Ask A Genius 1492: Television, Writing, Alien, and the Poetry of Physics

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/08/15

In this in-depth conversation, Rick Rosner reflects on how five years of watching well-written television with his wife, Carole, has sharpened his writing skills and ability to anticipate dialogue and plot twists. He shares insights on Noah Hawley’s upcoming Alien series, the evolution of science fiction horror, and the role of originality in storytelling. Rosner also discusses Mel Brooks’s creative longevity, his own struggles with writing about the future amid AI and political upheaval, and broader reflections on cosmology, intelligence, and scientific discovery. With humor and humility, he compares himself to Feynman, Gamow, and Darwin—highlighting the complexity of intelligence.

Rick Rosner: Every evening, Carole and I watch about two hours of television, but almost exclusively quality shows—well-written things. If the writing is bad or the pacing is too slow, we usually turn it off. This has been our routine since COVID, so for more than five years now. I have learned a lot from it. I was not a bad writer before this, but after watching so much well-written material, I have improved. Television in the 1960s and 1970s was largely formulaic and cliché-driven. In the 1980s, there were some exceptions, but much of mainstream television was still weak. Later, however, various market forces and the rise of cable and streaming services pushed the medium into what many people call a “Golden Age of Television,” beginning in the late 1990s and especially the 2000s. Since then, it has been possible to find consistently strong shows. I would guess this has made me a better writer.

Carole and I can often predict the next plot twist or even the following line of dialogue. When I am listening to stand-up comedy in my car, which is all I listen to, I can often guess the punchline too. That suggests I might be getting good at this—because I may be able to write material that surprises people, or at least has the ring of authentic writing. I need to write more. I am struggling to finish my book, set shortly, because the future keeps arriving every day in the form of artificial intelligence advances. And then there is the absurd present, arriving daily in the form of Donald Trump and his supporters. Both things make it hard to predict what the future will look like. What will happen to America in two or three years? In five years? I have had to give up on trying to portray the future with precision. Instead, I must portray it in a way that is entertaining and semi-plausible, because trying to get it exactly right is nearly impossible. Rotten Tomatoes.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Have you seen any new science fiction?

Jacobsen: Noah Hawley, who creates excellent television—he made Fargo and Legion, both critically acclaimed—also writes novels. He is interested in portraying near-future scenarios, among other themes. He is currently developing a television series based on Alien. You have seen some of the Alienfilms, right? The first two—Alien (1979), directed by Ridley Scott, and Aliens(1986), directed by James Cameron—are regarded as classics. The sequels after that received more mixed reviews. Hawley’s series is titled simply Alien. It will air on FX (and Hulu/Disney+ internationally). It is planned as an eight-episode season and is set on Earth, making it the first Alien story primarily set here. The timeline is before Ripley’s era—decades before the events of the original Alien. The plot reportedly begins when a research vessel crashes, unleashing alien organisms. Instead of open-world chaos, much of the story initially takes place in enclosed environments, like ships and corporate-controlled zones, which fits the tradition of the franchise: horror in confined spaces. That has always been part of Alien’s effectiveness—it is creepier, more claustrophobic, and more practical for production. In the original film, much of the gore was implied rather than shown, which heightened the tension. The first Alien was released in 1979, and the franchise has since become one of the most influential in science fiction horror.

At the latest, so it is pushing 50 years old, which is crazy. However, it assumes you are familiar with what the xenomorph can do. Instead of showing the Alien’s attacks directly, they show the xenomorph arriving somewhere, then the camera cuts away for a few seconds. You hear chaos and violence in the background, and when the camera returns, everyone is dismembered and blood is everywhere. You do not see the violence unfold—at least not yet. The show smartly says, “We know how this works,” and moves forward. That is a good sign, because it means this is not just a rehash—a competent production team makes it.

Jacobsen: Any thoughts on the new aliens in Alien?

Rosner: It has the classic xenomorph—the long skull, biomechanical body, and acid for blood. However, the story also introduces other alien specimens collected in deep space. One is a tentacled eyeball that can morph—sometimes it has a single pupil, many. We first see it inside a dying cat, having replaced the cat’s eye. The cat drags itself into view, barely able to move, and collapses after the creature abandons it in search of another host. There is also a slug-like parasite that drops from the ceiling on a string of ooze. If it attaches to you, it drains your blood within half a minute, leaving you mummified, and then rolls off as a swollen bag of blood. It is precisely the kind of grotesque invention you would expect from a show like this. Moreover, there are still more creatures we have not seen yet.

