The Physics of "Watchmen," or Why So Blue, Dr. Manhattan?

In this talk I will describe my experiences as a science consultant for a Hollywood superhero movie, and the opportunities my association with this film provided for science outreach to a broad audience outside the campus environs. My Freshman Seminar at the University of Minnesota titled "Everything I Know about Physics I Learned from Reading Comic Books," and the popular science book The Physics of Superheroes inspired by this class led the National Academy of Sciences in 2007 to ask if I would be interested in doing some science consulting for a superhero film then about to begin filming. I was thrilled when I learned that the film was Watchmen, and happily agreed. Conversations about science with Billy Crudup (aka Dr. Manhattan), Director Zack Snyder, Production Designer Alex McDowell, Art Director Francois Audouy, telephone calls, e-mails and a set visit to Vancouver were the beginning of my consulting gig for Watchmen. But my real work as a physics professor began after filming had wrapped in the spring of 2008. For Watchmen, beloved by legions of comic book fans, turned out to be an excellent medium through which I could relate real physics principles, such as wave interference and quantum mechanics, to a broad audience outside of an academic environment. Well received talks at Comic-Con International in San Diego and Convergence in Minneapolis led to the University of Minnesota News Division to suggest making a video where I would discuss some of the science underlying the characters in Watchmen. The resulting video, posted on the University's youtube page, garnered over 1.5 million views in its first few months. I doubt that I could get 1.5 people to view a straight video demonstrating the wave-particle duality principle that underlies quantum physics, but by tying it to the interest in and marketing of a major motion picture, people who came for the fiction would stay for the science.