The other day I was watching Apple TV’s telling of the story of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. For the record, at least up until the fourth episode, they’ve been doing a great job (they’ve only released four episodes as of the writing of this article). But one of the things that started bothering me was the way they handle advanced mathematics.
You see, if you haven’t watched the show (or read the books), the premise is basically about a mathematician who has blended math with psychology and history to create psychohistory, which is essentially a predictive mathematics. It’s a great concept, and someday, I’m sure that’s where our math will take us.
What I haven’t liked about the show is how it tries to show one of the main characters (an assistant to the mathematician) practically thinks in math so that she’s always thinking about prime numbers (a number greater than 1 that’s not the product of two smaller numbers). She keeps repeating large prime numbers as she’s doing other things, which is to give the viewer the impression that she’s so advanced in mathematics that she must keep focusing on prime numbers.
Well, to a person who understands prime numbers, it’s not that impressive. It’s actually reductive. To someone who doesn’t follow math, it’s going to serve its purpose: Making one think that she’s so brilliant that she thinks in primes. But to someone who knows basic mathematics (to the level of primes), it’s like pointing out a very smart person who is somewhat stricken by a compulsive disorder because, to be honest, spouting off prime numbers isn’t really complicated; it’s just repetitive and a somewhat endless process.
Which got me thinking about the many times that Hollywood has tried to represent intelligence to an audience of people who generally aren’t very intelligent. I mean, let’s face it. As much as we’d like to think otherwise, the average television or movie viewer isn’t exactly approaching the higher levels of Mensa. Sure, they might be represented in that demographic, but most media broadcasts are designed to appeal to someone with anywhere from a sixth grade to high school level of intellect. It’s not an insult to viewers, but just a common acceptance of the type of media to which most of us are exposed.
I remember years back when I was reading a book by Robert Heinlein, specifically Number of the Beast, a science fiction novel that uses mathematics to explain the nature of God and spirituality. At the time I read it, I remember thinking to myself that this went way over my head, and there were times where I found myself swimming in numbers that Heinlein was presenting, only half understanding the majority of what I was reading. That book alone represented to me the realization that there are some people who are way smarter than the average person, and quite often those people can find themselves incapable of even communicating a message to those they to whom they wish to connect. Which is kind of funny because most of the rest of Heinlein’s books are accessible and totally understandable. It just happened to be that specific novel that threw me off so much.
Of course I was young back then, but I never did reread it, even after gaining several advanced degrees. Why? You might ask. Well, cause secretly I’ve always suspected that I’d probably still find it difficult to read through that book again.
What this generally told me is that there is a certain talent to sharing information with other people. In communication, we call it accessing, which explains the procedure a doctor must go through when explaining complex procedures to a lay person who is being diagnosed. Delivering such information in complex jargon is never going to help to relay information so that the patient can take the necessary steps to deal with whatever might ail him or her. The doctor generally has to dumb down the language so that everyone is speaking in a language that everyone can easily understand.
So I started to think about other media that has attempted to do this in the past, where they have tried to represent some higher intelligence in a way that the rest of us might understand. And a couple of times they got it very right. And here are a couple of examples.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Steven Spielberg’s ground-breaking film was brilliant in how it did this. One of the questions I always seemed to have whenever it came to films about alien civilizations was how would they actually communicate with us. This movie handles this really well by showing that communication would happen through music, which would be a verbal representation of mathematics. By tying the algorithm through computer AI learning the other language, it made for a process that was easy to understand without having to actually learn a language in order to foster further communication to the audience.
Historically, movies and television have taken short-cuts through this process by just having alien races speak the same language as we do, which has never really made much sense. Star Trek attempted to cross this territory by creating a never-seen technology called a Universal Translator that basically gets implanted into your ear and then translates all languages so that you’re always able to communicate with others. A few times they mess this up by having characters actually speak a foreign phrase or two, but for some bizarre reason those phrases don’t end up being translated as well. I never really did understand how that worked (or didn’t).
One of the problems shows and movies have always had is determining how much dumbing down of technology they would do in order to help an audience understand. Star Trek was also famous for creating babble-speak that sounds techno, but doesn’t actually mean anything. It was a process always used to sound technological to a crowd of people who would have no idea what such vocabulary actually meant (usually because it didn’t actually have any translation).
The important question we’re left with is: How complex can you make the technology without losing your audience? Every time I watch a new show, I often wonder how they will handle that question, and often, when the writers have failed miserably, I find myself staring blankly at the screen because I have no idea what’s going on, which makes me question if the fault was mine (lack of knowledge) or theirs (lack of explanation). And sometimes, the answer to that question determines whether or not I will continue watching the show (or movie) further.