Tech Digest

Hollywood consults physics professor on "Watchmen"

HOLLYWOOD'S RECENT "WATCHMEN" FILM was a little more believable thanks to the expertise of University physics professor Jim Kakalios. He was hired by creators of the superhero movie to make sure its science didn’t slip into a black hole of unbelievability.

Kakalios became involved in the production in 2007, when he received a call from the National Academy of Sciences. Movie producers were looking for someone to help them with science and wondered if Kakalios, author of “The Physics of Superheroes,” had heard of the “Watchmen” comic books, published in the 1980s.

He had and after a couple of conference calls, he flew to the Vancouver set, where he talked with the filmmakers about how a physics lab might look in 1959—the year a physics-experiment accident gives superpowers to the character Dr. Manhattan—and 1985, the year the story takes place. He also showed them what might appear on a physics professor’s blackboard.

Kakalios applied his physics expertise by making sense of Dr. Manhattan’s superpowers, which include teleportation, controlling matter with his mind, and changing his size. He said the powers seem to be “more or less” quantum mechanical. In other words, they can be more or less explained by applying the physics of microscopic particles, or quantum mechanics, to humans and larger objects.