How to make science really shine
The latest film to draw on physics may be totally implausible, says Roger Highfield, but it has an impeccable adviser and, just for once, a handsome boffin
In Sunshine, the forthcoming sci-fi epic, it is 2057 and our Earth is freezing over. Rising Hollywood star Cillian Murphy is on board the Icarus II, a spacecraft with a mission to deliver a vast nuclear device to reignite our Sun, which is dying.
When Murphy gives a farewell speech to his family as the crew venture out to seed a new star, his hand movements look eerily familiar to those of Dr Brian Cox of Manchester University, a physicist working on a £4.4 billion atom smasher in Geneva called the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC. No wonder, for Cox was behind the scenes to advise the cast and crew of the Danny Boyle film.
Although the science in the film is flaky, it once again underlines how scientific ideas, from artificial intelligence to aliens, have inspired endless blockbusters over the years. And Cox believes that the film is significant for several other reasons. Rather than the usual white-haired, wild-eyed physicist, there is a Hollywood heart throb: Murphy. "It is a great portrayal of a physicist," says Cox. "Better than those seen in Back to the Future and Dr Strangelove."
Traditionally, he says, scientists are the ones who cause all the trouble. As National Science and Engineering Week is under way to help inspire the next generation of boffins, and as university physics departments are increasingly under threat, Dr Cox points out that in Sunshine, which was written by Alex Garland, it is left to Murphy's character, and his knowledge of physics, to save the planet.
Cox, 39, is no stranger to popularisation. He once played keyboards with D:Ream on Top of the Pops. By the time he joined the band - whose hit Things Can Only Get Better was later adopted by the Labour Party as their election anthem - he was studying for his doctorate in particle physics at Manchester. Eventually he could no longer combine the two, backing out of D:Ream's Australian tour so he could finish it.
His protégé, Murphy, first came to international attention with his full frontal performance as the reluctant survivor Jim in Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, the thriller set in post-apocalyptic London, also written by Alex Garland. He appeared with Scarlett Johansson in Girl With A Pearl Earring and played a villain in Batman Begins. In Sunshine he is the scientist who offers a last chance to save the world.
In Cox, Murphy found a soul mate. The actor has also flirted with pop, having played guitar with a Frank Zappa-influenced band, so perhaps it is no accident that they spent a lot of time hanging out together at the LHC. "If his film work takes a downturn, I have offered him a place doing a PhD," says Cox, who also gave the cast regular lectures on solar physics. "He really enjoyed it, as did Chris Evans (another Icarus II crew member, most notably seen in Fantastic Four)."
Cox also enjoyed taking part in the film because he approves of its central proposition. He says: "There is a sense that we are safe if we stay on this planet and don't mess around. Sunshine is more realistic. Eco catastrophes can be the work of Mother Nature too - just look what happened to the dinosaurs in the wake of a massive asteroid impact 65 million years ago. And the only chance we have got for survival comes from science. Finding out how the universe works is not a luxury but a necessity. We are in a dangerous universe and if we don't learn about it, we really are in trouble."
That is why Cox works in Geneva on the LHC, the biggest experiment ever, a 17-mile-circumference collider that sits 100 metres below the French-Swiss border at the European Centre for Nuclear Research, best known by its French acronym CERN.
Cox carries out research on Atlas, one of the "eyes" that will spot the detritus of collisions between protons after they have crashed together to probe deeper into matter than ever before and recreate conditions seen at the Big Bang of creation.
Alex Garland was inspired to write Sunshine, a meditation on the power of nature and how the Sun nourishes life on Earth, by scientific ideas about what is called the "heat death" of a universe - when it has run down to a thin, cold cosmic gruel incapable of supporting life. But, as any science adviser to a sci-fi film knows, the director is there to make a drama, not a documentary. Ugly facts are not allowed to get in the way of a beautiful story. Firing nuclear bombs into the heart of a fading Sun is somewhat unlikely, even though Cox persuaded the film-makers to scale the payload of this particular mission down from the mass of the Moon to a more manageable Manhattan-sized chunk.
Rockets still rumble in the vacuum of space even though, as we know, no one can hear you scream there. Manned missions to the Sun remain pure fiction, though there is a robotic space armada now studying every flicker of our local star. The director was also shocked to discover, after a microgravity flight in what astronauts laughingly call a Vomit Comet, that everything does not happen in slow motion in zero g. But things moved slowly in Sunshine space anyway, so as not to undermine audience expectations.
When it came to the film's central premise - that the Sun is dying - there was a slight problem of timing. It is true that, when its hydrogen fuel runs out, our Sun will eventually swell to 200 times its present size into a red giant. The only problem is that our Sun's demise is estimated to occur in around five billion years, not 50, as in Garland's screenplay. But here Cox could deliver some good news. Over the past few decades theoreticians have let their imaginations run riot because there is so little experimental evidence to check their theories against. Indeed, there are growing fears that the dominant paradigm of physics to explain all the forces and particles at work in the world - string theory - could even be a dead end, articulated forcefully in recent books by Lee Smolin (The Trouble With Physics) and Peter Woit (Not Even Wrong). Until the LHC reveals more of nature's secrets, Cox can raid the vast stockpile of whacky ideas that have accumulated over the years, unfettered by troublesome facts.
The LHC may be able to make a hitherto unseen family of particles, called supersymmetric particles, and these may account for globs of exotic matter - Q-balls - that roam outer space and could damage the Sun. These strange balls of matter became plausible around a decade ago, following studies in which scientists at CERN and the University of California at Los Angeles played with a theory called supersymmetry, which helps unify nature's fundamental forces. "Our back-story for the Sun dying is that a large blob of supersymmetric particles called a Q-ball has drifted into the solar core, and is slowly eating it away," says Cox. "This has been suggested as a possible explanation for gamma-ray bursts," he says, referring to the beams of gamma rays sent out by the most powerful bangs in the cosmos, thought to be created as black holes are born (and the cause of still more headaches for physicists).
There is one problem. "Our Sun is not dense enough to stop a Q-ball: it would fly straight through," he says. "But the general idea is that there is a lot of stuff in the Universe that is not the familiar matter that we are made of, and there are theories in which this stuff is not entirely benign." In fact physicists only understand about four per cent of the universe, the stuff present as atoms and materials we are familiar with, the rest being enigmatically named Dark Matter and, more mysterious still, Dark Energy. To paraphrase an old scientific joke. There is speculation. Pure speculation, cosmology. And a Hollywood screenplay.
# Sunshine is released on April 5. See
www.sunshinedna.com. Details of National Science and Engineering week can be found on
www.the-ba.net