It seems that physicists are having a moment in the pop culture scene and they are excited about two television series (Fallout and 3 Body Problem) televised earlier this year in US/Canada.
Fallout (television series)
From an April 12, 2024 news item on phys.org, Note: A link has been removed,
The world ends on Oct. 23, 2077, in a series of radioactive explosions—at least in the world of “Fallout,” a post-apocalyptic video game series that has now been adapted into a blockbuster TV show on Amazon’s Prime Video.
The literal fallout that ensues creates a post-apocalyptic United States that is full of mutated monstrosities, irradiated humans called ghouls and hard scrabble survivors who are caught in the middle of it all. It’s the material of classic Atomic Age sci-fi, the kind of pulp stories “Fallout” draws inspiration from for its retro-futuristic version of America.
But there is more science in this science fiction story than you might think, according to Pran Nath, Matthews distinguished university professor of physics at Northeastern University.
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An April 11, 2024 Northeastern University news release by Cody Mello-Klein, which originated the news item, provides more information from Professor Pran Nath, Note: Links have been removed,
In the opening moments of “Fallout,” which debuted on April 10 [2024], Los Angeles is hit with a series of nuclear bombs. Although it takes place in a clearly fictional version of La La Land –– the robots and glistening, futuristic skyscrapers in the distance are dead giveaways –– the nuclear explosions themselves are shockingly realistic.
Nath says that when a nuclear device is dropped there are three stages.
“When the nuclear blast occurs, because of the chain reaction, in a very short period of time, a lot of energy and radiation is emitted,” Nath says. “In the first instance, a huge flash occurs, which is the nuclear reaction producing gamma rays. If you are exposed to it, people, for example, in Hiroshima were essentially evaporated, leaving shadows.”
Depending on how far someone is from the blast, even those who are partially protected will have their body rapidly heat up to 50 degrees Celsius, or 122 degrees Fahrenheit, causing severe burns. The scalded skin of the ghouls in “Fallout” are not entirely unheard of (although their centuries-long lifespan stretches things a bit).
The second phase is a shockwave and heat blast –– what Nath calls a “fireball.” The shockwave in the first scene of “Fallout” quickly spreads from the blast, but Nath says it would probably happen even faster and less cinematically. It would travel around the speed of sound, around 760 miles per hour.
The shockwave also has a huge amount of pressure, “so huge … that it can collapse concrete buildings.” It’s followed by a “fireball” that would burn every building in the blast area with an intense heatwave.
“The blast area is defined as the area where the shockwaves and the fireball are the most intense,” Nath says. “For Hiroshima, that was between 1 and 2 miles. Basically, everything is destroyed in that blast area.”
The third phase of the nuclear blast is the fallout, which lasts for much longer and has even wider ranging impacts than the blast and shockwave. The nuclear blast creates a mushroom cloud, which can reach as high as 10 miles into the atmosphere. Carried by the wind, the cloud spreads radioactivity far outside the blast area.
“In a nuclear blast, up to 100 different radioactive elements are produced,” Nath says. “These radioactive elements have lifetimes which could be a few seconds, and they could be up to millions of years. … It causes pollution and damage to the body and injuries over a longer period, causing cancer and leukemia, things like this.”
A key part of the world of “Fallout” is the Vaults, massive underground bunkers the size of small towns that the luckiest of people get to retreat into when the world ends. The Vaults are several steps above most real-world fallout shelters, but Nath says that kind of protection would be necessary if you wanted to stay safe from the kind of radiation released by nuclear weapons, particularly gamma rays that can penetrate several feet of concrete.
“If you are further away and you keep inside and behind concrete, then you can avoid both the initial flash of the nuclear blast and also could probably withstand the shockwaves and the heatwave that follows, so the survivability becomes larger,” Nath says.
But what about all the radioactive mutants wandering around the post-apocalyptic wasteland?
It might seem like the colossal, monstrous mutant salamanders and giant cockroaches of “Fallout” are a science fiction fabrication. But there is a real-world basis for this, Nath says.
