FACILITIES

• Scientific facilities in films are always spotlessly clean. There are no motivational posters reminding lab employees they have as many hours in the day as Beyoncé. There are certainly no boxes of broken glass in which glass has been steadily accumulating over time — because no one knows the protocol for safe glass disposal.
• No movie labs ever appear to be staffed by incompetent undergrads.
• Every piece of equipment in a movie lab is always fully functional. No cinematic murder investigation or alien autopsy is ever delayed when, say, a mass spectrometer suddenly stops working for no apparent reason and the instruction manual is written in a language that no one in the lab can understand.
• More lab facilities are damaged or destroyed by dinosaurs, aliens, robots, and/or Jeff Goldblum in movies than they are in real life.

FUNDING

• Scientific funding in movies appears to come primarily from secret government budgets earmarked for alien- and Transformers-based research.
• Funding for supervillains appears to come from what is probably Evil NSF. Evil NSF grants are just as challenging to write and receive as regular NSF grants, but there is a much greater emphasis on the Broader Impacts section and less of an emphasis on publishing in peer-reviewed journals. It is also much easier to receive funding for building a lab inside a volcano from Evil NSF than from regular NSF.
• Movie scientists seem to have a lot of success in obtaining funding by delivering impassioned pleas to powerful men in suits.
• Real-life scientists obtain funding by spending months working on endlessly detailed grant proposals while alienating themselves from their friends and family. They do not wear suits.

JOB SECURITY

• Most movie scientists work in industry, or are tenured academics. Evil henchmen who toil in volcanic lairs are presumably postdocs.
• In both movies and in real life, the amount of respect a scientist should be afforded can be determined from the size of a scientist’s beard, in which the respect given increases proportionally with the size of the beard.
• There is no widely determined yardstick for assessing a woman’s worth as a scientist just by looking at her, which can be a confusing and unpleasant phenomenon for some men.

DAILY WORK

• Movie scientists spend their days drinking coffee and writing complex equations on clear glass boards.
• Real scientists spend their days drinking coffee and answering emails.
• Real scientists, on average, have historically produced fewer living dinosaurs than fictional scientists.

WORKPLACE BEHAVIOR

• In the real world, possessing a sense of humor and an understanding of basic social decorum while doing scientific research is not newsworthy.
• In films, acting like a human being while doing science is so revolutionary and unexpected that a movie about a levelheaded man’s desperate struggle for survival on another planet is classified as a comedy.

PERSONALITY

• Movie scientists are usually straight white men with no interests or hobbies outside of their labs.
• Real scientists are often not straight white men. Many real scientists have also been known to spend up to hours at a time without imagining numbers and equations swirling around outside their heads.

FLUBBER

• No real scientist (to date) has ever been consumed with an all-encompassing need to invent and control Flubber.

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