Neutrinos & Neŭtrinoj

Okay, let’s just go hell for leather on this. Most of it is just going to come out of my head.

When I was seven, I was really interested in nuclear physics. I had this naive idea that if I knew everything all matter and forces were made of down to the smallest level, I would effectively know everything, full stop. The error of this thought was borne in upon me when I realised I had no idea what the scientific name of the freshwater shrimp was, anything about that animal’s anatomy and so on, and more broadly that just because you knew everything about the building blocks of everything in the Universe didn’t mean you knew much about the things that were made of ’em. Seven year olds, eh?

However, one thing that did impinge upon my learning was that atoms were made up of electrons orbiting a nucleus made of neutrons and protons, that the nuclei were held together by the strong nuclear force carried by pions, light was made up of photons, and protons and neutrons were part of a larger class of fairly massive particles called hadrons, which were generally composed of smaller particles called quarks held together by gluons. This is now such a long time ago that nuclear physics has changed considerably since then and some of the ideas are very outdated. For instance, at one point it was thought that quarks were made up of smaller particles called “rishons”, whose number of types enabled the standard model to be simplified by seeing them as pairs of rishons of a few kinds. Only two types of rishons would be needed for there to be four types of quark. Also back then, the top and bottom quarks had yet to be detected, so people mainly talked about up, down, strangeness and charm, and it hasn’t been lost on me that that’s the title of a Hawkwind album. This was, however, about three years before the album came out and at the time I would’ve been entirely contemptuous and condescending about this piece of music with pretentions to be high art. I should hastily add that I’m not like that any more.

Now it was quite easy for my undeveloped child’s mind to understand all this. Basically, each particle had mass, charge (or no charge) and spin, and these properties defined what that particle was. They were divided into bosons and fermions, and also leptons, mesons and baryons according to their mass from light to heavy. I was for some reason particularly excited about mesons. Many of these particles are unstable, and when they break up their mass, charge and spin need to be conserved. To take a completely wrong example, say there’s a meson with a mass five hundred times that of an electron. If it broke up into two smaller particles, if each has a mass 250 times that of an electron, that would conserve mass. However, this is totally wrong because some of a particle’s mass is lost in binding energy, so each of the pair would actually have a mass more than half of the meson’s. That’s not in any way a real example but because I’m ploughing on at a rate of knots, I’m not looking any details up and can’t remember the properties of a pion, for example. Leptons, incidentally, are not like that. They’re stable, lighter and not made of anything smaller. This is about mesons and baryons. If you asked my seven-year old self, I’d be able to give you the properties, but my late middle-aged and addled brain can no longer so do.

But, more simply, if a neutral particle emits an electron it will become positively charged because electrons are negatively charged and that needs to be preserved.

Not all objects have mass at all. If an object has a mass of zero, it has no choice but to move at the speed of light, which is actually not the specific speed of light but just the fastest speed there is, to quote Monty Python. Neither must every object have charge. Most objects we come across in everyday life, such as combs and loo rolls, tend to have no charge most of the time although if you comb hair with a comb it will become charged and be able to pick up small bits of loo roll, so it does happen. On a subatomic scale, though, there are essentially charged particles, namely the electrons and protons making up atoms, but there also have to be the uncharged neutrons which balance out the nucleus and prevent it exploding. Both protons and neutrons are made up of charged quarks which together add up to one unit of positive charge or no charge because they cancel each other out or they don’t. So that’s also simple.

Spin is however really not simple. Although this makes no sense to our macroscopic brains, spin is quantised and a property like charge and mass. Also, even more strangely, a particle can have non-integral spin, and if it does, it needs to be flipped over twice to reverse its spin. Look at it this way: there’s a gyroscope spinning in a clockwise direction when viewed from above. Usually, to make it spin anticlockwise all you need to do is turn it upside down. If, however, it had non-integral spin, if you turned it upside down, it still wouldn’t be spinning anticlockwise and you’d have to flip it over again to make it spin the other way. This is very weird and as I’m typing this I wonder if I’ve got it wrong but it’s been said that if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand it, so presumably I do understand this because I don’t.

So why am I bothering to mention this little detail? Well, it was discovered some time ago that the way subatomic particles break down must conserve mass (taking into account that some of their mass is converted to energy when they’re stuck together), electrical charge and also this other property, spin. In order for this to work properly, there must be massless and chargeless particles. These particles seem to be nothing, but they aren’t because they have spin. These are neutrinos, and they come in various types because they’re leptons and they have corresponding more tangible particles, so there are for example muon’s neutrinos and electron’s neutrinos. They are of course bloody weird. The way they’re detected is by filling enormous buried underground tanks with dry cleaning fluid and trying to detect the tiny number of atoms which are changed by interaction with them. Since they’re produced in nuclear reactions, the Sun emits them. It’s been said that a million neutrinos passed through a wall of lead a light year thick, almost all of them would come out the other side. They virtually do not interact with matter. About forty-odd years ago, there was a problem understanding the Sun because it wasn’t producing enough neutrinos. In other words, the massive tanks of dry-cleaning fluid under the Alps or wherever they were kept were not producing detectable numbers of different atoms. I mean, I don’t know how you detect a couple of altered atoms in six hundred tonnes of dry cleaning fluid, but apparently you can. I’ve probably missed the point. Incidentally, I don’t want to go off on too much of a tangent but I find it kind of annoying that there is a thing called “dry-cleaning fluid“. How is it dry-cleaning then, eh? And while I’m at it, it used to be used to decaffeinate coffee, or something similar did, and it always used to give me a stomach ache when I drank it. Tangent alert!

Okay, so my point is that for whatever reason I didn’t have any problem accepting that neutrinos existed even though they were massless and practically didn’t interact with matter, at the age of seven. In fact, in 1987 it turned out that neutrinos did in fact have some mass because a couple of hundred thousand years ago, a star exploded in one of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies and the neutrinos took a few seconds longer to get here than the light, implying that they were travelling more slowly than light and must therefore have mass.

Now for the famous problem.

Centuries ago, Johannes Kepler worked out that the time it takes a planet to orbit the Sun can be worked out straightforwardly from its distance. To quote Kepler’s Third Law, “the squares of the orbital periods of the planets are directly proportional to the cubes of the semi-major axes of their orbits”. Semi-major axis is the mean distance of a planet’s orbit from the Sun. Isaac Newton generalised this law to come up with the law of gravity, and it’s supposed to apply to everything in the Universe. There’s a lot more, but this is the important bit. It means that if you look, for example, at the triple star system next to the Sun, you can work out from the masses of Proxima Centauri, α Centauri A and B and their distances from each other how long it takes them all to orbit each other. The much closer A and B are close in mass to each other and take eighty years to orbit and Proxima, which is eleven thousand times the distance of Earth from the Sun, takes 550 thousand years to orbit the other two, whose total mass is what matters. However, it doesn’t stay this simple.

If you look at a galaxy, you might think you can calculate its mass from the number of stars in it and their sizes. Galaxies rotate very, very slowly: our solar system takes something like 225 million years to orbit its centre. It ought therefore to be expected that the time taken for a star twice as far out from the centre to orbit this galaxy should be the square root of the cube of twice as long as 225 million years, i.e. a little under three times as long. However, it actually only takes about twice as long. Why?

Obviously you can’t see everything in the Galaxy. If you were looking at this solar system from α Centauri, even with a fantastically powerful telescope, you wouldn’t be able to see Jupiter, any of the other planets or moons, any of the dwarf planets or any of the asteroids, and between the stars there are also rogue planets wandering in interstellar space, dust, maybe black holes and brown dwarf “stars” too dim to see as well as potential comets very slowly orbiting sheer light months from the Sun, so there definitely is missing mass which means galaxies would seem to rotate faster than just counting up the stars would predict, and also, coming back to neutrinos, they also increase the mass of galaxies somewhat. However, for this to work as a way of accounting for how fast galaxies spin, and also how quickly galaxies “near” each other affect each others’ motion, well over three-quarters of the mass of a galaxy would have to consist of this sort of stuff. Maybe it does, but it probably doesn’t because for example 99.8% of the mass of our solar system is the Sun. Therefore it probably isn’t lots of ordinary invisible matter doing this.