“There are various kinds of abnormalities that occur [with radiation,]” Nath says. “They can also be genetic. Radiation can create mutations, which are similar to spontaneous mutation, in animals and humans. In Chernobyl, for example, they are discovering animals which are mutated.”
In the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, the genetics of wild dogs have been radically altered. Scientists hypothesize that thewolves near Chernobyl may have developed to be more resistant to radiation, which could make them “cancer resistant,” or at least less impacted by cancer. And frogs have adapted to have more melanin in their bodies, a form of protection against radiation, turning them black.
“Fallout” takes the horrifying reality of nuclear war and spins a darkly comic sci-fi yarn, but Nath says it’s important to remember how devastating these real-world forces are.
It’s estimated that as many as 146,000 people in Hiroshima and 80,000 people in Nagasaki were killed by the effects of the bombs dropped by the U.S. Today’s nuclear weapons are so much more powerful that there is very little understanding of the impact these weapons could have. Nath says the fallout could even exacerbate global warming.
“Thermonuclear war would be a global problem,” Nath says.
Although “Fallout” is a piece of science fiction, the reality of its world-ending scenario is terrifyingly real, says Pran Nath, Matthews distinguished university professor of physics at Northeastern University. Photo by Adam Glanzman/Northeastern University
Kudos to the photographer!
3 Body Problem (television series)
This one seems to have a lit a fire in the breasts of physicists everywhere. I have a number of written pieces and a video about this this show, which is based on a book by Liu Cixn. (You can find out more about Cixin and his work in his Wikipedia entry.)
Here’s a March 26, 2024 Northeastern University news release by Cody Mello-Klein, Note: Links have been removed,
“3 Body Problem,” Netflix’s new big-budget adaptation of Liu Cixin’s book series helmed by the creators behind “Game of Thrones,” puts the science in science fiction.
The series focuses on scientists as they attempt to solve a mystery that spans decades, continents and even galaxies. That means “3 Body Problem” throws some pretty complicated quantum mechanics and astrophysics concepts at the audience as it, sometimes literally, tries to bring these ideas down to earth.
However, at the core of the series is the three-body problem, a question that has stumped scientists for centuries.
What exactly is the three-body problem, and why is it still unsolvable? Jonathan Blazek, an assistant professor of physics at Northeastern University, explains that systems with two objects exerting gravitational force on one another, whether they’re particles or stars and planets, are predictable. Scientists have been able to solve this two-body problem and predict the orbits of objects since the days of Isaac Newton. But as soon as a third body enters the mix, the whole system gets thrown into chaos.
“The three-body problem is the statement that if you have three bodies gravitating toward each other under Newton’s law of gravitation, there is no general closed-form solution for that situation,” Blazek says. “Little differences get amplified and can lead to wildly unpredictable behavior in the future.”
In “3 Body Problem,” like in Cixin’s book, this is a reality for aliens that live in a solar system with three suns. Since all three stars are exerting gravitational forces on each other, they end up throwing the solar system into chaos as they fling each other back and forth. For the Trisolarans, the name for these aliens, it means that when a sun is jettisoned far away, their planet freezes, and when a sun is thrown extremely close to their planet, it gets torched. Worse, because of the three-body problem, these movements are completely unpredictable.
For centuries, scientists have pondered the question of how to determine a stable starting point for three gravitational bodies that would result in predictable orbits. There is still no generalizable solution that can be taken out of theory and modeled in reality, although recently scientists have started to find some potentially creative solutions, including with models based on the movements of drunk people.
“If you want to [predict] what the solar system’s going to do, we can put all the planets and as many asteroids as we know into a computer code and basically say we’re going to calculate the force between everything and move everything forward a little bit,” Blazek says. “This works, but to the extent that you’re making some approximations … all of these things will eventually break down and your prediction is going to become inaccurate.”
