ILLUSTRATION: JOHN SPRINGER COLLECTION/CORBIS

Anyone who chronicles technology for a general audience faces the same challenge— how to make a story interesting and accessible, while getting the science right.

I faced this while working on my first non-fiction book, Masters of Doom. One of the lead characters is John Carmack, the venerated programmer of the computer games Doom and Quake. Carmack is considered one of the best coders in his industry, and I needed to convey the essence of his innovations—what makes him unique and important—to people who think a binary space partition is a form of orthodontics. Now that Masters of Doom is being developed into a movie for Showtime, the challenge is back in meta-form—how to convey the science and technology of computer programming in a compelling but accurate, filmic way.

Writers, filmmakers, TV producers, theater directors, game makers, or anyone who chooses science as a subject for depiction has to strike the right formula of style and substance. Often, however, despite their best intentions, they get it wrong. And when they do, the Bad Science Nerds are waiting to nail them.

To some degree, I think anyone with even the slightest geek cred—gamers, technologists, Trekkies, webheads, tech writers—is a Bad Science Nerd, too. BSNs are easily identifiable. We're the ones in the back of the theater muttering, "Oh please!" when a missile intercepts an earth-bound asteroid at the last second, or pretending to self-induce vomiting every time a chip goes missing with the all-important secret code (in movies, it seems, there's no such thing as data back-up). And we even have our very own Siskel and Ebert, the big thumbs of bad science themselves: Phil Plait and Tom Rogers.

Plait and Rogers, respectively, run the Web sites Bad Astronomy (http://www.badastronomy.com) and Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics (http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics). The sites chronicle and explicate science gaffes, from Armageddon to Titanic. Though they're run separately, they have a common mission: to sift out the good science in movies and television from the bad or, more often, awful.

"A movie has got to have a sense of reality, even if it's a fantasy," says Rogers, who teaches physics at South Side High School in Greenville, S.C. And it's not just a nerdy concern, he adds, it's for the sake of future generations. "What I find is people really believe this stuff," he says. "We're filling people's minds with silliness. I don't think it leads to clear thinking."