How accurate is physics depicted in the movies?
“As long as the film stays in its own logic, I can accept other theories”, says Çiğdem İşsever from HU Berlin
Caution is required whenever physics appears in films, says Çiğdem İşsever. She dedicates herself to the fundamentals of particle physics at Humboldt Universität’s Lise Meitner House in Adlershof.
Entertainment formats like to mix facts with fiction. In “Ghostbusters”, the ghosts were captured using a proton package in the early 80s, while the sitcom “The Big Bang Theory” (2007 bis 2019) has Sheldon Cooper and his friends chat casually about physical theories. In the multiverse thriller “The Universal Theory” (2023), which has been nominated for many awards, a physicist explores a theory of everything.
The physics professor Çiğdem İşsever is right in the middle of this world of elementary particles. Her special focus: Exploring the Higgs mechanism, which gives elementary particles their mass without breaking with the mathematical consistency of the Standard Model of particle physics. Moreover, she has been a researcher at the ATLAS experiment of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a storage ring at CERN, the world’s largest research centre for particle physics near Geneva. The conspiracy thriller “Illuminati” (2009) is also set at CERN. However, according to İşsever, not only are the conditions in the laboratory misrepresented, but so is the current research status. In Ron Howard’s adaptation, a thief steals a cylinder that contains a quarter gram of antimatter. “Based on the current state of research, it would take us several billion years to produce this much antimatter,” says İşsever. For comparison: The universe has existed for about 14 billion years. Antimatter is also only useable for a short amount of time. Since 2011, it has been possible to store antihydrogen atoms at CERN for 16 minutes. This short storage period is due to the amount of energy required to store antimatter separately from matter, says the professor.
Charged particles need strong electromagnetic fields to keep their position in a container stable: “In the movie, the energy of a battery is sufficient to separate antimatter from matter. This is unrealistic. You would need much more energy.” İşsever has a conciliatory proposal for problems like these: “As long as the film stays in its own logic, I accept the world created by the film. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy and immerse myself in many films.”
At least, writer Dan Brown described the reaction of antimatter with matter correctly. As soon as the antimatter comes into contact with the walls of the container (matter), a significant portion of the matter and the antimatter will undergo annihilation, resulting in the production of photons (particles of light). The energy released by this can be calculated using Einstein’s formula of E=mc2, which describes the mass–energy equivalence. Mass (m) and energy (E) are connected by the constant of proportionality, the speed of light squared (c2). To calculate the energy contained in a certain mass, mass is multiplied by c2. In “Illuminati”, in which Rome and the Vatican are threatened, the explosive power unleashed would be enormous. More concretely, the researcher estimates “a glaring explosion with the force of five kilotons”; the two atomic bombs dropped in 1945 had a detonation value of 12.5 kilotons (Hiroshima) and 21 kilotons (Nagasaki).
In the Oscar-winning drama “Oppenheimer”, director Christopher Nolan highlights the most important physical findings that led to the construction of the atomic bomb, from the point of view of physicist Robert J. Oppenheimer. Both in the movie as well as in reality, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann succeeded in splitting the uranium core in 1938.
In a fictional scene, at the military Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, Oppenheimer expresses his concerns to Albert Einstein before detonating the first atomic bomb: “Neutrons split the core of an atom and release neutrons that split further cores. Criticality. Irreversibility. Massive explosive force. But in this case, the chain reaction does not stop.” From a scientific point of view, these considerations are baseless, since nuclear fission in the atomic bomb is only possible as long as there is enough fissile material.
It was Lise Meitner who, together with her nephew Otto Frisch, was the first to provide the nuclear physics explanation of uranium fission. İşsever was deeply disappointed that Meitner was not mentioned once in the film: “She should have been mentioned. Meitner was an expert in this field. Unlike Oppenheimer, she had decided against the nuclear research project.”
Susanne Gietl for Adlershof Journal
Prof. Dr. Cigdem Issever — Experimental High Energy Physics (hu-berlin.de)