Science Café: Science Fiction or Science Fact? (May 2025)

Café-goers participated in a discussion on science fiction film in the ambience of a bookstore, with pages of science fiction and science poems around at Science Centre Singapore’s Science Café session in May.

Have you ever watched a science fiction film and immediately pointed out the scientific discrepancies or was impressed by its scientific accuracy? How much science is in science fiction?

On 30^th May 2025 from 6.30PM to 8.30PM, participants gathered at The BookBar with a rocket scientist, and a science poet to explore how intertwined the sciences are (or can be) with film and literary art forms.

Simon Gwozdz, CEO and founder of space company Equatorial Space, originating in Singapore, shed light on how rockets are built, what is required for them to take flight, and gave an introductory lesson on space matters – enough to highlight how films can sometimes misrepresent the science. One example being the perception of distance in space versus its actual distance.

Participants were then introduced to local ‘science poet’ Cheyenne Alexandria Phillips who showed a sample of poetry form influenced by science: the nucleus poem, where each line’s number of syllables are determined by a chosen atom’s number of electrons.

Later, abstracts from science journals were handed out for a black-out poetry activity. For black-out poetry, poets would have to cancel out words (blacken out with a marker), leaving their own selected remaining words to form a poem.

Here is a sample! Feel free to try it yourself at home with any science paper.

Check out the next Science Café session happening in August on Science and Music (website to be updated in early August).

Written by Lydia Konig

Published 14 July 2025