We typically do our #SCInema sciencing of movie quotes on Friday. This past friday happened to be Halloween. So, we took a whack at the classic film Ghostbusters, which turned 30 this year*. If you have not watched Ghostbusters recently, you are cheating yourself. It holds up.
Bill Murray. Dan Aykroyd. Harold Ramis. Sigourney Weaver. Rick Moranis. Directed by Ivan Reitman. You owe it to yourself.
Frankly, I had been looking forward to sciencing Ghostbusters all October (yes, I once went as a Ghostbuster for Halloween). It was not, however, until a few tweets into the sciencing that we settled on a hashtag. We tried #GibbsBusters, #IdealGasBusters, even #FadeevPopovGhostBusters, before settling on the relatively pedestrian, but descriptive #GhostBusterSci.
The first act of the film centers on a trio of disgraced, academic parapsychologists losing their faculty positions and starting a company to catch ghosts. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that many lines need no alteration to be applicable to today’s scientific world.
This also suggests that a plausible backstory for an all-female Ghostbusters 3 team would be composed of graduate students/post-doctoral fellows who are unable to find faculty positions due to the oversupply of PhDs, undersupply of faculty spots, and disparity between the gender equality in some graduate school fields with the gender inequality among faculty.
Like usual, I have Storified our results.
*File under things that make me feel old.
The Finch and Pea 