Don’t Look Up Points Out Science Communication Challenges

Some of the reviews of Don’t Look Up criticize the film for its apparently negative representation of the politicians and media. But the scientists in the film have their own flaws, and they point to real issues that researchers encounter when they need to communicate their work to people outside of their expert bubble. 

For example, early in the film astronomers Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) meet with the president (Meryl Streep) to tell her about the comet they found. Mindy brings the news by first sharing what they found and then immediately continues by sharing in some detail how they spotted it. You can see it in the short clip from the film below.

This is a pretty standard format that scientists use when describing their work to other scientists in papers or at conference presentations, because the methods and the math are what their peers will use to assess the new findings. But here, the president probably expected to hear why the comet discovery is relevant to her country, not the broader context of the measurements the researchers were doing when they found it.

Although media training is offered by many universities’ communication departments, it’s not something that scientists are regularly expected to focus on. For many of them, a media encounter might be the first time they’ve had to carefully think about how to present their work to people who are not themselves scientists or science students. 

I’ve spent the last fifteen years (since I was a PhD student in biochemistry) involved in science communication, and I noticed that many of the struggles that Mindy and Dibiasky have in Don’t Look Up are very close to reality. 

In the same scene, the conversation that Mindy and Dibiasky have with fictional president Orlean points to another communication obstacle. They discuss the likelihood of the comet hitting Earth, and don’t want to call it exactly 100%, because technically it’s a small fraction of a percent less than that.

Providing a detailed calculation of the likelihood that a finding is real is the standard way that a researcher would present their work to a colleague, for example in a scientific paper. To a scientist, indicating a margin of error – even if it is miniscule – shows that they have carefully thought it through. To others, it might sound as if they’re saying “I’m not sure”.

Amy Mainzer, the film’s science consultant, also brought this up in an interview with Netflix’s Tudum website, saying “Every measurement has an uncertainty associated with it, and even the word “uncertainty” is a little bit fraught in that to a scientist, the word uncertainty has a very specific scientific definition.”

These small details in Don’t Look Up are part of a much larger trend in Hollywood to show ever more realistic scientists on screen. A few years ago I wrote an article for Nautilus magazine about the way that on-screen scientists have changed in the last few decades. For that article I spoke with David Kirby, who pointed out to me that filmmakers know that audiences love realism. That’s why they now often consult scientists (like Mainzer for Don’t Look Up) to make sure they get many of the details right, even within a fictional story. It doesn’t always mean that the science on screen is entirely real, especially in a comedy like Don’t Look Up, but it means that film audiences are gradually getting to see more realistic and diverse portrayals of scientists. 

In Don’t Look Up, that realism extends to science communication. Creating clear and actionable messages about their research is something that real life scientists deal with regularly. Let’s just hope they get it right if we ever do encounter a comet heading straight to Earth!