I'm pretty sure that I've read story versions of something like this. A bit of Philip Dick and James Morrow, maybe. Oh, also, Greg Egan and Vernor Vinge (in The Cookie Monster) have both explored the physics of virtual environments.
Still, I think it's an area that could use a good thorough treatment.
I have read these sorts of stories too - most recently Charlie Stross, whose "Accelerando" indirectly deals at one point with humans that have been resurrected en masse from history, reincarnated onto artificial continents over Saturn. They get a very frank FAQ about where and what they are once they come around, though. I can't recall a film-length story when someone gets the whole "Welcome to heaven! You made it!" business and they're like "wait what".
The Cookie Monster would also make a great movie, too.
I know you're being jokey, but I'll take this opportunity to note that my time hanging with the biochemists at Harvard made my default mental image of a bright young scientist turn female.
Plenty of films about the metaphysics of those that didn't quite make it to the afterlife... "I can see dead people!".
In literature, two things come to mind: LeGuin's _The Farthest Shore_ and Pullman's _Golden Compass_ trilogy. Both deal with an afterlife that is supposed to be "heaven", but whose idea is fundamentally corrupt, turning it into infinite existential boredom. All or part of the plot in both hinges on how to fix it. Neither has made it to film, though.
I have read an enjoyed these too. But what's tickling me today is the specific question of what would happen if a physicist (or even a scientific layman, but for the sake of illustration let's say a professional physicist) wound up in heaven, and it's not some spiritual abstraction but apparently an actual place where you have a real body and are surrounded by other people and the familiar 3+1 dimensions and so on. Maybe a few variables are tweaked, but still, 99 percent overlap with reality as they knew it before their earthly passing. Wouldn't they immediately seek to hook up with other scientists and find out how the heck any of this works?
If I were writing this as a story I'd want to avoid a "well duh, they're all running as emulated processes on a computer at the end of time" ending because the entire audience would see that coming, but in a movie you could get away with it and have a lot of fun too. Not to say that's the only possible ending! I don't know what the Big Reveal would be, really...
Well, of course, inquisitive physicists would never normally be let into heaven (what else is eternal torment for, dammit)! The latter half of the film could be filled with action sequences of our hero/heroine trying to avoid the angel bouncers, once the powers that be get wind of his/her research. ;)
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Still, I think it's an area that could use a good thorough treatment.
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The Cookie Monster would also make a great movie, too.
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In literature, two things come to mind: LeGuin's _The Farthest Shore_ and Pullman's _Golden Compass_ trilogy. Both deal with an afterlife that is supposed to be "heaven", but whose idea is fundamentally corrupt, turning it into infinite existential boredom. All or part of the plot in both hinges on how to fix it. Neither has made it to film, though.
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If I were writing this as a story I'd want to avoid a "well duh, they're all running as emulated processes on a computer at the end of time" ending because the entire audience would see that coming, but in a movie you could get away with it and have a lot of fun too. Not to say that's the only possible ending! I don't know what the Big Reveal would be, really...
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