Professor Barry Luokkala has been teaching complex scientific concepts through examples from movies and television shows, like "Back to the Future," "Jurassic Park" and "Doctor Who," for more than a decade. He authored a book on the topic that also uses examples from "Star Trek." The material is offered as a mini-course for science majors in the fall and a full-semester course open to all students in the spring.
4 comments:
I love how Star Trek has been able to inspire so many people. This article reminded me of the part of The Last Lecture book where Randy Pausch talks about how Star Trek inspired him and how thrilled he was to get the opportunity to work with William Shatner. To Pausch, meeting Shatner and getting to show all of the work that was inspired by Star Trek was a childhood dream come true. Though neither Luokkala nor Wilson say that working on Star Trek based on a childhood dream, the show inspired them to create. Wilson was inspired to write about family and Luukkala created a class. I also think it's interesting that Auberjonois was hoping that the advancements in medical technology could become a possibility while Luokkala class’s is about the what technology from Star Trek is possible. It’s amazing to think anything, especially something so close to CMU, can have such an impact on so many people in one community.
For me, science fiction has always played a big part of the media I consume. I, like so many other people, have found comfort, entertainment, and inspiration in the likes of Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, and Doctor Who. The course that explains real world concepts through these shows sounds incredibly appealing to me because one of the things I’ve always loved about science fiction is how it gives us a very unique lens to look at our own world. And not just the issues of advancing technology and science, but social issues as well. For example, one of the major recurring themes of many sci-fi TV shows is what in means to be human and how to relate to people/creatures who are vastly different from oneself, which I think is an incredibly important idea in our current culture. Part of the reason sci-fi TV shows are so popular across all demographics and through the generations is they speak to some of the deepest parts of our human nature, such as both our fear and intense longing for the unknown. Also, spaceships are cool.
I think this article is really cool, it certainly points out a neat intersection of academia and culture. I think that culture can be a really effective tool in education as it makes the subject matter more engaging. Star trek certainly thrives on topics that drive science fiction (topics like science and engineering) and so as a cultural phenomenon, it’s pretty obvious where the parallels between the show and topics taught in the various classrooms of CMU lie. However, and I understand that this wasn’t really the point of the article, it didn’t really shine a lot of light on what we as creatives can learn from science fiction. Like many people who are Star Trek fans, I’ve always been fascinated by the manor the franchise tackles current social issues. Star Trek (particularly the later shows (Next Gen rules)) is the master at abstracting an issue such that the superficial components of it fit nicely into a world where mankind flies around in starships, while keeping the root of the issue front and center as the driving force of the plot. That kind of metaphor is really effective in breaking down the walls we build around a tricky cultural issue; seeing a conflict that is logistically similar yet removed from real world emotionality of the real world issue can often bring us to a more sober and lucid state when returning to the real world issue, if only on a subconscious level. As artists who hopefully have something to say about the world we live in, there’s a lot we can learn from the structure Star Trek uses.
I love star trek and I quite like CMU. I had no idea that constable Odo was a Carnegie Mellon alumnus until I read this article. Science fiction has often had so many insights into the future of science, but sometime it is less than accurate. In the ‘40s ‘50s and ’60s science fiction expected have a revolution in propulsion technologies, instead, in the ‘70s and ‘80s we got the computing revolution. We have not reached space in the way that people expected that we would in the middle of the last century but we have reached knowledge that we did not even know was possible in the last century with more and more powerful computers. I had a computational physics teacher that was fond of saying “with a powerful enough computer, we wouldn’t need any other technology, and were close.” Its harder to comprehend just how cool computers are when disappointed by the lack of space travel today, but if you look, you will be awed by what we can do today that we couldn’t imagine even 40 years ago.
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