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I worked as a physics consultant on the 2009 film Watchmen and on a video discussing the science behind it. The video intercut scenes from the film with a discussion of the physics of wave interference and an experimental demonstration of electron diffraction. It was posted on several websites, including Ain’t It Cool News and Pharyngula, as well as on blogs run by Richard Dawkins and film critic Roger Ebert. Within a few months, the video had been watched more than 1.5 million times. I could teach 1,000 students a year for 15 centuries before I would reach that many people. I doubt that I could get even 15 people to view a straightforward video demonstrating the wave–particle duality that underlies quantum physics. But, by tying the facts to a major motion picture, people who came for the fiction stayed for the science.

Fans of fantastic fiction are excited by cool ideas, especially if they turn out to be true. The …