The series also has a Peter Pan theme. This is about 100 years in the future, where synthetic humans exist. The company at the center of the story has developed the first real human brains in synthetic bodies. The catch is that only children’s brains are flexible enough to survive the transplant. So you have kids in adult bodies who call themselves the Lost Boys and take names from Peter Pan. We have not seen them fully in action yet—they are still naïve, even more so than ordinary kids, since these were children who spent their lives sick and bedridden. Now, given functioning bodies, they are meant to become the soldiers fighting the alien creatures. It is a clever idea. It is fun to watch television made by smart, capable people.

I read an interview with Mel Brooks, who is 99 years old. He talked about creating Get Smart in 1965. They asked him how the shoe phone idea came about. He said one day all the office phones rang at once, so he picked up his shoe as a joke, pretending to answer it. That led him to realize that the worstplace to hide a phone would be inside a shoe. Until he said that, I had never thought about how impractical that gadget was. You assume it is another James Bond–style device, but in reality, it is terrible.

At 99, Brooks even has a new project in development—a television version of Young Frankenstein. That is a brilliant idea, since his 1974 film is a classic. It is inspiring to see the work of brilliant people. I have mentioned before what I call the tic-tac-toe theory of television: if you have three key people in central positions who are all excellent, you can make a great show despite other constraints. On the other hand, having three weak people in key roles will doom a production, regardless of the rest of the team’s talent. With someone like Mel Brooks involved, studios will surround him with strong collaborators. When you have a creative force who has been making innovative work for 75–80 years, chances are the result will be worthwhile. So, there you go.

Jacobsen: Any new thoughts on cosmology?

Rosner: I have been thinking about how much I have not been thinking about cosmology. I feel that I have solved a lot of the problems I originally set out to solve—not mathematically, but conceptually. That might just be me fooling myself at my age, but I can at least describe in words what I think is going on. That feels like part of the battle. George Gamow, who was one of the earliest popularizers of the Big Bang theory, was not firm in mathematics. When he needed detailed calculations, he would turn to others for help. He thought conceptually, and if he needed mathematical support, he found people who could do it. Even Einstein was not an elite mathematician compared to pure mathematicians of his time. That was not a flaw in Einstein so much as a reflection of the growing divide, even by 1910, between pure mathematics and theoretical physics. As a physicist, he would not necessarily have mastered every mathematical tool available. He relied on mathematically inclined colleagues—one suggested tensor calculus, which gave him the formal framework for general relativity. So there is a history of great physicists who were not masters of advanced mathematics but still conceptualized fundamental theories.

Of course, there have also been physicists who could do the math in their heads at remarkable speed. Richard Feynman, for example, was famous for being able to approximate solutions to almost any problem on the spot. He reportedly had a standing bet that if you presented him with a solvable problem, he could get within 10% of the answer in about a minute. That is someone who could construct mathematics quickly and intuitively.

Jacobsen: Do you think you are smarter than Feynman was?

Rosner: I do not know. Feynman often claimed he was not brilliant, just persistent and curious, with a healthy set of attitudes about the world. I, on the other hand, am highly distractible and lazy—which is not necessarily all bad. Gamow, for instance, was known for his flaws. He was a heavy drinker. My father heard stories about it because Gamow lived in Boulder, my hometown. My stepfather played poker every week with Ted Volsky, a chancellor at the University of Colorado and something of a fixer. Universities, like movie studios, are full of personalities and scandals, and people like Volsky had to manage what came out publicly.

In Hollywood during the 1930s, there was Eddie Mannix, who worked as a studio fixer. He kept scandals—actors’ affairs, affairs between men and women, same-sex relationships, and even criminal behaviour like Errol Flynn’s notorious relationships with underage girls—out of the tabloids. I suspect Volsky played a similar role at the university level. Through him, my stepfather heard stories about Gamow’s drinking and the scrapes he got into. Boulder is at the base of the Flatirons, and if you drove drunk up Flagstaff Mountain, it was easy to crash. Gamow needed help out of some dangerous situations like that.

So yes, Gamow had his foibles. He died relatively young, likely connected to his heavy drinking. However, even with his flaws, he was able to conceptualize the Big Bang and make lasting contributions to science. As for me—well, I have got my flaws, plenty of them.

Jacobsen: Do you think you are more intelligent than him?