Therefore, scientists decided that there must be something called WIMPs – Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. This is by contrast with MACHOs – MAssively Compact Halo Objects – which is the idea that there’s a roughly spherical cloud of massive ordinary matter also orbiting galaxies outside the plane of the arms. I’m about to come to the point by the way. To me, and to a lot of other people, WIMPs seem to be invented just to explain the problem. They’re most of the matter in the Universe, but they conveniently do not interact with the matter we’re familiar with. I paused there because I almost wrote “do not interact with ordinary matter”, but in fact if this is true they actually are “ordinary” matter, and it’s atoms, molecules and light which aren’t, in other words all the stuff which can be detected. Hence I think this is silly and go with a different hypothesis, which is MoND – Modified Newtonian Dynamics. This is the idea that the explanation is that Newton’s laws of gravity only work on relatively small scales and break down if you consider them over thousands of light years or further.

All this said, I am perfectly well aware that I’m no physicist. I did have my doubts about the cosmological constant as a teenager but just thought it was because I didn’t understand physics, then it turned out Albert Einstein had the same doubts and found it embarrassing, so maybe I should listen to my intuition more. Maybe people can be too embedded in their area of expertise to realise the flaws in their thoughts. Or, maybe an outsider just doesn’t understand properly and only thinks she does.

But my point is not about this but ageing and how people accept and reject things as they get older. As a child, I liked the idea of neutrinos because they were absurd and weird, and therefore fascinating. As a fifty-seven year old, and in fact even when I was quite a bit younger, I find the idea of dark matter, which is what I’ve just described, hard to accept even though it’s quite similar in a lot of ways to neutrinos. And that’s the process of becoming more conservative as you get older, and therefore this now becomes not an abstruse argument about physics or cosmology but personality and maturity.

There has been a pattern where young people start off left wing and become right wing old people. This is apparently less true than it used to be. Why this happens is another question. It may be that as one acquires wealth and possessions, one realises that one’s position of poverty and the apparent need to depend on the state for financial support was temporary and would also be for other people, and therefore things will get better or easier if one takes responsibility for things. Or, it could be that as one’s career advances, one makes moral compromises and therefore descends into self-deception and rationalisation for them. Or, again, maybe it’s cognitive decline and an inevitable process of being more easily duped by politicians and media-based propaganda. Conservative ideas are more appealing because they’re about the “good old days”. If this last one is so, the answer to a drift to the right may be just to decide that one was more likely to have been correct before one started losing one’s marbles and freeze one’s political opinions at that stage, but when new situations arise it can be harder to apply those principles than it used to be.

Why has this image appeared at this point on this blog post? Well. . .

I accept that neutrinos exist. Once upon a time, in 1887 CE, a guy called Lazarus Zamenhoff living in Poland invented a language called Esperanto, which I’m sure you’ve heard of. It was designed to be simple and logical, and was specifically constructed in a Europe where the various powers had been at each others’ throats for centuries, so the vocabulary was mainly based on Romance, Germanic, Greek and Slavic roots, plus a few completely invented words. In order to make learning it easier, Zamenhoff introduced the idea that words could be plugged together to change their meaning in a completely regular way, so for example the prefix “mal-” would turn a word into its opposite: “bona” means “good”, “malbona” means “bad”, and more controversially, “knabo” means “boy” and “knabino” girl, and in fact in the original version of the language all the gendered terms are unmarked when masculine and marked when feminine in this way. This is sexist but there are practical reasons for it. As in natural languages which mark this kind of gender, there are ways of working round it.

One of the possible flaws in the language is what this approach to word building does to words which are similar in many languages. For instance, take the English word “school”. In French this is «école», in German ,,Schule”, in Indonesian “sekola” and so on. All words which look and sound similar. In Esperanto, the word for school is “lernejo” – “learn-place”. This is easy to form and break down, and it reduces the need to learn a more opaque word, but the chances are that in many cases the word will already exist in the learner’s native language and there may at least initially be some puzzlement.

Germaine Greer’s famous book is called ‘The Female Eunuch’ in English, the language it was written in. The Esperanto word for “eunuch” is the rather logical word “neŭtro”, related to the adjective “neŭtra”, meaning “neuter”. However, since unmarked nouns in Esperanto usually refer to males or inanimate items, “neŭtro” means “male eunuch”. “-Ino” is the feminising ending. Hence the Esperanto word for “female eunuch” is “neŭtrino”! I don’t know whether Greer’s book has been translated into Esperanto or what its title is if it has, and I also don’t know what the Esperanto word for the elementary particle is, but logic suggests that neutrinos are called something else in Esperanto and the word “neŭtrino” does in fact mean “female eunuch”. If not, the chances are that when Esperantists talk about fundamental particles they say that there are vast tanks of dry-cleaning fluid under the Alps intended to detect female eunuchs and that when scientists detected Supernova 1987A, they noticed that female eunuchs don’t move at the speed of light. Well I could’ve told ’em that.

So what’s my point? Do I have one? Surprisingly, yes. As I’ve got older, like many other people my acceptance of novelty has become less flexible and although I was fine with neutrinos I wasn’t fine with dark matter. Neutrinos were discovered in 1956, though they were theorised earlier. ‘The Female Eunuch’ was published in 1970. Esperanto had its rules laid down in 1887, and although better-designed versions of the language have been proposed since, it’s difficult to accept them because the whole point of Esperanto was that it was supposed to be a single language which everyone could use. I actually think Esperantido is loads better but I wouldn’t use it because it isn’t the original. This rigid design is reflected in the fact that these two concepts, the female eunuch and the neutrino, have happened in the world getting on for a century after the language was devised, but it isn’t open to accepting new ideas in that way. As such, Esperanto represents exactly what happens to us as we get older, but not because we compromise or become more conservative, but simply because we were designed for an earlier age, in the case of Esperanto, one where neutrinos were unknown and second-wave feminism was unthought of.

It occurs to me also that second-wave feminism itself has also been superceded and may be in the same position, but that’s another story.

The Opposite Of Astronomy

I have committed myself to alternating posts on the Solar System with posts on anything but that. Today, I am strongly tempted to write something about recent discoveries in the neighbourhood of Tabby’s Star, but that would be somewhat similar to writing about the other topic, so I won’t be doing that today except to say, really, look it up because it’s absolutely amazing. You may have come across it already. Then there’s the millipede in Northumberland the size of a car. Also very interesting but quite sciency. I tell you, maybe I should’ve chosen that. But I didn’t, so instead I’m going to write about what the opposite to astronomy is, or rather I will after I’ve got something else out of my system: the idea of opposites.

When I was at primary school, we were doing opposites. We were asked what the opposite of black or white was, and unsurprisingly answered accordingly with whatever the other one was. This so far was controversial. We were then asked about the opposite to red, to which I replied that it was violet because it was at the other end of the visual spectrum. We were told that colours don’t have opposites. I disagreed with that then although nowadays my answer would probably be different. I would probably say that the opposite to red was aqua, because there are three additive primary colours, red, green and blue, and if red is 100, then aqua is 011. But this doesn’t always work because there are also subtractive primary colours, often described as red, yellow and blue, but possibly more like magenta, yellow and cyan (AKA “aqua”). If you go with the first, the answer will be green, and that also makes sense in terms of traffic lights, since red means “stop” and green means “go”. I think the opposite on a colour wheel would be the same but I’ll have to investigate. Hang on. Yes, it’s green apparently, although I will bow to the better judgement of whomso might be reading this, hint-hint.

