It's not often that the subjective, opinionated world of cultural criticism and the objective, fact-based world of hard science come together, let alone form a common consensus. But in January of 2008, one of those rare moments occurred: a special screening of the Hayden Christensen vehicle Jumper, about a young man who discovers he has the power to teleport through space, was arranged for physics professors and their students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. These brilliant men and women, heirs to the tradition of Newton, Bohr and Einstein, agreed with movie critics the world over: Jumper has got a lot of problems.
According to the Times, the screening was arranged by publicist Warren Betts, who apparently got a little overexcited when he heard about the feasibility of (quantum) teleportation, and was attended by Christensen and the film's director, Doug Liman. (Liman claims to have been a physics prodigy in high school, but to have taken no classes at the collegiate level because "being good at it made it a little boring". This no doubt accounts for why so many star athletes don't bother to pursue sports in college.) After the screening, two professors predictably burst the bubble of anyone left thinking the movie's science was anything but pseudo-, to the cheers of their nerdy students; one of them, a Dr. Edward Farhi, chose instead to concentrate on the acting and the characters, apparently not having been informed that the movie stars Hayden Christensen and Rachel Bilson.
