In the 1980s ABC News – the news division of the American Broadcasting Company – unveiled a new logo consisting of a stylized image of the Earth, which was animated with the continents moving from east to west: from right to left on the TV screen. Soon after the logo’s debut, someone pointed out the error. The network’s producers made the correction ceremoniously on air during the late-night news programme Nightline. First the existing logo was shown with the globe revolving as usual east to west. Then the globe slowed and stopped, and then began to turn west to east, the direction in which it continued to revolve until the logo was retired some years ago.

Two months ago I discussed varieties of scientific bloopers (see “Science bloopers”). These include “flubs”, which spring from scientific illiteracy, and “gaffes”, which are committed by those who should know better but are easy to fix. The ABC News logo, of which my colleague Roy Lacey from Stony Brook’s chemistry department reminded me, was a gaffe. Other common examples of gaffes include textbook diagrams of DNA molecules spiralling in the wrong direction, rainbows with the colour sequence reversed, and so on.

Gaffes in fiction

Dozens of respondents sent me bloopers of all kinds: in commercials, literature and political speeches, variously involving facts, instruments and procedures. This time I will write about gaffes, which are interesting because the reasons why they are harmful are sometimes murky. Of course, a prominent news agency needs to get the Earth’s spin right, and textbook publishers need to get spirals and colours correct, because such mistakes would undermine their authority. But are gaffes harmful in fiction? Those who commit them are usually trying to make a scene prettier or at least look the way that an ordinary person expects. So does it really matter if few notice or care?

Specialists do notice and care, however, and each field has its gaffe collectors. Greg Budney, curator of the Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at Cornell University, has a list of movies (Black Hawk Down, Raiders of the Lost Ark) that include noises from birds that do not belong to the region in which the film is supposedly set. The New York Times garden columnist Anne Raver, meanwhile, occasionally writes about botanical blunders in films, such as the appearance of tall, flowering tomato plants in otherwise realistic-looking scenes that take place in Connecticut not in mid-summer but early spring.

Others collect hydrodynamic gaffes, such as clips from films that have incorrectly scaled waves, and meteorological gaffes, including hyping or misuse of the “wind-chill factor” that applies only to bare human skin exposed to wind for milliseconds.

Fred Cohn from New York City reminded me of a notorious geographical gaffe in the title of the early disaster movie Krakatoa, East of Java (1969). Just before the advertising campaign for the film opened, the producers learned that Krakatoa is actually west of Java. A correction was deemed to be too expensive.

Meanwhile, James Lamb, from the Owens Valley Radio Observatory at the California Institute of Technology, noticed an optical gaffe in William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies, in passages where Piggy’s glasses are said to be used to start fires. Since Piggy is myopic, the lenses would have been diverging and thus ineffective. Lamb finds this disturbing since Piggy is generally taken to represent science and human intelligence.

Thermal physics is a “constant source of science bloopers”, according to Sami Franssila of the Micro and Nanosciences Laboratory at the Helsinki University of Technology. He cites films such as Icestation Zebra, where the Arctic conditions magically transform to a pleasant indoor environment inside an abandoned research hut, and Cliffhanger, in which Sylvester Stallone camps overnight in snow-covered mountains in little more than a wet T-shirt.

My favourite blooper is entomological. In the movie Anaconda (1997), a camera crew ventures “deep into the Amazon” – a location, it seems, that is entirely free of flies and mosquitoes. This allows Jennifer Lopez and the other female lead actor to dress in skimpy clothes – and for male lead Ice Cube to be sweat-drenched and stripped to the waist – as they prance around the rainforest and splash in the river. Mosquitoes would have killed this movie.

In my April column, I cited a gaffe from a biography of the jazz musician Charles Mingus, which claimed he once blared his horn in a tunnel to hear the Doppler effect. Several readers said this was not a gaffe. So, on a recent pass through the Lincoln Tunnel I blared my horn. I heard reverberations, but no Doppler shift. Either I do not drive as fast as Mingus, or my ears are not as sensitive as those of a jazz musician. Both, surely.

The critical point

Such gaffes are amusing – but are they harmful? To explain why this is the case requires me to shift to a more serious tone. We need to get the seemingly trivial features of nature right, even in fiction, because of a much-underrated virtue that the philosopher Paul Woodruff wrote about a few years ago in his remarkable book Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue.

Reverence, Woodruff says, has fallen out of favour, being absent from recent discussions in ethics, political theory and other areas. Reverence, he thinks, sounds too spiritual and too religious for many people, who value irreverence instead. But in the context of science bloopers, exercising reverence means showing that we value nature. Making public our desire to get the details right is healthy because it underlines that the fundamental features of the world are not up to us. Reverence is a virtue because it cultivates in ourselves and in others the sense that we constantly need to reconfirm – and keep testing – what we think we know.