Hollywood has a new obsession with science, thanks to the extraordinary success of recent science fiction movies, such as Gravity, The Theory of Everything and Interstellar. However, scientists in movies is hardly a new phenomenon. Scientists have appeared on the silver screen for quite some time, often as film protagonists and sometimes as film villains. It got us thinking about our favorite Hollywood scientists.
So we've rounded up a list of our favorite movie scientists of all time.
1. Dr. Eleanor Arroway - Contact
In Contact, a film based on a novel by Carl Sagan, Jodie Foster takes on the role of Dr. Eleanor "Ellie" Arroway, a SETI scientist who has not only found proof of alien life, but also makes first contact with it. She does this by finding a signal repeating a sequence of prime numbers, originating from the star Vega. Decoded, these signals are a blueprint to a complex machine. The machine carries Arroway through wormholes that eventually leads to humanity's first contact with an alien lifeform. If that doesn't give you a spot on the "Most Awesome Fictional Scientists" list, we don't know what will.
2. Dr. Emmett Brown - Back To The Future
Everyone knows Dr. Emmett Brown. He's the mad scientists/time traveler who visits Michael J. Fox in the 80s and wows him with a tricked-out DeLorean that can travel forward and back in time. Not only is he one of our top movie scientists, but Dr. Brown ranked at #76 in Empire magazine's "The 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time."
3. Dr. Miles Bennett Dyson - Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Dr. Dyson was the inventor of the neural-net processor that eventually became Skynet, an artificial intelligence system. The system's purpose was controlling weapons for the defense of the United States, but eventually took control of the world itself and launched a war against humanity. Disgusted by what his work became, Dyson changes the future by destroying his research. His noble acts seem particularly relevant, given all the drone debates that have been happening.
4. Q. - James Bond film franchise
Superspy James Bond would be nothing without his gadgets, those pens that record conversations and cufflinks that blow buildings up. And those gadgets are all thanks to Q., the genius that runs MI6's research and development department. If Bond needs equipment, Q is the man he goes to.
5. Tony Stark - Iron Man
Notice all that cool technology that the Avengers and the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. have? Most of that is courtesy of Tony Stark, genius billionaire who makes robotic suits he can fly around the world in for fun. Not only that, but he also has a tiny, nearly-limitless energy source in his chest. And he created the first one by throwing some spare parts together.
Stark also built a touchscreen computer interface that works in three dimensions.
Of course, one might argue that he's also a bit of an egomaniac, but with a brain as big as Stark's, maybe that's okay.
6. Seth Brundle - The Fly
Seth Brundle was a brilliant physicist who created teleportation pods, all because he got motion sickness during travel. Although his experiments in teleportation were successful, things didn't work out so well for him after a fly followed him into one of the pods and his DNA got mixed up with it. But we won't hold that against him, we can't all be winners all the time.
[Photo Credit: Paramount Pictures/Marvel]
