Learning Curve

January 19, 2009

Last summer I wrote about Quantum Quest, an animated 45-minute film set entirely in the subatomic world, where the forces of the Core (protons, photons, neutrinos) battle it out with the antimatter forces of the Void to determine the fate of the universe. Now in post-production, the film is starting to generate a bit of buzz, although it's garnered mixed reactions from those who've either heard about it, or had the chance to view a few clips at last year's Comic-Con. (You can see a preview here.)

On the one hand, NASA is heavily involved, and while we're all NASA fans here (at least of all that cool science NASA funds), it's not the first name that pops to mind when you think of quality children's entertainment. On the other, some truly major names have lent their voices to the project, including William Shatner (who voices the Core) and breakout star Chris Pine ("Dave," a plucky little photon), who will play the young Captain Kirk in J.J. Abrams' forthcoming Star Trek "prequel." Add in Samuel Jackson, Jason Alexander, Mark Hamill, Amanda Peet, Brent Spiner, Sandra Oh, and James Earl Jones, and you've got some serious celebrity street cred going -- enough for Variety to sit up and take notice.

I'm of a more optimistic bent than the skeptics, especially since the film's writer/producer, Harry Kloor (Jupiter 9 Productions) stopped by my office last week to give me a sneak preview of where things stand thus far. Kloor is a scientist -- with not one, but two shiny PhDs -- and deeply engaged with education and outreach, but he's also an unabashed sci-fi fan with bona fide writing chops, having written a few episodes of Star Trek: Voyager, among other TV credits.

That makes Kloor kind of the ideal person to tackle a project like Quantum Quest. I saw rough cuts, with incomplete animation (no texturing, for instance) and storyboards as placeholders in a couple of spots, but even so, it's clear that Kloor has taken pains to delight as well as to teach. The science "lessons" are woven into the storyline, rather than dryly lecturing to the audience. Plus, the animation is excellent, incorporating actual footage taken from various NASA missions, including Cassini-Huygens, SOHO, Mars Odyssey, and Mercury Messenger.

But the story reigns supreme. The script has a decent plot, lively pacing, humorous asides, clever physics in-jokes, fun characters, and if the message gets a bit ham-fisted towards the end -- well, it's no more so than any other family flick, and certainly less nauseating than, say, Barney.

Kloor expects to complete the animation by June, and finish the final touches by this fall, shooting for a November release. And he's looking to partner with various organizations to produce educational materials that teachers can use in the classroom, based on the characters in the film. His philosophy is that you don't need to lecture to kids -- you just need to pique their interest and make them want to know more. Do that, and they'll probably do what all of us grown-up geeks did as kids: we heard about something cool and looked it up.

That's a philosophy I happen to agree with: I can totally see kids Googling "neutrino," or wanting to learn more about the Cassini-Huygens mission after seeing the film. There's just one problem: the science in Quantum Quest occasionally goes far beyond anything that's readily accessible to a non-scientist.

Take my personal favorite characters, the Gell-Mann Ghosts sent after Dave and his neutrino pal to keep them from completing their mission. Google "ghost" and "Gell-Mann" (as in physicist Murray Gell-Mann), and you won't find much information. Even Googling "ghosts" and "physics" turns up mostly paranormal debunking sites. That might be because, while physicists do indeed talk about "ghosts" in their research, it's more of a side dish than the main course -- and it can mean more than one thing, depending on the context.

Fortunately, I have my own personal household physicist to enlighten me. In one context, "ghosts" are hypothetical particles that don't exist. (Neutrinos are sometimes called "ghost particles," but this is something else altogether.) If they did exist, they would have negative energy -- and this, says Sean, would be very bad, in part because it would mean theory did not agree with experimental observations: "Empty space would be catastrophically unstable if there were ghosts." (The existence of "ghosts" would be very good, however, if you wanted to build a stable trasversable wormhole. Many theoretical models call for a form of negative energy to hold such a structure open long enough for an object to pass through.)

See, normally, in particle physics, a muon decays into an electron by spitting out neutrinos, and then the electron is stable. Heavy particles decay into lighter particles, per the Standard Model. If there were negative energy, then we should also see this process in reverse: an electron would "decay" into a muon by producing "ghosts." We don't -- ergo, these sorts of "ghosts" are largely confined to some of the more exotic physical theories.

The above seems like the most likely candidate for Kloor's Gell-Mann Ghosts, except these particles are not the same thing as antimatter (remember, the Void's forces are antimaterial): antimatter has positive energy, and actually exists. We can even make small amounts of the stuff in particle accelerators. Also? "Ghosts" in this context don't have anything to do with Murray Gell-Mann.

Gell-Mann was tangentially involved in a different usage of the term "ghosts," related to Feynman diagrams and quantum field theory. Sean tried to explain it to me, and this appears to be the gist: Feynman diagrams are a handy method for calculating how probable a given "event" will be in quantum field theory, but the process requires one to also include -- solely as a "bookkeeping device" to get the math to come out right -- diagrams with particles that can only exist within the diagram and cannot escape into the outside world to be observed. Much like we don't see "free quarks", these "ghosts" can never be observed all by themselves. Physicists are actually still arguing about this.

Apparently the term "ghost" also crops up in the context of cosmology. Sheesh. No wonder there's no good lay language discussions to be found online. I suppose I could have asked Kloor to explain the science behind his Gell-Mann Ghosts, but where's the fun in that? I invite any theoretical physicists out there to weigh in with their own ideas of what might be behind the "ghosts" in Quantum Quest. Maybe we can all get a spot of advanced science education.

Photos: (top) Dave the Photon and The Core, from Quantum Quest. (middle) Coach Mackey and Milton, war hero turned "free quark" miner. (bottom) Dave the Photon's "home," the core of the Sun. Source: Jupiter 9 Productions.

Comments

[Gordon]

I don't really know how I ended up here instead of the other site since I didnt know it existed, but just lucky, I guess. I really like your short essays
in spite of my occasional prickliness :).

[IceBogan]

The Feynman-diagram ghosts are usually called "Faddeev-Popov ghosts". They're fictitious anti-commuting scalars put inside Feynman diagrams to compensate for too many degrees of freedom in a gauge vector field. I've never heard Gell-Mann's name associated with them.

[Gordon]

It is "Corpus Hypercubus", not "Hydrocubus", but I'll be
charitable and assume it is a typo :)
As a human being, Dali left a lot to be desired. Read Orwell's
essay about him, "Benefit of Clergy". As a draftsman, he was superb.