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Haggard after a busy week and not enough sleep. Spent far too much time this afternoon trying to work out what the heck Pip and Jane Baker had got hold of when they wrote the Rani's PowerPoint presentation in the climactic final episode of Time and the Rani. Briefly, her goal is to create a lightweight substitute for strange matter to detonate a strange matter asteroid in order to produce Leptonic Era temperatures to recreate Helium 2.
After which it turns into magick and dinosaurs, but the thing is, up until that point the individual pieces of the plan are drawn from real science - probably from New Scientist. Strange matter is scientifically credible, it would be incredibly dense and therefore massive, ramming a chunk of it into a larger one would create a hell of a bang. If there is any lying around, it would've been cooked up in the early, hot universe.
So you can see where they're getting all of that from. But where the hell does Helium 2 come into it? I assume P&J have the extremely short-lived isotope, aka the diproton, in mind, and not the superfluid from that Larry Niven story. It was thought at one point that, if the strong force was a fraction, erm, stronger, and therefore Helium 2 nuclei were stable, they'd have greedied up all the protons in the early universe and Life As We Know It would not have been possible. (Apparently this proves not to be the case, which is a poke in the eye for the anthropic principle.) So there's a Big Bang link, but the point is that Helium 2 isn't stable.
Once you have your Cavorite, of course, you can do with it whatever your story requires. My best guess is that there was scientific speculation about the production of, or existence of, Helium 2 in the Big Bang. So the Rani's trying to do what a particle accelerator does - recreate the enormous temperatures of those early fractions of a second and thus the elusive substance itself. (Either that, or it's an error for something else that was cooked up in the Bang - Hydrogen 2? Helium 4?)
Seems like a waste of time wondering about a throwaway line in a rather silly story. OTOH, it was Time And Yer Aunty, Logopolis, and Castrovalva, and their borrowing of real scientific terminology if not actual science, which interested me in cosmology in the first place.
To bed!
After which it turns into magick and dinosaurs, but the thing is, up until that point the individual pieces of the plan are drawn from real science - probably from New Scientist. Strange matter is scientifically credible, it would be incredibly dense and therefore massive, ramming a chunk of it into a larger one would create a hell of a bang. If there is any lying around, it would've been cooked up in the early, hot universe.
So you can see where they're getting all of that from. But where the hell does Helium 2 come into it? I assume P&J have the extremely short-lived isotope, aka the diproton, in mind, and not the superfluid from that Larry Niven story. It was thought at one point that, if the strong force was a fraction, erm, stronger, and therefore Helium 2 nuclei were stable, they'd have greedied up all the protons in the early universe and Life As We Know It would not have been possible. (Apparently this proves not to be the case, which is a poke in the eye for the anthropic principle.) So there's a Big Bang link, but the point is that Helium 2 isn't stable.
Once you have your Cavorite, of course, you can do with it whatever your story requires. My best guess is that there was scientific speculation about the production of, or existence of, Helium 2 in the Big Bang. So the Rani's trying to do what a particle accelerator does - recreate the enormous temperatures of those early fractions of a second and thus the elusive substance itself. (Either that, or it's an error for something else that was cooked up in the Bang - Hydrogen 2? Helium 4?)
Seems like a waste of time wondering about a throwaway line in a rather silly story. OTOH, it was Time And Yer Aunty, Logopolis, and Castrovalva, and their borrowing of real scientific terminology if not actual science, which interested me in cosmology in the first place.
To bed!