Rosner: I do not know, because intelligence is made up of so many different qualities. I am good at thinking about ideas. From time to time, I have been good at thinking in terms of what I would call the “poetry of physics.” When Einstein spoke about God or the beauty of physics, when physicists talk about elegance, what they mean is the poetry of physics. If you are weighing competing ideas, it is often the elegant and resonant ones that turn out to be true, rather than the clunky ones. Special relativity is elegant. General relativity is elegant. Newton’s universal gravitation—that everything attracts everything else, that the same force that makes an apple fall keeps the planets in orbit—that is very elegant. The planets are constantly falling toward the Sun, but with enough velocity that their parabolic descent becomes an elliptical orbit. That is beautiful.

There are also stories about how discoveries come to people. Friedrich August Kekulé, the chemist who proposed the ring structure of benzene, said he had a dream—he saw a snake seizing its tail—and that inspired his idea of a circular molecule. Francis Crick and James Watson, meanwhile, famously worked out the structure of DNA, but they relied on Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray crystallography images. They saw from her diffraction patterns that DNA had a helical structure, and from there they inferred the double helix. The story has often been told with embellishments—that they had drinks beforehand, that they “stole” a look at her data—but the essential fact is that Franklin’s work was central, even though she did not get proper credit at the time.

There are plenty of scientists who did their work methodically, without alcohol or shortcuts. Einstein himself coined the term Sitzfleisch, meaning “sitting flesh,” to describe the ability to sit and think hard for long periods. Ironically, during his most creative period, he was a clerk at the Swiss Patent Office, where employees worked at standing desks. They were not allowed to sit, which must have been exhausting. However, it was in that environment that he did his groundbreaking thinking.

So, I do not know if I am brighter than any of these people. Intelligence is complicated.

Jacobsen: Who do you think is the most accidentally great scientist or philosopher?

Rosner: Charles Darwin immediately comes to mind. My wife has written a biography of my parents’ marriage, based on a trove of love letters she discovered. She has called it Dear Ruth, and it is good—she should try to publish it. She tends to be her own devil’s advocate, to talk herself out of things, but the book deserves to be seen. She should even write a sequel about what happened afterward, because those two people produced me, and my childhood was unusual enough to be a vivid portrait of the 1960s and 70s. That one should be called Mooncalf. Do you know the term “mooncalf”? It refers to a dreamy, spacey person, someone always staring off at the moon, like a calf staring at the sky.

It is somebody who is lost in their little world, which I was. I missed out on a lot of family drama because I was a mooncalf, which brings us to Darwin. Darwin did not know what he wanted to do. He was a mooncalf too. He went to university and studied theology, preparing to become a clergyman, but he did not want that. He considered medicine as well, but abandoned it. He was fairly aimless, and his wealthy family—connected to the Wedgwood porcelain fortune—did not push him to settle down as quickly as most young men in Victorian England would have been forced to.

They eventually found him an opportunity. Captain Robert FitzRoy of HMS Beagle was preparing for a round-the-world survey voyage. FitzRoy was prone to depression and needed a gentleman companion to dine with and talk to; as captain, he could not socialize with the crew. Darwin was offered the position. On the five-year journey, he collected thousands of specimens, saw the eroded cliffs of South America, and famously observed the finches and other unique species of the Galápagos Islands—species isolated enough to evolve into distinct forms found nowhere else.

So, almost accidentally, because he was a mooncalf without a plan, Darwin ended up with experiences no one else on Earth had. He saw the world for five years, thought deeply about it, and found exactly the kind of raw material his scientific imagination needed. When he returned, he spent 20 years analyzing, writing, and slowly developing his ideas. His friends finally pressured him to publish because another naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, had independently arrived at a theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin was generous—he and Wallace co-presented their ideas in 1858—but Darwin had years of notes and a massive manuscript nearly ready. That became On the Origin of Species(1859).

Darwin later wrote The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), which emphasized that animals, like humans, experience and display feelings. When people think of Darwin, they often think of the phrase “nature red in tooth and claw,” but that was not his. That came from Tennyson. Darwin himself was not fixated on brutality—he saw animals as individuals capable of feeling. He wrote an entire book about their expressions of emotion.

So Darwin was a great man, shaped by chance and circumstance. If he had not gone on the Beagle, who knows what would have happened? However, it was a remarkable twist of fate.

Jacobsen: All right, I have got to go. Tomorrow then—I will see you.

Rosner: Thanks, bud.

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