{"id":942,"date":"2018-10-25T21:20:28","date_gmt":"2018-10-26T01:20:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/?p=942"},"modified":"2018-10-25T21:20:40","modified_gmt":"2018-10-26T01:20:40","slug":"scientists-real-and-imagined-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2018\/10\/25\/scientists-real-and-imagined-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientists Real and Imagined \u2013 Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Re-posted from 2017 in honor of Halloween<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>On Saturday afternoons when I was a kid I used to watch Million Dollar Movie on Channel 11 and was able to enjoy such science fiction classics as \u201cAttack of the Crab Monsters\u201d and \u201cAttack of the 50 Foot Woman.\u201d\u00a0 Right away I figured out that really big creatures that had been exposed to atomic radiation really liked to attack.\u00a0 But as I became more sophisticated in my sci-fi viewing I eschewed such childish cinematic offerings in favor of more cerebral tales.\u00a0 No more ridiculous giant crab stories.\u00a0 I graduated to \u201cThem\u201d which is the realistic depiction of an attack by giant ants exposed to atomic radiation.\u00a0 In this classic of the fifties I learned that scientists were old and wore glasses and looked like Santa Claus (except for the girl scientists who were young and didn\u2019t even look like Mrs. Claus and tended to end up with the FBI agent who starred in the film, who in this case was James Arness of Gunsmoke fame).\u00a0 And the best ones had British accents (or at worst New England accents).\u00a0 Also, no matter what their area of specialization (e.g., physics, botany or myrmecology) they were all equally adept at battling giant creatures exposed to atomic radiation.\u00a0 And they were full of esoteric and valuable information.\u00a0 I found out that the plural of antenna wasn\u2019t antennas but rather antennae!\u00a0 This inspired in me a life-long love of the classical Greek and Latin languages.\u00a0 And the most important characteristic of scientists was their love of knowledge.\u00a0 Because of this thirst for knowledge, they were willing to venture into tunnels and basements where even the ubiquitous soldiers in their WWII vintage uniforms were afraid to go.\u00a0 It also meant the scientists were very likely to be munched on by the mutant du jour of the story.\u00a0 But you know, science.\u00a0 So that is how I came to admire scientists.\u00a0 They were cool and smart too.\u00a0 And they always, always, always figured out how to kill the monsters.<\/p>\n<p>But one Saturday, Million Dollar Movie was playing another sci-fi film, \u201cThe Thing from Another World.\u201d\u00a0 I was suspicious at first.\u00a0 If it was from another world how did it get here?\u00a0 Had it been exposed to atomic radiation?\u00a0 Would there be enough scientists?\u00a0 These doubts plagued me.\u00a0 But I decided to give it a whirl.\u00a0 Encouraging signs emerged quickly.\u00a0 The creature was indeed radioactive and there was a whole passel of scientists assigned to this movie.\u00a0 One of them even had a New England accent so things seemed to check out.\u00a0 And reassuringly the US military was available for monster eradication duty once the scientists had done the heavy lifting of analysis.\u00a0 Early on a problem arose.\u00a0 This creature was man shaped.\u00a0 He was bald and had strange hands with hypodermic finger nails.\u00a0 But he was no more than eight feet tall.\u00a0 This was highly irregular and seemed to throw into doubt his qualifications for his own movie.\u00a0 Also the scientists in this movie were extremely assertive and gave the military officers a lot of lip.\u00a0 And it seemed they didn\u2019t know their primary function, figure out how to kill the monster.\u00a0 This was very confusing.\u00a0 The leader of the scientists kept saying that regardless of how many humans the creature killed, science demanded that no force should be used against it.\u00a0 He kept saying (in a really annoying intonation) that the creature \u201cis wiser than we are\u201d and that \u201cit\u2019s our duty to die to preserve the knowledge this creature possesses.\u201d\u00a0 Even as a youngster I intuited that this head scientist was what we called back then \u201ca loser.\u201d\u00a0 How could this be?\u00a0 He was a scientist!\u00a0 He had the answers.\u00a0 I found this very puzzling and dispiriting.\u00a0 I searched for some reason for this failure on the scientist\u2019s part to want to kill the monster.\u00a0 Eventually I developed an hypothesis based on a detailed comparison of \u201cThem\u201d and \u201cThe Thing from Another World.\u201d\u00a0 At first glance nothing jumped out.\u00a0 But once I checked the cast members it all became clear.\u00a0 As mentioned above, in \u201cThem\u201d the part of the FBI Agent and eventual boyfriend of the scientist\u2019s daughter is played by James Arness of \u201cGunsmoke\u201d fame.\u00a0 It turned out that the part of the Thing was played by none other than James Arness!\u00a0 Well obviously if Arness was the prospective son-in-law of one scientist, then it stood to reason that a fellow scientist would not turn on him.\u00a0 What was at work here was the kind of professional courtesy that, for instance, police confer on each other\u2019s family members.\u00a0 Now it made perfect sense.\u00a0 Crisis averted.\u00a0 I could become a scientist without becoming a loser.\u00a0 But I was troubled by all that talk of monsters being wiser than us.\u00a0 And not killing them but instead letting them kill us.\u00a0 It was very strange.<\/p>\n<p>Fast forward forty years.\u00a0 I work as an engineer.\u00a0 I am surrounded by R&amp;D PhDs.\u00a0 They all look and sound like the head scientist in \u201cThe Thing from Another World.\u201d\u00a0 They drive Priuses and have Tolerance and Coexist, Bernie and Free Tibet bumper stickers on their cars.\u00a0 And suddenly it all makes sense.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2017\/04\/03\/scientists-real-and-imagined-part-2\/\">Scientists Real and Imagined &#8211; Part 2<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Re-posted from 2017 in honor of Halloween &nbsp; On Saturday afternoons when I was a kid I used to watch Million Dollar Movie on Channel<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,239,238,237,4,243],"tags":[43,44,13,162,161],"class_list":["post-942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-movie-reviews","category-classic-movie-reviews","category-reviews","category-sff","category-sff-movie-reviews","tag-movie-review","tag-sci-fi","tag-sjw","tag-the-thing-from-another-world","tag-them"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Scientists Real and Imagined \u2013 Part 1 - Orion&#039;s Cold Fire<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, 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