I’ve been here before with my attempt to determine the essence of anti-custard. Here the issue is more complicated because custard has multitudinous qualities, but I provisionally decided that anti-custard was probably a blue breeze block. Bear with me on this one. Custard is of course a non-Newtonian fluid extremely suitable for speed bumps in many people’s opinions, but this kind of custard is rather far from being considered vanilla flavoured, yellow or edible. I happen to hate custard as a food item, so thinking of it as something to put in your mouth seems strange. Custard flows freely when treated gently but thickens up when hit hard, meaning that if you fill a swimming pool with it you ought to be able to walk on it. Hence the opposite of custard, in this sense, is a substance which flows freely when hit hard but resists gentle treatment, which is similar to most Newtonian fluids. However, very few real fluids as encountered in everyday life happen to be Newtonian. For instance, water resists the very gentlest treatment due to surface tension, which is stronger for it than most other liquids, then becomes more yielding as it’s treated more forcefully, so to some extent even water is non-Newtonian, and since most liquids we come across as humans on Earth are based on water, they’re likely to behave like that even if that’s unusual. Hence there are a number of axes along which custard can be placed, and it isn’t clear how to reverse them. There could be a reflection about the origin, the X axis, the Y axis, both X and Y axes and so forth. This discussion on the Halfbakery led to the invention of the delightful term “eigencustard”. The German word “eigen” is often translated as the adjective “own” but can also be translated as “proper” and this is probably more informative in this context. In maths, there are things called eigenvalues and eigenvectors, and here the word probably works best if understood as meaning “characteristic”. It’s probably most helpful to use diagrams to address what these are rather than formulæ, but I may have some difficulty doing this, so instead, consider this. Suppose you have a square made of latex (or lycra if you prefer – actually that might be more useful). If you then stretch that square vertically, the poisson ratio being positive (when it gets longer in one direction it gets shorter at right angles), the height will increase and the width decrease. This means that somewhere between the horizontal and the vertical is a direction in which the square does not stretch at all. This is an eigenvector of that square under that transformation. Similarly, in a fairground mirror one’s reflection may appear to be distorted but there may be some lines along which one looks exactly the same (this works better with two mirrors). These lines are eigenvectors. Now back to custard. If you imagine some kind of multidimensional space containing the essence of custard, doing something like flipping the custard through different angles and axes will result in substances with different eigenvalues and eigenvectors. Decide which are the most significant and you get anti-custard: the opposite of custard. However, there are a variety of eigencustards, which will not vary under these transformations.

This could be treated very seriously. The resistance of a fluid to flow under increasing force could be plotted on a line graph and turned upside down to produce whatever the opposite of that was. There are quite a number of markèdly non-Newtonian fluids around, such as tomato ketchup, quicksand, wet cement, silly putty, mayonnaise, the fluid inside automatic vehicle transmission, synovial fluid (in joints between bones) and non-drip gloss paint. It would be fairly straightforward to assert that in physical terms, tomato ketchup comes close to being the opposite of custard, but it’s also red. For it to be proper anti-custard, tomato ketchup must be blue, because blue is the opposite colour to yellow. However, it does seem to taste very different to custard, so it makes sense to consider the opposite to custard to be blue tomato ketchup. This is feasible.

What, then, of astronomy? One suggestion is that the opposite of astronomy is geology, and in a way this makes sense. If one considers the proper study of astronomy to be everything which is “up there”, geology can then be considered to be concerned with everything which is “down here”, or perhaps “down there”. The trouble is, this doesn’t really work. For an alien on another planet, astronomy would include geology in the sense that it’s the study of the physical material and processes affecting Earth. In another sense, geology is a speciality of planetology, and most people would say that planetology is a generalisation of geology as well as a speciality of astronomy. So it doesn’t work. In fact I find the idea that geology is in any way special quite distasteful as it seems narrow-minded, although of course Earth is very special because it’s kind of our mother – Tellus Mater. In that case it gets quite difficult to imagine what astronomy would exclude.

But then I think of the 1960s CE, and the idea of inner space in three different ways. If astronomy is the discovery of outer space, then the opposite of astronomy is the study of inner space. Inner space could be the interior of the atom, the interior of the body or the interior of the mind. All these have their merits. Atoms are very small as opposed to star systems and galaxies, which are very large. There are stories such as ‘The Girl In The Golden Atom’ which imagine that atoms are solar systems in their own right, and on a much larger scale it’s common to imagine that our own solar system is a mere atom in a macro-world around us. This doesn’t really work though, because of what really goes on inside atoms. If a solar system was like an atom, the Sun would consist of a ball of smaller stars, planets would move in strange orbits shaped like clover leaves in three dimensions and would not be located in definite places, and would emit other planets or have other planets crash into them as they teleported instantaneously across the system, and they would also tend to be bunched together. If, on the other hand, atoms were like solar systems the situation might be a bit more like matter as we know it, but solid matter would tend to break down and probably always be metallic, and there would be no such thing as valency and perhaps no such thing as chemistry. Nonetheless, as Demokritos once said,

νόμωι (γάρ φησι) γλυκὺ καὶ νόμωι πικρόν, νόμωι θερμόν, νόμωι ψυχρόν, νόμωι χροιή, ἐτεῆι δὲ ἄτομα καὶ κενόν – “By convention sweet is sweet, bitter is bitter, hot is hot, cold is cold, color is color; but in truth there are only atoms and the void”.

This doesn’t apply to atoms themselves nowadays but it does to a particular not very quantum view of the Universe: it’s mostly empty space with widely separated lumps in it. So is the opposite of astronomy nuclear physics then? I would say not for a major reason. Nuclear physics is a vitally important part of astrophysics in that it explains what stars and some other objects are and how they work, so once again there’s an issue with excluding a fairly central part of astronomy – from astronomy!

The makers of ‘Fantastic Voyage’ seem to have thought along the lines that the interior of the human body is like an alien planet or space, and to us it is our own inner space, so perhaps anatomy and physiology are the opposite of astronomy. I’m going to permit myself a diversion here into that work and its surroundings, as it used to be my favourite film when I was about nine.

First of all, ‘Fantastic Voyage’ is part of a whole complex of works. It has a little in common with ‘The Incredible Shrinking Man’ and ‘The Girl In The Golden Atom’ and a lot more in common with the later ‘The Men Inside’ and ‘Innerspace’, Doctor Who’s ‘The Invisible Enemy’ plus a whole load of parodies from such animations as ‘Rex The Runt’, ‘Family Guy’ and Radio 4’s ‘Old Harry’s Game’. Like Willy Wonka, it’s one of those films which has so captured the public imagination that sometimes it seems like every TV series out there has to pay homage to it. It also spawned an entire animated series of its own, rather like ‘Star Trek’ did. Isaac Asimov wrote the novelisation but didn’t associate himself closely with it. He agreed to write it because there were so many plot holes in the film that he considered it a challenge to address them. He also tried again with his own version of the story in the late 1980s, ‘Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain’. I gave this a go but got very bored with it as like many of Asimov’s stories it was all talk and little action. In the sequel, miniaturisation is achieved by reducing Planck’s Constant. The first novel, so far as I can remember, has a discussion of miniaturisation parallel to that made by Arthur C Clarke in his ‘Profiles Of The Future’, where the options are reducing the size of the orbitals in the atoms, removing some of the atoms or shrinking the size of all the particles involved. The problems are, respectively, that reducing the size of the orbitals leaves the object with the same mass, making it like a neutron star or black hole and causing it to fall to Earth’s core, which in a way would be a fantastic voyage but more Verne than Asimov, reducing the number of atoms simplifies the object, and if that object is human, its brain, resulting in a not very intelligent organism instead, and the third one is the Goldilocks solution – “just right”. Unfortunately the last answer is also the least plausible. A rewrite of this story today might have the people interact with nanobots from the safety of a VR facility, but that would take away all the peril. Maybe there would still be a way of manufacturing it, such as a harmful immune reaction triggered by the presence of the nanotech, which is quite similar to what happens in the film.