Blazek says the three-body problem has captivated scientific minds because it’s a seemingly simple problem. Most high school physics students learn Newton’s law of gravity and can reasonably calculate and predict the movement of two bodies.
Three-body systems, and more than three-body systems, also show up throughout the universe, so the question is incredibly relevant. Look no further than our solar system.
The relationship between the sun, Earth and our moon is a three-body system. But Blazek says since the sun exerts a stronger gravitational force on Earth and Earth does the same on the moon, it creates a pair of two-body systems with stable, predictable orbits –– for now.
Blazek says that although our solar system appears stable, there’s no guarantee that it will stay that way in the far future because there are still multi-body systems at play. Small changes like an asteroid hitting one of Jupiter’s moons and altering its orbit ever so slightly could eventually spiral into larger changes.
That doesn’t mean humanity will face a crisis like the one the Trisolarans face in “3 Body Problem.” These changes happen extremely slowly, but Blazek says it’s another reminder of why these concepts are interesting and important to think about in both science and science fiction.
“I don’t think anything is going to happen on the time scale of our week or even probably our species –– we have bigger problems than the instability of orbits in our solar system,” Blazek says. “But, that said, if you think about billions of years, during that period we don’t know that the orbits will stay as they currently are. There’s a good chance there will be some instability that changes how things look in the solar system.”
An April 12, 2024 news item on phys.org covers some of the same ground, Note: A link has been removed.
The science fiction television series 3 Body Problem, the latest from the creators of HBO’s Game of Thrones, has become the most watched show on Netflix since its debut last month. Based on the bestselling book trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past by Chinese computer engineer and author Cixin Liu, 3 Body Problem introduces viewers to advanced concepts in physics in service to a suspenseful story involving investigative police work, international intrigue, and the looming threat of an extraterrestrial invasion.
Yet how closely does the story of 3 Body Problem adhere to the science that it’s based on? The very name of the show comes from the three-body problem, a mathematical problem in physics long considered to be unsolvable.
Virginia Tech physicist Djordje Minic says, “The three-body problem is a very famous problem in classical and celestial mechanics, which goes back to Isaac Newton. It involves three celestial bodies interacting via the gravitational force—that is, Newton’s law of gravity. Unlike mathematical predictions of the motions of two-body systems, such as Earth-moon or Earth-sun, the three-body problem does not have an analytic solution.”
“At the end of the 19th century, the great French mathematician Henri Poincaré’s work on the three-body problem gave birth to what is known as chaos theory and the concept of the ‘butterfly effect.'”
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An April 8, 2024 Virginia Tech news release, which originated the news item, describes problems with the premise, Note: Links have been removed,
Both the novels and the Netflix show contain a visualization of the three-body problem in action: a solar system made up of three suns in erratic orbit around one another. Virginia Tech aerospace engineer and mathematics expert Shane Ross discussed liberties the story takes with the science that informs it.
“There are no known configurations of three massive stars that could maintain an erratic orbit,” Ross said. “There was a big breakthrough about 20 years ago when a figure eight solution of the three-body problem was discovered, in which three equal-sized stars chase each other around on a figure eight-shaped course. In fact, Cixin Liu makes reference to this in his books. Building on that development, other mathematicians found other solutions, but in each case the movement is not chaotic.”
Ross elaborated, “It’s even more unlikely that a fourth body, a planet, would be in orbit around this system of three stars, however erratically — it would either collide with one or be ejected from the system. The situation in the book would therefore be a solution of the ‘four-body problem,’ which I guess didn’t have quite the right ring to use as a title.
“Furthermore, a stable climate is unlikely even on an Earth-like planet. At last count, there are at least a hundred independent factors that are required to create an Earth-like planet that supports life as we know it,” Ross said. “We have been fortunate to have had about 10,000 years of the most stable climate in Earth’s history, which makes us think climate stability is the norm, when in fact, it’s the exception. It’s likely no coincidence that this has corresponded with the rise of advanced human civilization.”
