10 Common Misconceptions About Science In Film And TV That Bug Real Scientists

Despite what you may see on screen, science just doesn’t work that fast.

Time after time you’ll see scientific montages in which everything just works immediately, and the results are gathered in a short time frame. This is exemplified on CW’s The Flash in which the eponymous main character uses his super speed to analyse samples of DNA and other forensic evidence.

The sad reality is that most scientific processes take a certain amount of time to complete, often a long time. So its all well and good that Barry Allen can use his super speed to not have to use a centrifuge, but the next part of the analysis would just be waiting 4-10 hours for some processes, such as DNA amplification, to occur. These processes also have a relatively high failure rate and the whole methodology may need to be started again from the beginning and may take days or weeks to get results; this is often left out of these montages.

Additionally, most of the labs involved, such as in forensics, may be elsewhere in the country, or at least somewhere far away from the detective needing answers, further increasing the time taken.

I’d like to give a shout out to 2019’s Dark Waters film, in which a major source of drama revolved around the years it took to analyse the sheer volume of large data sets and get meaningful, verified results. This film took the real-life story and portrayed it on screen. Hopefully helping dispel the trope that science is instant.