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.
A Box Of Chocolates 