For a time, it’s said that the film was used in medical classes to teach certain aspects of medicine. I’m not sure this can be true, because it gets a number of things wrong. The blood corpuscles, for example, don’t look like real ones but seem to have been done with oil droplets in water, giving the impression of a lava lamp. It also suffers from higher definition versions, which for instance make the capillary epithelium look like printed curtains, which is presumably what they are. The phagocytes end up looking like white balloons, rather similar to the Rovers in ‘Prisoner’. This wasn’t so much a problem back in the day not only because of the lower quality of the prints (I’d only seen it on PAL TV, so I can’t vouch for the cinematic experience) but also because suspension of disbelief used to get more exercise back then. One of the notable things about the film is the fact that it was produced while New Wave SF was in its heyday, with its emphasis on mental rather than physical interior life. ‘Fantastic Voyage’ sends the crew into the brain where they’re able to view nerve impulses moving between brain cells and this provokes them to wonder about the soul. Hence they are actually inside a living human brain, but in a physical sense, while much of popular culture was exploring consciousness and therefore inner space through drugs and meditation, inter alia.

And then of course there’s New Wave SF and the exploration of consciousness, and therefore inner space in that sense, as seen in ‘The Ultimate Trip’ segment of ‘2001’ but also many other films of that era such as ‘Charly’ and remarkably ‘Willy Wonka’ with its tunnel scene. It seemed to be de rigeur to do that at the time, possibly to appeal to people on psychedelics. This is a different kind of inner space again, and seems to correspond to something like qualitative psychology, or maybe depth psychology. This is psychology, but not in the mainstream academic sense. It may seem arrogant to posit that the human mind is on an equal footing with the physical Universe, but the fact is that we cannot step out of our subjectivity.

To summarise then, these are the possible anti-astronomies: depth psychology, human biology, nuclear physics and geology. Alternatively, maybe it’s astrology.

Spin Is Not What It Seems

Nor is isospin, but then that’s less well-known.

Most of what people say about quantum physics focusses on things like entanglement, acausality and uncertainty, with a kind of mystical bent, but there’s also something else which most people ignore which is equally weird, and on top of that is something else again which is as weird too, if not even weirder. These two things are spin and its oddly- but appropriately-named sibling isospin.

It’s been said that if you think you understand quantum mechanics, it means you don’t. This may or may not be true and there are different opinions about what it actually means, but I would say this is also true of spin and isospin. I’ll deal with spin first.

If you hold a spinning gyroscope, you can feel the difficulty of shifting it from the direction its pointing. If it’s one of those small toy ones, it won’t wrench you off your feet but its rotation will be shifted into your body if you’re standing. In a swivel chair, a sufficiently large and massive rotating object will rotate the chair if you try to move the object into a different angle. This principle is useful, and is for example employed with rifle bullets, spacecraft and compasses to stabilise them. Whereas magnetic compasses are useless near the poles, gyrocompasses can float around as they move and will therefore continue to point north if they’ve been set up that way in the first place. A spacecraft will tumble unpredictably in space unless it’s stabilised in some way, and one way of doing so is to make it spin as it launches, which keeps it pointing in the same direction. This particular spin is often counteracted by ejecting something spinning in the opposite direction to ensure the spacecraft instruments or devices stay facing the requisite direction later on.

These are all illustrations of angular momentum. Momentum in general is the tendency for an object to keep moving in the same way unless something stops it, that is, unless another force acts upon it. This is true of masses moving in straight lines, and of spinning masses. They will continue to spin in the same way around the same axis unless something acts on them to shift them or slow them down, and when this happens that momentum has to go somewhere as spin rather than in a straight line. This is called angular momentum.

We tend to think of atoms as consisting of nuclei surrounded by electrons in orbit around them: that is, rotating. Ferromagnetism happens when the atoms in a material are all lined up spinning in the same direction, and only applies to very few materials, notably iron but also cobalt and nickel. If you think of atoms as gyroscopes, which they are, what you’re doing when you magnetise something is shifting the axes of rotation of a load of gyroscopes, and that angular momentum shift has to go somewhere. And it does. If you suspend a piece of unmagnetised iron in space in zero gravity conditions, or more accessibly hang it from a thread, then apply a magnetic field to it, this will to some extent magnetise the block and shift the atoms, and it will start spinning. This is known as the Einstein-De Haas Effect. Yes, that Einstein.

This change in angular momentum can be measured quite easily because the mass of the iron is known and its rotation can be timed and observed. However, even if you take into account all the angular momentum involved in the shift, it doesn’t account for all of the spin. This is because the electrons themselves are tiny magnets pointing in a particular direction, and the magnetic field aligns not only the atoms but also the electrons. Now here’s the crucial question. How can an electron point in a particular direction? The answer is that it has an axis of rotation, and this accounts for the discrepancy in the rate of spin the lump of iron has. This difference in angular momentum just taking the orbitals into account and the actual difference allows the spin of the electron to be found.

And this is where things get really weird.

If you calculate the spin of an electron, either assuming the smallest probable size of the particle or the much more likely scenario of thinking of an electron as a point in space, there is an imponderable problem. If the electron has a size at all, in order to generate the amount of angular momentum it has, it would have to be moving faster than light. If, on the other hand, an electron is a point, it’s featureless except for location, so how can it be spinning at all? A point in space doesn’t have a direction or an axis of rotation in the conventional sense, so – huh?

This is not some abstract thing happening due to the vagaries of scientific theory either. A lump of iron really does start spinning if magnetised, and taking into account all of the rotational movement of the electrons in their orbitals shifting is not enough to account for the exact rate of rotation. In the end, then, there seems to be only one possibility: spin is a fundamental property of matter. From our usual perspective, it definitely looks as if there are just objects which are not spinning which we can rotate or might start or stop rotating, or speed up and slow down, and so on, as if it’s just another thing going on in the world, but that isn’t actually what’s happening. On a tiny scale, spin is an intrinsic property of matter like electrical charge or its absence. Moreover, it’s quantised. In the same way as there are jumps between values of something on a small scale rather than an infinitely smooth transition, so for example electrical charge is either neutral, equivalent to an electron, the reverse of an electron, and if a quark either -⅓ or + ⅔ or the opposite for their antiquarks, which add up to an equivalent charge to the electron when they form a nucleon, which is just as well because otherwise atomic matter couldn’t exist. This will become relevant.

Spin has been described as “classically non-describable two-valuedness”, as it’s indescribable in the sense that it can’t actually be properly understood but must exist. Subatomic particles don’t literally spin in the same sense as a wheel or planet, but behave as if they do. All subatomic particles have a spin of either a whole number or a multiple of ½ other than a whole number. The former are bosons, the latter fermions. Fermions are “stuff” and bosons forces, so for example quarks and electrons are fermions and gluons and photons are bosons. Non-integral spin particles have a peculiar property which doesn’t seem to make sense, which is that to reverse their spin they need to be turned through not one but two full circles. How is this possible? Well, imagine a Möbius strip, which is a joined ribbon with an odd number of twists in it, usually simplified to just one. Following the edge around with your finger pointing to the right will reach the point where it points to the left after 360°. In order to get back to pointing the finger to the right, a further 360°of the strip have to be traversed. It’s easier to do this with a strip of paper or ribbon than try to imagine it, for me anyway. This is a good model for how half-integer spin particles work and how it’s possible for them to have to be turned right round twice before they’re back to their initial state. Incidentally, there’s a short story called ‘A Subway Named Möbius’ where a complicated underground train system has one more tunnel added to it which causes a train to disappear, and it doesn’t come back again until the tunnel gets blocked off again. I’m not by any means saying that’s anything more than a fanciful story, but if a topological analogy of that kind can be made regarding such a fundamental feature of physical reality, albeit on a quantum level, it does make me wonder what’s possible. For instance, it’s possible to imagine that space as a whole is “twisted” in all three dimensions, such that any journey round the Universe ends up with one finding one’s home planet is mirrored, or rather seems to be because one has in fact reversed, because the topology of three-dimensional space could in theory be analogous to a Möbius strip. A Möbius strip with an even number of twists is effectively not one at all.

