Tuesday, May 26, 2015

From Renaissance to Futurama

This weekend, I was very excited to go to the Tennessee Renaissance Festival!  Uuuunnnfortunately, after waiting in traffic for over an hour and still being no closer to the gate, we decided to give it up.  I also had a high school graduation to get ready for, last minute gifts to buy, yada yada yada.

I wanted to find something at the Renaissance Festival to blog about.  Instead, I binge-watched one of my favorite shows while I was painting nails and doing hair....



Then I thought, waaaiit a minute!  What a great thing to blog about!!

This is (in my opinion) the most underrated television show... ever.  I am, of course, biased, because I love animation and I love sci-fi!  In Futurama, the two worlds collide into a perfect mix of hilarity and scientific (and mathematic) awesome-ness!!

Here's a brief synopsis:

A young and bumbling man-child is accidentally cryogenically frozen on New Year's Eve, 1999.  He awakes, 1,000 years later, to a future that is both completely absurd and totally familiar. The show follows him and the eccentric crew of the Planet Express Ship, a inter-planetary deliver company, as they have crazy and often thought-provoking misadventures.

To quote from an article put out by Popular Science:

While most TV science fiction is an exaggerated metaphor of the creators' ideas--or, at its worst, a sterile attempt at imagining the future--Futurama understood that the future would always subvert our expectations. So the show did the only reasonable thing: revel in all the ways the future could be absurd, wild, poignant, hilarious, bizarre, terrible, wonderful, and so, so close to reality without being a thinly veiled version of the present.


The show, named after the 1939 World's Fair which took place in New York City, boasts some incredible people on its writing staff:

David X. Cohen, the head writer and an executive producer on the show, holds a Bachelor's Degree in Physics from Harvard University and a Masters in Computer Science from UC Berkley.

Ken Keeler, another writer on the show, holds a PhD in Mathematics from Harvard University.  In one episode in particular (Bender's Big Score), Ken Keeler actually writes a mathematical proof to enable the show's cast, which had switched bodies with one another, to return to their original bodies.  Though Keeler calls it a "proof," it is now actually known as the Futurama Theorem!



He, literally, did the math!


Here are some other great examples of science in Futurama:

  • Dark matter is used as star-ship fuel
  • In order to explain space travel, the writers of Futurama said that in the future, scientists actually increase the speed of light.
  • Alien creatures are designed with more than just carbon-based, humanoid likenesses in mind: there's even an alien that has evolved into a higher form of existence that needs no corporeal body!
  • The laws of robotics and computer programming are consistently threaded in throughout each episode.
  • and much, much more!

Of course, this is an adult, animated comedy, so there are science gaffes and mathematic impossibilities.  But, with a writing staff as "nerdy" as Futurama's, watching an episode will not only make you laugh, but you might even learn something!

Here's a list of websites and articles that go into more detail about the science and math behind Futurama:






And just to be fair, here is a list of the biggest scientific falsities in the show:



Here is another article, published from the American Physical Society, which contains an interview with David X Cohen.  The article is directed towards current and future physics students in order to educate them on the versatility of their future careers or educational goals:



I think this last article is the most meaningful.  It also relates to the Multiple Intelligence Theory that I have shared with you all (my classmates) before.  Not only are there multiple intelligences, but people are capable of having and using multiple intelligences.  The writers on this show are math wizards and science experts, but they are also creative writers and artists, computer designers and programmers, etc.  The list could go on.

While you (hopefully) give Futurama a looky-loo and (hopefully) laugh your heads off, think about your future students and all the many, many things they can achieve with their knowledge and creativity.  Cultivate more than just one passion, and we might just have another show that challenges the ranks of good Sci-Fi!


Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before






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