Phidias, the greatest sculptor of classical Greece, got into trouble while working on his statue of the goddess Athena for the Parthenon. Citizens seeing his work in progress realized its head was disproportionately big, and denounced it. The sculptor asked them to suspend judgment until the statue was complete and they could look up and see it – literally in perspective – mounted high on the temple. When this was eventually accomplished, the citizens appreciated the sculptor’s wisdom: Phidias’s distortions had indeed been necessary to make the statue look lifelike.

I often think of this tale when I see science mistakes in the media. It is tempting to ridicule science bloopers – or what I would call “science solecisms” – partly because we feel superior for noticing them. But as the Phidias story cautions, not all distortions from reality are bad, and some can even be useful.

Flubs and gaffes

What we might call the “flub” is a mistake due to science illiteracy. In one biography of the jazz musician Charles Mingus, for instance, the author claims that Mingus blew his car horn while driving through a tunnel because he “loved the swelling echo and the Doppler effect”. Clearly the author, the manuscript reviewer and the editor had forgotten what elementary physics they had been taught, if any. Flubs, though, do not really bother me, and I don’t think they are truly harmful. I suspect that the author would have needed to have the mistake explained to him – and would have been happy to fix it once he had understood what was wrong.

The “gaffe” is similar to the flub, but occurs in contexts where you might expect better. The Oscar-winning movie Titanic (1997), which is the highest grossing ($1.8bn) and costliest ($200m) film ever made, is celebrated for the supposed care that director James Cameron took to get the ship’s details correct, down to the rivets and even the patterns on the crockery off which the passengers ate. But this care did not extend to the night sky, where the stars are in the wrong positions. Gaffes of this sort do trouble me, for they treat nature as less important than cups and saucers. This particular gaffe bothered me even more when I learned that Cameron had studied physics at college, and so really should have had more respect for nature. Say it ain’t so, James!

Enabling distortions

Another problem is that while the real Titanic‘s lifeboats lacked lanterns, in the film version a lifeboat crew produces one to hunt for survivors – Cameron needed something to light the scene. I’d call this a “harmlessly enabling distortion”, or HED, as it was done knowingly for a good purpose.

Most HEDs are used to make a scene prettier or at least look the way an ordinary person might want it to look, who would not notice or care if it deviates from reality. To those who do care, however, HEDs can be offensive and have the opposite effect, making the scene look unrealistic. Physicists have plenty of material to choose from, such as noisy explosions in space, visible laser beams and people wearing bullet-proof vests being blown violently backwards through shop windows after being shot. Many of these physics flaws are listed in the wonderful website Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics (see Physics World June 2004 p52, print version only).

“Good faith enabling distortions” occur when the person who commits them does care, and has recourse to them only as a last resort. The producers of the film Finding Nemo (2003) for instance, enlisted Adam Summers, a specialist in fish biomechanics who is now at the University of California, Irvine, to ensure maximum possible realism in the animation. Summers did the best he could, given the parameters; after all, it was a movie about talking fish.

But what I call “Phidias distortions” are those that are deliberate, knowledgeable and done for a genuinely artistic end. I can think of several classic short stories involving the supernatural in this category. These include Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle and Fitz-James O’Brien’s The Diamond Lens, which involve suspensions of natural behaviour but create a concentrated and even chilling effect, thanks to the authors’ careful control of details.

“Fake artistic distortions”, however, are mistakes that the perpetrators try to pass off as artistic distortions. When last year the novelist and recovering alcoholic and drug addict James Frey was discovered to have fabricated details of his bestselling memoir A Million Little Pieces, a spokesman for its publisher Doubleday said that the deceptions were unimportant. What mattered was instead “the power of the overall reading experience”.

The critical point

Bloopers evidently come in many different varieties. Some – especially those in movies and books – can be harmless even when annoying, and can serve bona fide artistic purposes. It would be difficult, however, to justify as harmless a blooper in a textbook or physics syllabus. But what varieties have you spotted – and have I missed any categories? I shall devote a future column to the responses.

• Which are your favourite science solecisms? Do they matter and, if so, why? E-mail your contributions to Robert P Crease to rcrease@notes.cc.sunysb.edu or fax them to +1 631 632 7522