This property of fermions, for complicated reasons I don’t understand, means that no two fermions can occupy the same energy state. This is not the case with bosons. For instance, a laser consists of innumerable photons in the same energy state because they’re bosons, but it effectively means that light cannot form structured matter. It can do things like form caustics and be focussed to a point, and the like, but fermions can build themselves into atoms. Nuclei have to consist of nucleons in different energy states, although they are less obviously in shells than electrons, but neutron stars also have to be in this state – every single neutron in a neutron star is in its own distinct energy state. The electrons in an atom organise themselves much more clearly into different levels, in the form of the shells which enable the periodic table to exist, with heavier elements having more shells and different properties. Without that, there would be no chemistry and no materials as we know them. The fact that I don’t understand this is a source of discomfort to me which I feel very driven to remedy, but right now that’s how things are. It also makes me wonder about Bose-Einstein condensates. These are an unusual state of matter which happens when a low-density gas consisting of bosons is cooled to almost absolute zero and the atoms become overlapping waves and ultimately a single, collective wave comprising all the atoms because they’re larger than the distances between them. Although atoms are made of fermions, each atom as a whole can be a boson if the total number of nucleons and protons is even, so this means that the possibility of attaining this state depends on isotope number as well as what kind of element the gas is, in a similar way to how helium-4 becomes a superfluid at a higher temperature than helium-3. If they were fermions, this would be impossible because they wouldn’t be able to occupy the same energy state.

For us to exist, spin must also, and there also have to be integral and non-integral varieties. It’s a sine qua non of our reality. The Multiverse presumably means there are other universes where there are, for example, only fermions or bosons, or perhaps universes where there is no spin, but these are all very boring places. A universe with just bosons would have no structured matter but instead consist of rays of energy, and one with just fermions would have no structured matter either but simply electrons.

A particle is supposed to have mass, charge and spin. Of the charge values, these can be either positive, negative or neutral, and of the integral and non-integral varieties mentioned above depending on whether quarks, leptons or both make them up. This addition also occurs with spin. Neutral particles clearly do exist, for instance neutrons, whose existence can be deduced fairly easily with precise enough measurements. Chlorine has two common stable isotopes, and if one does something like react salt with something else in distilled water or tries to make a saturated solution of pure sodium chloride in it, one is soon confronted with the fact that the ratio between the weights of the same amount of salt and other substances has to involve a fraction. This is because all normal chlorine is a mixture of the two types of atoms with different numbers of neutral particles, and these are neutrons. Mass, charge and spin all have to be conserved in nuclear and other processes, so for example if a potassium-40 atom emits a positron, one of its protons must become a neutron and it becomes argon-40, and unstable particles decay into various different “fragments”, but they must all add up to having the same charge and spin. Hence a negatively charged muon may become an electron with the same charge but since an electron is so much less massive than a muon, the spin, i.e. the angular momentum, still has to go somewhere, which is into a muon neutrino and an electron neutrino. Likewise, when a neutron leaves the safe confines of an atomic nucleus it only has about a quarter of an hour to “live”, and will decay into a proton and an electron, conserving charge, and also an electron neutrino. They have extremely low mass but observation of the 1987 CE supernova 168 000 light years away revealed that they do have some because of the timing of their arrival here compared to light. Supernovæ produce bursts of neutrinos because the protons in them collapse into a neutron star, converting themselves to neutrons in the process and emitting neutrinos. There are three types of neutrinos, associated with tauons, muons and electrons.

Neutrinos are a bit mind-boggling because they have no mass or charge but only spin,but they must exist because otherwise the accounts wouldn’t balance, as it were. However, there was a problem with solar neutrinos detected in the 1960s, when it turned out the Sun was producing fewer of them than current physics said it should. Until this was resolved, it was possible, though of course extremely unlikely, that for some reason the Sun had stopped working and that the light and heat we were getting from it was simply the last blast of a defunct star, so in a way it was quite worrying, but it’s okay now.

Before I get to the next bit, I want to mention a much older form of philosophy than nuclear physics. Back in the day, there were supposed to be four elements opposed to each other: earth, air, fire and water. Each had two qualities opposed to each other, namely dry and wet and cold and hot. Their atoms were also supposed to correspond to the five Platonic polyhedra, which is why there are five elements rather than four. All of this makes mathematical sense and you can imagine flipping the eight-pointed star round, turning it through 90° and so on – it’s symmetrical. It could even have predictive power in that if one of them was missing, its qualities could be determined, and it has correspondances in alchemy, psychology, astrology and humoral medicine, the last of which is actually useful in herbalism. However, it isn’t applicable to science as it’s usually practiced today, and someone claiming to use it, as I just did, might be seen as undermining their ethos. Nonetheless, the symmetry is real.

By Mike Gonzalez (TheCoffee) – Work by Mike Gonzalez (TheCoffee), CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=284321

There’s also a symmetry in the physics of elementary particles, which allows one to anticipate where gaps may exist implying other particles yet to be discovered. Symmetries can be analysed by group theory in mathematics. One of the most obvious places where this crops up is with Rubik’s cubes, where certain turns may or may not be performed in a particular order to return the cube to its original state. With Rubik’s cubes there are also “orbits”. If you take one to pieces and put it back together arbitrarily, the chances are you will have placed it in another orbit in which there is no arrangement with all the faces the same colour. I think there are eight of these. Groups also apply to arithmetic, so it makes sense to introduce them with that familiar subject. A group is a set with some operations of a certain kind performable on it. It has an identity element, inverse elements and these are associative. For instance, addition and integers form a group because adding zero doesn’t change a number, adding a positive number can be undone by adding the same negative number and it doesn’t matter where you put the brackets: (2+1)+3 = 2+(1+3). Likewise with a Rubik’s cube, keeping it in the same position and turning the top row one twist to the right and then the right hand side one twist downward can be undone by turning the right hand side one twist upward and the top row one twist to the left, and there’s also an identity element in that if you leave the cube alone, it stays the same, which sounds a bit silly but these are just two examples of groups which can be easily understood. Group theory is relevant to crystallography and cryptography. Take this sentence, for example. ROT13 turns it into “Gnxr guvf fragrapr sbe rknzcyr”, and applying ROT13 to it again turns it back into “Take this sentence for example”.

Physics has various symmetries. For instance, there’s symmetry between matter and antimatter, and there are other symmetries such as the correspondence between leptons and quarks. Electrons, muons and tauons accord with up and down, charm and strangeness and top and bottom. The names of up/down and top/bottom are not accidental, although there were moves to name top and bottom truth and beauty instead.

Group theory can be used to classify different forms of symmetry. Spin falls into the SU(2) group. This is one of the Lie groups, which are groups which also behave like spaces. SU groups are “Special Unitary” groups, and I should point out here that I have never knowingly understood matrices and they were a significant hole in my mathematical knowledge at school, because I could never understand how to multiply them, so I’m just going to have to let this pass and say this is this thing, this is out there, and that’s it. I believe I can safely assume that anyone with at least a CSE in maths will get them and understand this better than I can because it’s just my personal blind spot. Having said that, I will kind of give it a go.

There are six flavours of quark: up, down, strangeness, charm, top and bottom. These can be arranged in a hexagon and can be swapped to some extent. A neutron is two down quarks and one up, and a proton two up and one down. The names seem to relate to these properties, because if up and down were swapped in an atomic nucleus it would swap the neutrons and protons. Mathematically this can be envisaged as being part of the SU(3) group, and this is the other area in which the word “spin” has been used: isospin. Isospin is another property of matter which has the same kind of symmetry as spin but is not spin. Then again, spin in the subatomic sense is really quite far from our intuitive understanding of rotating objects, so the fact that this is also called spin, relatively speaking, is not a big leap from the other kind of spin. It’s also why the words “top”, “bottom”, “up” and “down” are used. Just as an electron can be thought of as having an arrow pointing up which can be flipped through two turns to be an arrow pointing down, although it has no link with gravity which determines up and down in everyday parlance, so can some quarks be thought of as “up”, flippable conceptually to “down”, and “top”, flippable to “bottom”. If SU(3) is applied to hadrons (mesons or nucleons), they can be flipped to other hadrons with similar properties. Another application of group theory revealed a gap in the pattern which turned out to be the omega-minus particle consisting of three strange quarks, which was detected and confirmed that group theory could be fruitfully applied to isotopic spin.

