Jim Kakalios got stars in his eyes when the National Academy of Sciences asked if he’d like to consult for the makers of a movie based on the 1986 graphic novel Watchmen. “There was the fan-boy aspect of my personality. ‘Oh my God, they are making a Watchmen movie. That will be so cool!’” says the University of Minnesota physics professor, author of The Physics of Superheroes (Gotham Books, 2005). The matching of Kakalios with the movie’s production designer was a test case, made well before NAS and its Hollywood partners officially launched the Science and Entertainment Exchange with a symposium on 19 November.
“We are looking to foster creative collaborations,” says Exchange director Jennifer Ouellette. “We don’t want to do just fact-checking—we don’t want to come in after the fact and clean up. We want people to talk early on in projects.”
Ouellette is responsible for “sussing out...