About Ross
A professor of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering at Virginia Tech, Shane Ross directs the Ross Dynamics Lab, which specializes in mathematical modeling, simulation, visualization, and experiments involving oceanic and atmospheric patterns, aerodynamic gliding, orbital mechanics, and many other disciplines. He has made fundamental contributions toward finding chaotic solutions to the three-body problem. Read his bio …About Minic
Djordje Minic teaches physics at Virginia Tech. A specialist in string theory and quantum gravity, he has collaborated on award-winning research related to dark matter and dark energy. His most recent investigation involves the possibility that in the context of quantum gravity the geometry of quantum theory might be dynamical in analogy with the dynamical nature of spacetime geometry in Einstein’s theory of gravity. View his full bio …
For the last ‘3 Body Problem’ essay, there’s this April 5, 2023 article by Tara Bitran and Phillipe Thao for Netflix.com featuring comments from a physicist concerning a number of science questions,, Note: Links have been removed,
If you’ve raced through 3 Body Problem, the new series from Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss and True Blood writer Alexander Woo, chances are you want to know more about everything from Sophons and nanofibers to what actually constitutes a three-body problem. After all, even the show’s scientists are stumped when they witness their well-known theories unravel at the seams.
But for physicists like 3 Body Problem’s Jin (Jess Hong) and real-life astrophysicist Dr. Becky Smethurst (who researches how supermassive black holes grow at the University of Oxford and explains how scientific phenomena work in viral videos), answering the universe’s questions is a problem they’re delighted to solve. In fact, it’s part of the fun. “I feel like scientists look at the term ‘problem’ more excitedly than anybody else does,” Smethurst tells Tudum. “Every scientist’s dream is to be told that they got it wrong before and here’s some new data that you can now work on that shows you something different where you can learn something new.”
The eight-episode series, based on writer Cixin Liu’s internationally celebrated Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, repeatedly defies human science standards and forces the characters to head back to the drawing board to figure out how to face humanity’s greatest threat. Taking us on a mind-boggling journey that spans continents and timelines, the story begins in ’60s China, when a young woman makes a fateful decision that reverberates across space and time into the present day. With humanity’s future in danger, a group of tight-knit scientists, dubbed the Oxford Five, must work against time to save the world from catastrophic consequences.
Dr. Matt Kenzie, associate professor of physics at University of Cambridge and 3 Body Problem’s science advisor, sits down with Tudum to dive into the science behind the series. So if you can’t stop thinking about stars blinking and chaotic eras, keep reading for all the answers to your burning scientific questions. Education time!
What is a Cherenkov tank?
In Episode 1, the Oxford Five’s former college professor, Dr. Vera Ye (Vedette Lim), walks out onto a platform at the top of a large tank and plunges to her death in a shallow pool of water below. If you were wondering what that huge tank was, it’s called a particle detector (sometimes also known as a Cherenkov tank). It’s used to observe, measure, and identify particles, including, in this case, neutrinos, a common particle that comes largely from the sun. “Part of the reason that they’re kind of interesting is that we don’t really understand much about them, and we suspect that they could be giving us clues to other types of physics in the universe that we don’t yet understand,” Dr. Kenzie told Netflix.
When a neutrino interacts with the water molecules stored inside the tank, it sets off a series of photomultiplier tubes — the little circles that line the tank Vera jumps into. Because Vera’s experiment is shut down and the water is reduced to a shallow level, the fall ends up killing her.
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What are nanofibers?
In the show, Auggie’s a trailblazer in nanofiber technology. She runs a company that designs self-assembling synthetic polymer nanofibers and hopes to use her latest innovation to solve world problems, like poverty and disease. But what are nanofibers and how do they work? Dr. Kenzie describes nanofiber technology as “any material with a width of nanometers” — in other words, one millionth of a millimeter in thickness. Nanofibers can be constructed out of graphene (a one-atom thick layer of carbon) and are often very strong. “They can be very flexible,” he adds. “They tend to be very good conductors of both heat and electricity.”
