CERN in Science-Fiction
That's about it for LHC physics in Torchwood: Absolution, but physics also crops up in the action of our mysterious alien visitor, who dines on his victim's neutrons. Atoms short of neutrons tend to be radioactive, frequently decaying via positron emission in a very short time. So let's assume our visitor is eating the neutrons from our carbon atoms - we are carbon-based life forms, after all. Most carbon is an isotope called carbon-12, which contains a healthy balance of 6 neutrons and 6 protons. If you take one neutron away, it becomes carbon-11, a radioactive isotope that decays with a half-life of about 20 minutes to boron. If our ghost were eating two or more neutrons per carbon atom, then the resulting isotopes would have half-lives of seconds or less, so the least that can be said for the plausibility of the science behind the sickbay is that Captain Jack would have had to work a whole lot faster to save Martha's friend Julia Swales.
CERN PET Scanner
Carbon-11, incidentally, is widely used in medicine, as a tracer in PET scans. And PET, or positron emission tomography, owes much to technology developed for physics. Carbon-11 can be made using particle accelerators, which are becoming as much a part of the modern hospital's armoury as stethoscopes and hypodermics. The scanners use detection techniques originally developed for physics, and current particle physics technology shows promise for developing a new generation of scanners, combining the technique of PET with Magnetic Resonance Imaging, MRI.
In Angels and Demons, the veracity of the science falls at the first page. Fact, says Dan Brown, CERN exists. So far so good, but just a few lines further down, Brown runs into trouble. Antimatter can never be a source of energy because it doesn't exist naturally. You have to make it, and doing so is incredibly inefficient and slow. CERN can make perhaps a nanogramme per year, meaning that it would take a billion years to make as much as Dan Brown's thief spirits away from CERN. The lab's only been there for 54 years, so there's some way to go yet. The plausibility of the science safely dispatched with, we can just sit back and enjoy the story. Because that's all it is. I, for one, am looking forward to the film.
Herman Wouk is another author, and a Pulitzer Prize winning one at that, who has used the science of particle physics in fiction. In his book, A Hole in Texas, physics takes a back seat, simply providing the premise for a hugely entertaining exploration of the American political system. What would happen in the USA if the Chinese got to the Higgs boson first? Wouk wisely limits the science to that simple premise and gets on with what he does best. The only flaw is that the Chinese won't get there first. We'll all get there together, because that's the way particle physics works. As Gwen correctly points out in Torchwood: Absolution, some 10000 people of over 100 nationalities work at CERN, and in the world of fundamental physics, collaboration on that scale is the norm.
Whether avoided, well treated, or even wrong, science in fiction gives laboratories like CERN a great opportunity to bring the excitement of research at the frontier of knowledge to a broader audience than any amount of laboratory PR can do. The success of Angels and Demons drove up traffic to the CERN web site by a factor of 10 over night, and it has kept on climbing. Dan Brown is not the only factor - there are some amazing things going on at CERN - but it certainly helped.
Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) outside Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff
The facade of Torchwood's magnificent backdrop, the Wales Millennium Centre, is adorned with words penned by the country's national poet, Gwyneth Lewis: "Creu gwir fel gwydr o ffwrnais awen (Creating truth like glass from inspiration's furnace)/ In these stones horizons sing"? Did she know when she wrote them that she too would visit CERN? Her words would sit as comfortably over the door of a science lab as they do on an arts complex. And perhaps that's the point. Both enrich humanity, and the more often they get together the better.
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