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Forum - View topicCan Anime Teach You Science?
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omiya
 Posts: 1862 Location: Adelaide, South Australia |
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No mention of NHK's Elementhunters?
Silver Spoon has some mention of biological science. |
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Gina Szanboti
 Posts: 11693 |
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And Animal Science! And Food Science! Did it have oenology? I can't remember. Did Moyashimon? |
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yuna49
 Posts: 3804 |
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Moyashimon is more about the power of microbes; oenology is only one expression.
Noein packages the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory into a story about a conflict between our world and two alternate versions. Schroedinger's cat makes a cameo appearance. I liked Heaven's Design Team quite a bit. The discussions about how physics limits making animals too big or too small were very informative. Fun OP, too. |
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DerekL1963
 Subscriber Posts: 1130 Location: Puget Sound |
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That's... a very hard question to answer unequivocally. Sure, anime sometimes gives high level and simplified overviews... And those aren't totally without value. But at the end of the day, they're essentially soundbites. And knowing soundbites and factoids aren't the same as actually understanding a given topic. For example, space history is one of my specialties. "Everybody knows" (to take just one example) the soundbite and factoid versions of the Challenger and Columbia accidents. And those factoids and soundbites aren't exactly wrong per se... But if you take them at face value they paint a picture that is, at best, extremely misleading. |
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DaResidentDouche
Posts: 30 |
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No anime doesn't teach anything related to academic studies. And it shouldn't (more specifically people shouldn't view it as a valid academic source) unless it was designed to be such by an official academic (or other similar) entity. Could anime make you aware (or interested) of something you didn't know or cared for before ? Sure, but your follow up to that should ideally be to a official source.
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dm
Subscriber Posts: 1518 |
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Anime can give you a popular press view of science that is maybe deeper than an article you read with half your attention.
But it can also motivate an interest in science. As DaResidentDouche says, you should follow up with something more "real", but you might just get the motivation to power through the slog that some of that real might involve based on the inspiration you remember from a childhood anime. |
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Top Gun
 Posts: 4868 |
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I watched Dr. Stone when it was broadcast on Toonami, and from the beginning it felt like a series that had been custom-tailored for me personally. I've loved science since I was a little kid and studied physics in college, and it was fantastic to see a piece of entertainment celebrate the joy of discovery and the potential for science to help people. If you told me before watching that I'd wind up getting emotional over turning on a light bulb, I would have called you crazy, but here we are. Sure, a few of the technical details get exaggerated for dramatic effect, but the series gets a lot of the basic science very right. It's such a rare thing to have a shonen series that's focused on using intellect and planning to beat one's enemies as opposed to mere strength, and rarer still for those "enemies" to be portrayed as having their own valid reasons for believing what they do. I could definitely seeing it acting as an inspiration for fans to learn more about the scientific topics it covers.
Cells at Work has been an enormously fun ride itself, and again, even though it simplifies some of the processes involved, the basic roles of the body's cell types are portrayed quite accurately in its cute anthropomorphized style. When I was getting my COVID booster recently, the first thing that came to mind was, "What would an episode about the mRNA vaccines look like?" 
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Alan45
Village Elder Posts: 10090 Location: Virginia |
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No, not really. The problem is that without outside verification, there is no way to tell if the science presented is real. Anime can be really good at world building. Some shows go into extensive detail showing how the effects they present are real. It can make both science fiction and even fantasy seem perfectly reasonable. If you already know the science involved, you can acknowledge that it is real, but you already knew that. If it goes beyond the scope of what you already know, you can't be sure it is real. Yes, anime can be specifically made for teaching purposes. But even that needs outside verification. Happy Science anyone?? |
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micah007
Posts: 205 |
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"Teach" maybe not, but anime can certainly inspire interests in science or inspire creative thought that could be useful in science. For example, I've typed in quite a few science terms from the Irregular at Magic High School and the Toaru series into Google and have read from more than a few "serious" sources concerning the real topics the fictional concepts are often based on. In the former a character has an attack called "phonon laser", that inspired me to read about phonons. That might seem silly to some people, but as someone who's had alot of creativity and pure curiosity beaten out of him by formal academic study in physics, for several years, I appreciate media that can inspire me though entertainment to keep going in my studies, and expose me to scientific concepts I otherwise wouldn't have cared about. In fact, I think more series with heavy science world building should involve consultants as much as possible, so that a balance can be achieved between fantasy and science.
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enurtsol
 Posts: 14902 |
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There are real doctors who review Cells At Work like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv0Ye-lIywQ 
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLaAsA2s3QNBcZlyiwnCICDE_ePlIjW1y0 
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9kM744mBlxkQoYUWIKtpxJOZi8PX4Lq5 
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Nom De Plume De Fanboy
Exempt from Grammar Rules
Posts: 641 Location: inland US west, pretty rural |
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Science Fell in Love, So I Tried to Prove it was pretty good at using and explaining experimental design and statistics use, in my very humble opinion. They even had asides with a narrator plushy toy to provide brief but clear explanations to do just that. They just kept picking things to observe that had anecdotal connections to a specific emotional state. Like, heart rate and BP when two people look into each other's eyes. The metrics will go up, but that isn't necessarily because of love, doing that in a lab makes people nervous anyway. But they did try to set up control measurements to weed that out.
So it was educational about how science is suppose to be set up. Not about 'knowledge' in the field of love science, because, if my memory serves, there ain't any such thing. Not that social and medical folks haven't tried. My memory of my one Psyc class was that it was considered a very, um, intractable research area. Maybe things have changed since the late '70s. 
The problem of learning, for my two bits, is that science is generally a Master/Apprentice system where to really learn, one has to go do it for a few years. When I took general physics for one year in college, instruction was spread out over nine topics in nine months, and we were told, very clearly, that we were just skimming the surface of physics; the benefit that was aimed for was to make us think about the method of setting up. And to sharpen our logic skills. Anyway, fun little show, but a paper thin plot. And a horrible long name. 
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yuna49
Posts: 3804 |
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I watched Cells at Work!! with a neighbor who is a physician and her sister who works as an executive at a lighting design firm. They both fell in love with Ed Hope.
His discussions made me realize that there was a lot of actual science behind the silliness that appears on screen. |
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