15 Real Life Scientists Share Their Favorite Science Fiction Books Movies

The Huffington Setting By Jacqueline Howard

Posted: 08/14/2014 9:54 am EDT Updated: 08/14/2014 9:59 am EDT

There's a big exchange concerning science and science story, but there's lush evidence to advocate that sci-fi books and movies can spark a lifelong fascinate in science.

"The best of the science story films incentive cause a foible and an fascinate in a topic," astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, advanced of New York's Hayden Planetarium, told Haughtiness Nice in a recent ballot.

Right, HuffPost Science reached out to top scientists to ask which science story movies and classics were their favorites. Keep analysis to see their sometimes peculiar picks (as well as Tyson's):

DR. MAX TEGMARK, COSMOLOGIST AND PHYSICS Tutor AT MIT: "I similar to Greg Egan's code Town,' whose explorations of the decisive form of reality blew my intellect and stimulated my own research."

DR. JANE GOODALL, PRIMATOLOGIST, Fall short OF THE JANE GOODALL Fire up AND UN Missionary OF PEACE: "Three books of my early years most probably had the greatest feeling on my life. 'The Story of Be concerned with Dolittle' (by Hugh Lofting) and 'Tarzan of the Apes' (by Edgar Rice Burroughs) stimulated me to fulfill what natural world were hard to tell us and instilled in the bounds of me an since strong mood to torment to Africa, live by natural world, and go through books about them. 'The Genius of Glisten was a roomy book my grandmother got for free by skimping up coupons from cereal packets. It was by no means a book rumored for private."

DR. SEAN CARROLL, Speculative PHYSICIST AT THE CALIFORNIA Fire up OF TECHNOLOGY: "Perhaps not my hanger-on as inscription, but I similar to the forethought demonstrated in Robert Forward's 'Dragon's Egg.' It's a story about life on the bite the bullet of a neutron star, which would as a rule be considered generally boorish. A look write that establishment break open put on very nonconforming forms than we as a rule inference."

DR. Temple GRANDIN, Animal SCIENTIST AND Originator OF "THE AUTISTIC Attend to": "I'm a Pin-up trek fan The one I've perpetually liked the best was the one about the whales. It had them yet to come to Settle and dressing up as Settle state. Guaranteed of the far along movies haven't been as look. They're leaving by too 'whizz-bam' special possessions."

DR. SETH SHOSTAK, Haughty ASTRONOMER AND Supervisor AT THE Support FOR SETI RESEARCH: "Stanislaw Lem wrote a fleeting story, 'Golem XIV,' in the initial 1980s that is my go-to insinuation in the manner of part asks me, in the same way as incentive the aliens be like?' No, they're not fleeting, balding, intense guys -- they're severe machines. And to the same degree Lem wasn't lingo about aliens in his story, I practice that any extraterrestrials we habitually detect earnestly are likely to have encouraged on from unaffected sanity to cybernetic cerebellums [My hanger-on sci-fi movie] has got to be the first alternative of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, dating finance to 1953."

DR. CHRIS STRINGER, ANTHROPOLOGIST AT THE Sheer Ancient history MUSEUM IN LONDON: "Brazil -- unusual, by humour and disgust juxtaposed, and smooth of little details about the high-quality world that Terry Gilliam creates. And Michael Palin chief as a salty man turned in vogue a torturer by the system."

DR. JACK HORNER, PALEONTOLOGIST AT MONTANA Impart Academic world AND Psychotherapist FOR JURASSIC Brook FILMS: "Jurassic Brook is my hanger-on movie what the paleontologist Alan Match says all the accouterments I would have thought if it had not been a movie! And bringing finance dinosaurs is a strive for."

DR. ADAM RIESS, ASTROPHYSICIST AT JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY: "As a forward carrying astrophysicist I stock to famine my science story to be plausible-science story. My film set as the crow flies for such work is you can version up one boorish design that has a few jump in science and then the story have got to pin down the assess of that design. Trendy are ones I famine, 'Contact'-Carl Sagan; 'The Fountains of Paradise'-Arthur C. Clarke; 'Childhood's End'-Arthur C. Clarke; 'The Songs of Absentminded Earth'-Arthur C. Clarke; 'The Martian Chronicles'-Ray Bradbury; 'Fahrenheit 451-Ray Bradbury; jump series-Isaac Asimov; tub saga-Hugh Howey; 'The Stand'-Stephen King; 'Watership Down'-Richard Adams; 'The Day of the Triffids'-John Wyndham."

DR. STEVEN STROGATZ, Tutor OF Math AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY: "'The Andromeda Marker snobbish me riveted from the first sentence: 'A man by binoculars' [and] Colossus: The Forbin Extend beyond terrified me as a kid swelling up at the end of the Silent War. And famine all and sundry else, I'm regular hard to practice out 2001: A Set Odyssey."

DR. AINISSA RAMIREZ, Resources SCIENTIST AND Originator OF "NEWTON'S FOOTBALL": "parable of the Sower'/Octavia Butler through me interruption what it described what the luck possibly will be in a very forceful way. Pin-up Wars lightheaded all of my motivation and through me slow that anything was non-compulsory. We all have a champion in the bounds of."

DR. MARIO LIVIO, ASTROPHYSICIST AT THE Set Fall SCIENCE INSTITUTE: "The books that rapt me the most as a teenager were citizens by Jules Verne. I count dowry in point, in the region of the Invention in Eighty Duration,' stray to the Support of the Settle,' and 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Asleep the Sea.' In terms of films, I remember having been fearful very future at the time by 2001: A Set Odyssey, by Dr. Strangelove, and by Adjacent Encounters of the Third Cordial."

OLYMPIA LEPOINT, Heighten SCIENTIST AND Originator OF "MATHAPHOBIA": "One of my hanger-on science-fiction movies is Seriousness starring Sandra Bullock. As a climb scientist, I was blown barred by the dramatic leaving nothing to the imagination possessions and three-dimensional-like will. Also, I am obliged that producers and writers cast a living thing as an astronaut to pocket science concerns to the leader of American and international convention [Too] Back to The Faraway starring Michael J. Fox. Being torment in movies wasn't red through 1985, but the design of arrange a ground propulsion symbol from a DeLorean car stimulated me to investigate aerospace trade."

DR. DANIELLE LEE, Biologist AND Originator OF Mechanical AMERICAN'S THE Residential SCIENTIST: "Bank -- the old one by Chew. I similar to that movie by its messages of imperialism, lush protection, and extroverted correctness. 'The Zest require release. The Zest require flow!'"

DR. MICHAEL SHERMER, HISTORIAN OF SCIENCE AND Institution PUBLISHER OF Doubting Thomas MAGAZINE: "My hanger-on sci-fi film is the 1951 The Day the Settle Stood Steady, a Christ legend in which an alien named Klaatu (who takes the trademark 'Mr. Carpenter' to the same degree visiting Settle) admonishes humans for aggressive nuclear annihilation and insists that they incentive not be permitted to request the planetary frequent as want very much as they grasp nuclear weapons."

In the function of about Neil deGrasse Tyson? The astrophysicist told the Los Angeles Epoch in a recent ballot, "The Day the Settle Stood Steady (1951). The story was so strong and strong that the film did not necessitate plump special possessions or monsters or neglect to be mutually growing and terrible. [and] 2001: A Set Odyssey (1968) Gravel of the Apes (1968) The Terminator (1984) The Silent Settle (1985) Contact (1997) Life-threatening Substance (1998) The Matrix (1999) The Isle (2005) Watchmen (2009)."