Why is it called “isospin” or “isotopic spin”? Well, nuclei are isotopes of various kinds, so for example there’s helium-3, made of two protons and one neutron, as well as helium-4, consisting of two protons and two neutrons, and tritium, an isotope of hydrogen comprising two neutrons and one proton. If the nucleons in these were swapped, they would respectively be tritium, helium-4 and helium-3. This is a form of symmetry pertaining to isotopes, and it influences their stability because there are certain isotopes of elements which would be stable whether or not the neutrons in them were protons and vice versa, and these are particularly stable isotopes. Extending this into the transuranic realm of synthetic elements, it’s possible to predict which isotopes of heavy elements are likely to be the most stable.

It’s also a system of classification, because at one point in the mid-twentieth century a large number of hadrons were known, almost all of which seemed to have no prospect of being part of ordinary matter or having any special relevance to it, which was very puzzling. Another, more recent, puzzle is whether this is just a case of making pretty patterns, albeit useful ones, out of elementary particles or whether it reflects something profound about the nature of physical reality. Murray Gell-Mann, who thought this up, referred to it as the Eightfold Path à la Buddhism, and Fritjof Capra has written extensively on the idea of links between subatomic physics and Eastern spiritual concepts such as Daoism. Western philosophers tend to think of this as jejune and crass.

There is an issue regarding what appears to be the appropriation of quantum physics ideas by the New Age movement in such films as ‘What The Bleep Do We Know?’ and ‘The Secret’. On the other hand, there is also the question of whether this is an excessively proprietorial attitude on the part of some nuclear physicists and academics. But that’s a topic for another post.

Mind Over Antimatter

Illustrative purposes only – will be removed on request

Spoilers for Doctor Who’s ‘Planet Of Evil’, Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s ‘Normal Again’ and Space 1999’s ‘Matter Of Life And Death’ follow.

I’ve been watching a lot of old SF TV and films recently, and have now reached the mid-’70s. Well, I say that. What I’m actually doing is following Anderson productions through from ‘The Dark Side Of The Sun’ down towards the present, but that isn’t exactly my focus today because I’ve noticed two interestingly similar uses of a science fiction motif which don’t seem to make a lot of sense, one in ‘Space: 1999’ and one in ‘Doctor Who’: antimatter.

Antimatter is definitely not what it’s shown to be in either of these. Starting with ‘Doctor Who’, there’s the serial ‘Planet Of Evil’, whose air dates are 27th September to the 18th October 1975, and with ‘Space 1999’ (is there a colon there?), the episode ‘A Matter Of Life And Death’, broadcast on 27th November 1975. Hence these two are very close together. This could almost be titled ‘The Depiction Of Antimatter In British SF Shows of autumn 1975’. The weird thing about the two of these is that both of them make antimatter into something it absolutely is not.

I’m going to start with describing what antimatter really is, how it was discovered and so forth. The first hint that antimatter was possible was Paul Dirac’s 1928 CE paper ‘The Quantum Theory Of The Electron’ which pointed out that there didn’t seem to be any reason why electrons should have negative charge. They just did. Now there’s a device called a cloud chamber, which contains humid air almost at the point where it starts to form droplets of water in a fog, and this is used to detect subatomic particles, which leave vapour trails behind them due to upsetting the delicate balance of the conditions. Other, similar devices are bubble and spark chambers. If a magnetic field is applied through a cloud chamber, it unsurprisingly causes charged particles to curve in a direction corresponding to their charge, so for example α particles, which are doubly positively charged helium nuclei, will go one way and electrons, which are negatively charged, will go the other. At any time, cosmic rays are passing through the atmosphere, objects on Earth and Earth itself in the case of neutrinos, so any cloud chamber will detect various particles from those, although most are filtered out by Earth’s own magnetic field. Thus you get a wide “zoo” of different kinds of particles constantly raining down from space, including β particles, which are just fast electrons and can be bent by a magnetic field. At some vague and disputed time in the late 1920s CE, scientists began to notice that not only were there electrons, but there were also other particles which seemed to be exactly the same as electrons except for one thing: they bent the other way in a magnetic field. In other words, they were positively rather than negatively charged. These particles were dubbed “positrons”.

Since I’m primarily talking about fiction here, I’m going to talk about Isaac Asimov’s use of these in his “positronic robots”. Asimov’s robot stories are primarily about the ethics practiced by said robots, but there’s a blurry technical background to them in that they all have positronic brains. This is essentially technobabble, but the idea is that robots’ heads contain something rather like a computer (and Asimov’s first stories in this vein more or less predate the invention of the digital computer) made of platinum-iridium alloy which operates by the creation and destruction of positrons. On one occasion, Asimov comments “no, I don’t know how this is done”. Since his focus is on the Three Laws, this is just off happening to one side and is rarely the focus of his fiction, but one thing he does say is that a positronic brain cannot be made without conforming to those laws. However, the reason for this seems to be that they have been such a central part of the ethics of US Robots that in order to do so, one would have to reinvent the wheel, so it isn’t that there’s a fundamental physical principle that makes this impossible. That said, in one of his stories a human character is captured by an alien robot which also obeys the Three Laws to the extent that it, too, “cannot harm a human being or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm”, so it seems that whereas there is no physical reason why using positrons prevents a robot from acting unethically, it’s more like the utility and function of such a machine is fundamentally ethical, in the same way as, for instance, any light source is going to have to emit visible light to be worthy of the name, so there is a reason why they’re like that which is as immutable as the principle of using positrons, but it works on a different basis which is more social, perhaps related to Asimov’s other big concept, psychohistory.

Although all of this is very vague, it’s still possible to discern a limited amount of nebulous creativity around the concept, if it’s worthy of that name. Platiniridium, as the alloy is in reality known, has some real world features which communicate something about the situation. Their use signals that the positronic brain is of extremely high value, since platinum is dearer than gold. The two metals are among the heaviest, that is the densest, of the chemical elements, communicating that positronic brains are very weighty, i.e. important. Platinum also has the reputation of being shiny, so it’s bright, an attribute which can be used metaphorically for intelligence, and also a sense of high technology – a gleaming bright ultra-scientific future. I can’t say that all of these things were operating in Asimov’s mind when he thought of it, but they are all in there for a reader. Another less obvious aspect, bearing in mind that he was originally a chemist, is that the alloy is particularly unreactive and has a very high melting point, so it’s resistant to physical assaults, which is what constant bombardment with positrons would be. However, this can’t be taken far beyond the figurative realm because in fact there’s no reason to suppose, and nor was there in the 1930s, that platiniridium would be any more resistant to damage from positrons than any other kind of atomic matter. If significant amounts of positrons were moving through platiniridium alloy, they would increasingly ionise both elements, they would become oxidised and probably melt from the extreme heat generated.

There does in fact seem to be a way of building a valve-based positronic computer, and it would have certain advantages, one of which is that it wouldn’t need an external power source, but any such device would also be extremely radioactive and dangerous, so it could only really safely operate in deep space, and there’s no particular reason for doing so. Another area in which positrons could be said to have sort of come up is in the electron holes which allow transistors, and therefore microchips, to operate. These are the absence of particles behaving as if they’re real, but oppositely charged, so if there could be a form of matter allowing electrons and positrons to co-exist, this would be a genuine aspect of computing where they would have a rôle. However, Asimov was writing at a time before electronic digital computers existed as such. Colossus, the first stored-program digital computer, was built in 1943, three years after ‘Robbie’ was written. Also, although the possibility of antimatter had first been thought of in 1898, at the time he was writing, positrons were en vogue but other antiparticles had yet to be detected and were probably absent from even the scientifically-educated public consciousness, though of course not to actual physicists.

