Film and science have combined with varying degrees of success, from 50s B-movies all the way to Interstellar. But is science just a hokey hook from which to hang a plot? Or can films actually help to teach and encourage science?

Hoping to answer those questions, or at least gain an insight, I met up with Rick Edwards the day his book, Science(ish): the Peculiar Science Behind the Movies, was published to ask him. Based on the podcast of the same name, which he hosts with co-author Dr Michael Brooks, the idea behind Science(ish) is to take a serious look at big screen science, so he seems the ideal person to ask.

Edwards and I were at university at the same time, but we never met, despite having interests in common. I thought this was odd, until we got chatting about his degree, at which point everything made a bit more sense.

While English student me was hanging out in the library reading novels and working through the odd medieval lyric, Natural Scientist Edwards was working his way through the physical sciences: physics, chemistry, geology, plus a bit of maths on the side. “Gradually I veered towards human impact on the environment and ended up doing conservation, climate change, population dynamics,” he explained. “But it’s so broad, you end up doing quite a lot of other things – I loved all the palaeontology stuff in geology.”

His interest in science is clearly undiminished since his student days. As well as keeping up with the latest research developments, he has obviously managed to fit in some serious film-watching.

Edwards is keen to stress that he believes films are a key way to communicate science, and that the intention is not to jeer at Hollywood’s scientific bloopers. “We don’t really spend a great deal of time myth-busting. It’s very easy to find that stuff - if you want to find the 20 scientific mistakes in in The Martian, then just Google it and you will find endless people detailing those things. We’re much more interested in the real science, and where science is at in those areas and what they’ve got right.”

Films not only make science accessible, they generate essential debate, he contends: “you come out of something like Ex Machina – it doesn’t matter if you know anything about artificial intelligence – you come out of that film and I guarantee you will have a conversation with your friends about ‘so hang on, how close are we to that – should we be regulating this stuff? Was she conscious? What is consciousness? All of these questions – that are huge science ethics questions – people are just asking them without thinking ‘oh, I’ve just been given a guided tour of an area of science.’”

And that’s the nub of it: despite the stereotype of science as existing in a sterile, intimidatingly complex space, science and film are both hugely imaginative undertakings. Edwards agrees: “science is incredibly imaginative because almost by definition you’re at the frontier of something, you’re thinking about what might be possible ... you need to have a fertile mind.” And that, he continues, is what makes film and science such natural bedfellows. “There are directors out there that can use scientific concepts as kernels, seeds from which to grow a film and I think that we should be encouraging that.”

We talk about favourite “science” directors, and perhaps not unsurprisingly, Christopher Nolan came up. Edwards is impressed with Nolan’s rigorous approach. That seems a fair assessment, given that Nolan worked with gravitational wave-discovering Nobel laureate Kip Thorne on the script for Interstellar, for example. “I think as far as me and Michael could work out it’s the only film that’s every had a scientific paper published off the back of it ... Nolan wanted to absolutely get the look of the black hole. He didn’t want ‘I think that might be what a black hole looks like’, he thought: ‘I want people who are actually working on them – not literally, clearly – day in day out to tell me, and we will do that.’”

And what if history judges Kip Thorne and Interstellar to have been way off the mark? Like poodle perms and the flat-Earth hypothesis, there are certain things that history will reveal as having been wrong. Will these films, and these theories, end up seeming ridiculous? The important thing, says Edwards, is to remember that it doesn’t matter. There will always be new leaps of imagination and new discoveries to fuel the creative processes of film and science: “Science is wading through a never-ending hallway of curtains, and every time you open a new curtain, you sort of think ‘that’s it, there’s no more curtains’ but there always are. Everlasting curtains. That’s science: bear in mind there are more curtains, guys.”

Science(ish): The Peculiar Science Behind the Movies by Rick Edwards and Dr Michael Brooks is out now in hardback, £12.99, published by Atlantic.

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