Being an associate editor of Nature Nanotechnology, I now know a lot more about carbon nanotubes that I ever thought I would. There’s a lot I don’t know, however, and I was surprised by what I learned today…

Every now and then I need to look up some interesting (or otherwise) little fact about nanotubes and just get an idea of what the popular terminology is, i.e., is it a ‘chirality vector’ or a ‘chiral vector’? I won’t spoil that one for you. Anyway, first port of call, as with a lot of people, is the web, and, in particular, Wikipedia. Now, I know that any information garnered from Wikipedia might not necessarily be 100% accurate, but it’s a good place to start for casual references.

So, as I was scanning through the entry on carbon nanotubes, I was interested to see how their cost is normalized to the price of a more widely known chemical product in society:

Single-walled nanotubes are still very expensive to produce, around $1500 per gram as of 2000 (compared to marijuana, which generally costs between $10 and $30 per gram, depending on who you know and how sweet the nug is), and the development of more affordable synthesis techniques is vital to the future of carbon nanotechnology.

I don’t know if this is Wkipedia vandalism or not… anyway, maybe this new standard will give the Big Mac index a run for its money…

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Tonight’s Horizon tackles some very challenging physics. Nature Network London joins the production team to see how they explain the arcane.

Tristan Farrow

Science documentaries are not always well-received by the scientific community. The Great Global Warming Swindle, a recent film from Channel 4, is an extreme example, currently causing a furore among scientists who cite numerous misrepresentations of fact.

Not every documentary is this controversial. But all have to meet the challenge of presenting complicated data to a lay-audience while telling a compelling story. To learn more, I spent a week with the makers of the BBC’s flagship science series Horizon.

Inside the production studio

The mixing studio is housed in a drab 1960’s high-rise block in the middle of Soho. I find Horizon director James van der Pool cooped up in the cutting room, editing the latest instalment of the series. The myriad dials and switches evoke a laboratory that most physics postdocs would find homely.

Here’s a challenge: the biggest experiment in the world is about to swing into action to discover a particle that will either make or break our understanding of the universe, and you are asked to film it. There is a problem – apart from the monumental machines that run the experiment, there is nothing tangible at which you can point your camera. So how do you keep a primetime television audience of millions glued to the screen with such unpromising material?

That was the task facing van der Pool four months ago, when Horizon’s series editor Andrew Cohen, an alumnus of Imperial College, suggested a documentary about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the giant particle accelerator at CERN near Geneva that promises to discover the Higgs particle, believed to give objects their mass.

Making physics sexy

Unlike ‘blockbuster science’ – dinosaurs, space, cloning – less penetrable fields like particle physics can leave audiences cold. “The Higgs particle is an abstract concept which is very difficult to explain,” says van der Pool, who has been directing Horizon documentaries for two years. “You can’t tackle the LHC and the Higgs particle directly. You need a bigger hook to grab attention and a compelling story that people can follow.”

The hook, in this case, is the unsettling idea that the LHC could accidentally produce a black hole and destroy the world. Although conceivable, the odds are vanishingly small, and scientists dispel the idea later in the programme.

From the Big Bang to the LHC

Once viewers have been drawn into the film, they are carried on an upbeat tour of physics by a cast of colourful scientists and their epic quest to understand how the universe began. The tension is ratcheted up half way through, when the scientists’ efforts hit the brick wall of the Cosmic Microwave Background. As van der Pool explains, “To overcome it, the logical next step is to recreate the Big Bang here on earth”. The stage is now set for explaining why the LHC is needed and how it aims to simulate the Big Bang. “The result is a compelling story on which you can hang the LHC experiment. Opening the film with the LHC and the Higgs particle wouldn’t work.”

Mission accomplished?

Many professional scientists remember their interest in science being sparked by programmes like Horizon. Although the format has adapted to a generation that is supposedly less patient, it would be surprising if youngsters watching the series nowadays were left without a sense of wonder. This is science told through the extraordinary tales of human ingenuity, persistence and the thrill of discovery.

‘The Six Billion Dollar Experiment’, Horizon’s documentary about the LHC, will be broadcast on Tuesday 1 May 2007, 9pm on BBC Two