The key feature of positrons in this usage was probably their ephemeral nature, like that of thoughts in the conscious mind, and in general there is no complex set of ideas in his fiction to back this particular one up. In fact it’s rather unusual in that respect, as he was a professional scientist and often provided a lot of technical detail regarding such things. For instance, at around the same time he wrote a story about a spoon made of ammonium ions which looked exactly like it was made of metal but turned out to stink horribly and was therefore unusable, and this is based on the common observation that the ammonium ion, NH₄⁺, behaves rather similarly to an alkali metal such as sodium or potassium and could perhaps be made to form into a bulk metal in some way. This is speculative, to be sure, and doubtless impractical, but the scientific detail involved is considerable and important. Compared to that, his positronic brain is very vague. In fact, whereas Asimov is generally a hard science fiction writer, the only major exception being the usual one of allowing faster-than-light travel when he’s actually writing SF as opposed to fantasy, the positronic brain is more a soft sci-fi idea, more like a light sabre or a food pill than a robot (ironically) or an alien.

The concept was borrowed from his work into a number of others, including ‘Doctor Who’ and ‘Star Trek’. The earliest mention in the former seems to be in 1966, in the Second Doctor story ‘The Power Of The Daleks’, where a character erroneously speculates that the Daleks might be controlled by one. In ‘The Evil Of The Daleks’, broadcast the same year, the same regeneration attempts to implant the “human factor” into such a device, to be placed in a Dalek. Later, in the Fourth Doctor serial ‘The Horns Of Nimon’, a robot is understood to be controlled by a “positronic circuit”. In ‘Star Trek’, the android known as Data has a positronic brain, and the phrase “Asimov’s dream of a positronic brain” is used at one point as if it was a well thought-out concept with firm theoretical underpinnings, and also some sort of technological Holy Grail. In the ‘Star Trek’ universe, they’re supposed to have the ability to configure and program themselves in a way which would be impossible with electronic circuitry. What the concept does, insofar as it is one rather than just a vague idea, is create a non-existent type of technology which can have all sorts of things projected onto it without annoying plausible scientific facts getting in the way. I’d go so far as to say ‘Doctor Who’ does the same thing, particularly where the human factor is being induced into the Daleks using them. When asked about whether his robots were conscious, Asimov replied that they were, and ‘Reason’ certainly suggests that they are through the deployment of the Cartesian method of doubt by QT-1. If you believe that some objects are conscious and others not, as most adults in the West probably do right now, you are stuck with the problem of what could make something like a computer conscious, and his solution to that, and even more so that of ‘Star Trek’ and ‘Doctor Who’, is to posit the positron as a potentially perceiving particle. This is possible because it’s outside everyday experience.

Positrons are simply one example of antimatter, and moreover, one which managed to escape from the general science-fictional concept, possibly because although they are anti-electrons they’re only rarely called that. The wider concept of antimatter turns up particularly in the matter-antimatter generators which release energy to power star drives in all sorts of stories, and this, assuming antimatter can be manufactured in bulk, is an entirely feasible use, because the total energy locked up in matter and antimatter would be released if they came into contact with each other, usually creating an almighty explosion. This is what the equation E=mc² expresses, or rather, it expresses the quantity of energy present in matter. There’s enough energy in a single grain of sugar to keep the population of Melton Mowbray alive for life, and from this it can be seen that chemical energy is ridiculously inefficient. However, such a prodigious release of energy is potentially very dangerous, and this has been used in science fiction as well, in the form of the Total Conversion Bomb.

These are both relatively scientifically plausible ideas, and given that enough antimatter could be found or produced, both would be entirely feasible. They blow fusion power and bombs out of the water of course, and given that existing weapons of mass destruction are worrying enough, they may not be desirable but the fact remains that they probably could exist quite easily. But for some reason, in autumn 1975 two science fiction TV series ended up using the concept of antimatter in a really weird way which is completely alien to scientific theory and shows no signs of ever being realistic.

The first of these is ‘Planet Of Evil’, a Doctor Who adventure, with the classic Fourth Doctor and Sarah-Jane Smith lineup at the start of the Hinchcliffe era. I read the Terrance Dicks novelisation rather than the TV version, probably because I was watching ‘Space 1999’ on the Other Side! The Tardis picks up a distress signal from Zeta Minor, a planet on the edge of the Universe, over thirty thousand years in the future from whenever Sarah Jane comes from (see Unit Dating Controversy) in the year 37 166 CE. It turns out there’s an antimatter monster on the planet who is killing everyone, and is able to pass between this Universe and the antimatter Universe via a pool of antimatter, which is black and has no reflections. The Morestrans are a species or race whose sun is going out and they’ve arrived on the planet to mine antimatter ore, which will provide energy for their planet for generations to come. However, the antimatter is prevented from leaving the planet by the planet itself, and it also acts like the potion in ‘Strange Case Of Doctor Jekyll And Mister Hyde’ by gradually bringing out a primal, evil side in people.

To analyse this, antimatter in this does seem to share some properties with real antimatter in one way, sort of, in that it provides a prodigious source of energy. However, it isn’t clear that this is only because it interacts with matter, which is potentially just as good a source. It isn’t a property of antimatter specifically. Antimatter also seems to be “evil”. It opposes matter in the sense that it’s its enemy. In a sense this is also true, because matter and antimatter are each others’ enemies in that they annihilate each other, but here it’s more like matter is good and antimatter evil. I haven’t read Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella so I don’t know if he goes into what’s in the potion or whatever, but I suspect that antimatter here is largely a plot device to represent that potion in an updated way. The idea of antimatter being present in an ore of ordinary matter probably doesn’t make much sense, because if there were actual atoms of antimatter, there’d also have to be a way to prevent them from coming into contact with matter or they would immediately mutually wipe each other out. The idea that such a thing could exist somewhere “out there” depends on Einstein’s famous dictum that “the Universe is not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine”. This is clearly true, but there’s no reason to suppose that antimatter ore made largely of matter is possible at all. To me, it suggests some kind of electromagnetic suspension of particles in a cage-like crystal structure, and it might happen that positrons could be captured by positively charged ions in a rock. This raises the question of how close bits of matter and antimatter could get before they interact destructively, and this is an important issue because of the quantum mechanical implications of the probability of a particular particle being in a specific location. Given that, it seems that two pieces of matter and antimatter approaching each other would increase their probability of annihilation as they got closer, which also means there’s an issue regarding the speed of light. But all of this is beside the point because it isn’t about the properties of real matter and antimatter but what it means in this ‘Doctor Who’ story, which being based on the novella will presumably be to do with the potential for good and evil coexisting in all of us and in Victorian terms the hypocrisy of private actions and public appearances, which is likely still to have been valid in 1974, when I presume it was written, and of course today. Given our current hindsight and the likes of Savile at the BBC doing what he did, and this being kept quiet or just rationalised away, ‘Face Of Evil’ comes across in a more sinister way as almost a commentary on child abuse happening at the time. In this context, antimatter becomes the inner evil, secret, hidden side, and there’s also a sense of greed in wanting the power from antimatter ore and that power corrupting.

