If you’ve seen one science fiction doomsday movie, you can probably recognize (even predict) the plotting twists and turns in most other science fiction doomsday movies.
The differences lie in the source of the disaster, such as nuclear war or catastrophic weather; the type of the disaster, such as fire, water, ice or radiation; and where the underlying science in the science fiction lies along the continuum from reasonable to eye-rolling.
And then there’s the all-important aberration – the scenario where the science (whatever science it is) departs from its normally-predictable mode and runs amok.
Consider the case of “2012,” the current doomsday movie with John Cusack starring as a doomsday novelist turned doomsday hero.
At the core of the science in “2012” is the neutrino, a ghostly subatomic particle with no charge and almost no mass. The neutrino interacts so rarely and so weakly with ordinary everyday matter that in any given second, about a hundred trillion (100,000,000,000,000) neutrinos from the sun pass through our bodies with nary a trace.
Most Abundant Particle in the Universe
The “aberration” in the movie: Neutrinos start behaving very badly.
Neutrinos are the most abundant particle detected in the universe so far. There are a billion times as many neutrinos as there are electrons, protons and neutrons, which combine to form the atoms of everyday matter. A neutrino has a mass that is about 1/10,000 of the mass of an electron.
Tracking down and studying neutrinos is a daunting scientific task.
Consider the neutrino experiment known as NUMI-MINOS, headquartered at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, about 30 miles west of Chicago.
Scientists create a beam of neutrinos and aim it at a target 450 miles away in a former iron mine in Soudan, Minnesota, in the far northeast corner of the state. The beam takes about 2.5 thousandths of a second to make the journey from Batavia to Soudan – while traveling right through the earth’s crust. Right through the rock, with virtually no interactions (and no tunnel needed, of course).
About a half-mile below the Soudan surface is an enormous cavern, housing a linear array of octagonal steel plates weighing a total of about 6,000 tons. It takes that much steel to record at most a dozen neutrino interactions in a day, out of the many billions of neutrinos on the beam sent from Fermilab.
Flavors and Oscillations
Have you got it so far? Fusion at the core of the sun produces neutrinos. Hundreds of trillions of neutrinos are passing right through the earth on a steady basis, all the way through without stopping or leaving much of a trace. Neutrinos rarely interact with any forms of everyday matter. So far, the movie is on firm ground with the basic science.
OK, now it gets tricky, but it does connect with the pseudo-science in the movie. Neutrinos come in three forms, or “flavors.” They are able to change from one flavor to another, called “oscillation,” but all the neutrinos’ behavior characteristics hold true for all flavors.
Now here comes the scientific takeoff in the movie, the aberration.
Abnormally-huge and frequent solar flares (explosions on the surface of the sun) are bombarding the earth with neutrinos in quantities and intensities that have never been seen before. But these neutrinos are not passing harmlessly through the earth. They are interacting to form some new kind of subatomic particle that is producing microwave radiation and heating the earth’s core. The heated core is creating havoc by producing innumerable volcanoes and off-the-chart earthquakes, splitting and shifting the earth’s crust and creating gigantic tidal waves everywhere.
So now we have left the real science behind (unless some geologists want to chime in) and entered the sci-fi realm. At least some of the basic science is credible. Cue the special effects and let the doomsday plot play out. Kick back and enjoy the ride, which is what movies like “2012” are all about.
Mike Perricone - For nearly a decade, I served as Senior Editor and science writer in the Office of Public Affairs at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory ...
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