Is nanofiber technology real, and can it actually cut through human flesh?
Nanofiber technology does exist, although Dr. Kenzie says it’s curated and grown in labs under very specific conditions. “One of the difficulties is how you hold them in place — the scaffolding it’s called,” he adds. “You have to design molecules which hold these things whilst you’re trying to build them.”
After being tested on a synthetic diamond cube in Episode 2, we see the real horrors of nanofiber technology when it’s used to slice through human bodies in Episode 5. Although the nanofiber technology that exists today is not as mass produced as Auggie’s — due to the cost of producing and containing it — Dr. Kenzie says it’s still strong enough to slice through almost anything.
What can nanofiber technology be used for?
According to Dr. Kenzie, the nanofiber technology being developed today can be used in several ways within the manufacturing and construction industries. “If you wanted a machine that could do some precision cutting, then maybe [nanofiber] would be good,” he says. “I know they’re also tested in the safety of the munitions world. If you need to bulletproof a room or bulletproof a vest, they’re incredibly light and they’re incredibly strong.” He also adds that nanofiber technology is viewed as a material of the future, which can be used for water filtration — just as we see Auggie use it in the season finale.
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The Bitran and Thao piece includes another description of the 3 Body Problem but it’s the first I’ve seen that describes some of the other science.
An unsolvable problem?
This Instagram video of physicists from Canada’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics shows reactions to the 3 Body Problem with the 2nd physicist in the group challenging the use of the words ‘unsolvable’ or ‘impossible’, used in some of the excerpts (from the May 2024 Perimeter Institute newsletter received via email).
The Science and Entertainment Exchange
Also mentioned in one of the excerpts in this posting is The Science and Entertainment Exchange (also known as The Science & Entertainment Exchange or Science & Entertainment Exchange) according to its Wikipedia entry, Note: Links have been removed,
The Science & Entertainment Exchange[1] is a program run and developed by the United States National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to increase public awareness, knowledge, and understanding of science and advanced science technology through its representation in television, film, and other media. It serves as a pro-science movement with the main goal of re-cultivating how science and scientists truly are in order to rid the public of false perceptions on these topics. The Exchange provides entertainment industry professionals with access to credible and knowledgeable scientists and engineers who help to encourage and create effective representations of science and scientists in the media, whether it be on television, in films, plays, etc. The Exchange also helps the science community understand the needs and requirements of the entertainment industry, while making sure science is conveyed in a correct and positive manner to the target audience.
Officially launched in November 2008, the Exchange can be thought of as a partnership between NAS and Hollywood, as it arranges direct consultations between scientists and entertainment professionals who develop science-themed content. This collaboration allows for industry professionals to accurately portray the science that they wish to capture and include in their media production. It also provides scientists and science organizations with the opportunity to communicate effectively with a large audience that may otherwise be hard to reach such as through innovative physics outreach. It also provides a variety of other services, including scheduling briefings, brainstorming sessions, screenings, and salons. The Exchange is based in Los Angeles, California.
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I hadn’t realized the exchange was physics specific. Given the success with physics, I’d expect the biology and chemistry communities would be eager to participate or start their own exchanges.
Speculation aside, you can find the Science & Entertainment Exchange here.
A couple more bits about Chinese science fiction
Back in 2019 Canada was having a problem with Malaysia and the Phillipines over the garbage (this is meant literally) that we were shipping over to those counties, which is why an article about Chinese science fiction writer, Chen Qiufan and his 2013 novel, The Waste Tide, caught my attention and I pubisihed this May 31, 2019 posting, “Chen Qiufan, garbage, and Chinese science fiction stories.” There’s a very brief mention of Liu Cxin in one of the excerpts.
The next time Chinese science fiction made an appearance here was in November 16, 2020 posting, “Telling stories about artificial intelligence (AI) and Chinese science fiction; a Nov. 17, 2020 virtual event.” Even though the event is past, you might still want to follow up on one or more of the speakers.