The location of the planet, at the edge of the Universe, is probably also relevant and in fact this is what I mainly got from reading it. The pool, mysterious and bottomless, is like a portal into a neighbouring universe where antimatter dominates. I get the impression that there’s a kind of “Duoverse” with a plane down the middle, with matter on one side and antimatter on the other, and that the two sides are in an uneasy truce. Zeta Minor is like a border checkpoint between two mutually hostile territories. There’s also the influence of ‘Forbidden Planet’ and therefore also ‘The Tempest’, and the Doctor does in fact quote Shakespeare in the story. The famous jungle set is clearly linked to the isle which is “full of noises”. The monster is thus very obviously Caliban, although the story is directly based on the film rather than the play and there are differences. The semi-visible monster closely resembles that in the film, and in the case of the Doctor Who story the semi-visibility is to do with it only being partly in our Universe, i.e. world, and incapable of reaching all the way into it, and therefore being essentially other-wordly. But the trouble is that I can’t go into much depth about ‘Planet Of Evil’ because of my unfamiliarity with it, and also with Shakespeare and Robert Louis Stevenson.

The other example is much fresher in my mind, as I only watched it yesterday. ‘Space 1999: Matter Of Life And Death’, and I think there’s no article in this title either, so it refers directly to antimatter having those fundamental qualities, or perhaps matter being life and antimatter being death. So far, the entire series of ‘Space 1999’ has seemed quite odd to me, being closer to space horror like ‘Alien’ and ‘Event Horizon’, and of course the children’s book ‘Galactic Aliens’, than science fiction or space opera. Then again, ‘Doctor Who’, particularly of the Hinchcliffe Era, has strong elements of that genre too, but because it wasn’t on the Other Side, I might judge it less harshly. Even so, ‘Matter Of Life And Death’ is a problematic episode among many of the same in the series, which however I’ll leave largely aside for a future date. If the viewer takes the idea that Helen Russell is simply being allowed to see things less apocalyptically after the calamity at the climax of the episode, it makes the whole of the rest of the series take place in her imagination. It’s very like the Buffy episode ‘Normal Again’, but if a series of such high quality is allowed to do that, so should ‘Space 1999’ be judged fairly. In any event, I’m not here to discuss the whole of that series in depth although it is worth remembering that this is very far indeed from hard SF at this point.

Here’s the plot: An Eagle reconnaissance mission has discovered an apparently perfect planet for human life, which is named Terra Nova. During their visit, their craft is struck by lightning, knocking both crew members senseless, and returns automatically to Moonbase Alpha. When it lands, Dr Helen Russell goes aboard to find a third person present: her missing presumed dead husband, mysteriously revived and present on a distant planet he never went anywhere near, as far as she knows. When taken to Alpha’s medical bay, their equipment is unable to detect heartbeat or any other vital signs and it also turns out that he only has a normal pattern of body heat when he’s in her presence. There is pressure to discover more about the planet and considerable enthusiasm to settle on it, so he’s injected with a dangerous stimulant drug. He’s monosyllabic and largely unresponsive to everyone after this except his wife, with whom he has a more involved conversation and others conclude that he is using her life force to sustain his own life. He’s taken to be questioned and says he can’t tell where he came from but can tell them the planet is dangerous to them. He also says that Terra Nova is inhabited, “but not in the way you think”, then dies when he hears they will go there anyway. After his death, his body begins to “reverse polarity” (it actually says that!), which is a sign that it’s going to become antimatter, and this is dangerous because of the release of energy which will probably destroy Moonbase Alpha when it’s complete. The corpse then vanishes, after shocking someone with a burst of energy. They land on the planet. All seems well at first, and in fact this scene of their arrival is one of the few in the series I clearly remember. Everything seems fine, with parrots, edible fruit, breathable air and potable water. Then the Moonbase fails and the entire satellite explodes, a landslide kills Koenig and Sandra goes blind. After all that, Helen’s husband appears again and tells her it’s all about perception and she can choose to see things the way they were.

This is a largely unsatisfactory story of course, partly because it’s in the “it was all a dream” category, which at least one other ‘Space 1999’ episode, and also an episode of ‘UFO’ also do, and this is really scraping the bottom of the barrel. It’s been seriously suggested that the writers were on acid when they came up with the idea, but leaving all that aside it’s still interesting to consider how it portrays antimatter. First of all, apparently a gradual transition from matter to antimatter is possible. Professor Bergman refers to “reversed polarity”, which I think is probably also a reference to ‘Doctor Who’, but also presumably means there’s an intermediate stage during which the subatomic particles making up the corpse only have some of their properties reversed, such as spin or charge, without being fully-fledged antiparticles. To be honest I do have some sympathy with the idea of there being particles preserving symmetry in other ways, but I get the feeling this is a very naïve view of physics, so I’m going to stick with the idea that it’s all or nothing: something is either a specific particle or its antiparticle with nothing in between. Otherwise it would be like saying something is slightly reflected. Alternatively, maybe it means that some of the particles have converted but others haven’t, which is again unfeasible as this would cause a huge surge of energy fuelled by mutual annihilation.

This episode is clearly inspired by ‘Solaris’, originally a story by Stanisław Lem and later made into two films (and an operating system). However, for some reason both films and the novel are so much better than this. ‘Solaris’ is extremely thought-provoking and lends itself to many interpretations. Its sentient ocean is replaced here by antimatter, which has a protean nature and is utterly alien. The idea seems to be that antimatter does not belong in this Universe but is able to mix with it to a limited extent, and is essentially mysterious and incomprehensible to us. The statement that the planet both is and is not inhabited is part of this. It corresponds to a wider sense of mystery and alienness found throughout the series. And of course, antimatter is once again metaphorical.

I can only presume that the concept of antimatter was topical at the time due to some kind of scientific breakthrough, which led to it being included in these scripts. Having said that, I do think the perception of antimatter is significant for both. The particle I think of as “gypsy”, also known as a psion or psi meson, was detected first in 1974, and whether it was valid or not there was also the idea that atomic matter included a small admixture of charmed matter where one of the quarks of a nucleon was replaced by a charm quark. This is not the same as antimatter, because there’s no fundamental incompatibility involved, but I don’t know if it’s actually the case or possible. My own impression of charm at the time was that it made some nucleons slightly more massive, causing matter to clump together in the form of galaxies rather than be spread smoothly throughout the Universe, but please remember I was only seven at the time and didn’t know much about nuclear physics. In any event, if this kind of mixture was a current idea in science at the time, the popular understanding of it might allow for the notion that there could be a metastable mixture of matter and antimatter which lasted more than a tiny fraction of a nanosecond but was still unstable over a short term compared to a human lifespan, and this mixture idea occurs in both works – the corpse in ‘Space 1999’ and the ore in ‘Doctor Who’. Both of them include a strong component of otherness in their idea of antimatter. In ‘Planet Of Evil’ it seems to be linked to ideas of horror and another universe at war with this one, which is kind of metaphorically true of matter and antimatter. In ‘Matter Of Life And Death’, antimatter is dangerous but also just utterly alien and beyond our understanding, and may also be linked to the idea of the Other Side in the sense of a spirit world beyond death. There’s an occult flavour to both of these.

On one level I find it quite annoying when scientific concepts are used like this. There doesn’t seem to be a good reason for using those specific ideas rather than something more fantastic and obviously made up which has no pretensions to a scientific basis. On another, I do have sympathy with it, because it attempts to express the essential mystery of what I might call “The Beyond”. There’s a very human projection here of fear of the unknown, but also sense of wonder, which is essential to science fiction. I’m not sure whether I’d describe either of these series as science fiction though.

One of the factors in play here is having to put series on screen for popular consumption. ‘Star Trek’ has this issue too, as do probably all TV series aiming for more than a niche audience. It’s like the limeflower tea sold in supermarkets which also has lime peel in it because that’s what some consumers expect. On the other hand, a character in ‘Space 1999’ itself makes an interesting point in another episode, that as time goes by a mythology for the modern age will be created, and it’s possible that this is what’s happening here. But we also have to live in a scientifically literate civilisation.

I’ve also noticed that I’m a lot more forgiving of technobabble and its consequences on ‘Doctor Who’ than I am on ‘Space 1999’, and I can’t help thinking that this is simply because the latter is on the Other Side. Maybe to me, BBC TV matters, and ITV antimatters.