In last year's animated feature Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, the engineer Wallace is a stereotypical applied scientist: an eccentric who works in his potting shed on great inventions and is better at communicating with his dog Gromit than with human beings. He is cuddly, and lovably nostalgic, but presents the sort of image that drives real-life engineers crazy. The British film was an Academy Award nominee.

What do cinematic images of scientists say about cultural attitudes toward scientific progress? They are usually about science as a source of anxiety, scientists as outsiders and oddballs, research as very likely to get into the wrong hands, and scientific institutions as dangerous places to be. Never mind that cinema depends on technological progress—this is one of the great unresolved contradictions of popular culture.