A killer astrophysicist
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.010095
My wife and I have just finished watching the first season of Luther, a police drama on BBC America. Despite its overburden of clichés (the main character, Detective Chief Inspector John Luther, has marital problems, a rookie partner, and a hot temper), the show is compelling to watch, thanks to Idris Elba’s performance as Luther and Ruth Wilson’s performance as Alice Morgan, his amoral antagonist.
In the first episode, Morgan (shown here) murders her parents and gets away with it because she has committed a flawless crime: The police unwittingly destroy incriminating evidence, just as she planned. Luther figures out Morgan’s method, but can’t convict her. For the remaining episodes, Luther and Morgan develop an uneasy relationship of mutual fascination.
Interestingly, the show’s creator, Neil Cross, made Morgan an astrophysicist. Here’s how her character is described on the show’s website :
Alice Morgan went to Oxford University aged 13, a celebrated child genius. She completed her PhD in astrophysics at the age of 18. Now working at a London university as a research fellow, she has spent her life feeling different, special and freakish. For Alice, human existence is insignificant compared to the universe, with its vast galaxies and black holes. Life is futile and senseless but still the alternative, death in all its emptiness, is even worse.
Why did Cross choose astrophysics and not some other, equally demanding pursuit for Morgan? I can think of several answers. First, of all the fields of science, astronomy is the best reported in popular media. People know just enough to be familiar and impressed by Morgan’s thesis topic: the distribution of dark matter in spiral galaxies. Spin-mediated pairing in pnictide superconductors, a hot topic in condensed-matter physics, is perhaps more intimidating as an area of study, but it’s also more obscure.
The second reason is hinted at in the description quoted above. The objects that she studies, supermassive black holes, are utterly inhuman in size, remoteness, and violence. Metabolic networks in a yeast cell are just as daunting to understand, but lack the black holes’ resonance with Morgan’s character.
As a former astrophysicist, I admit a perverse sense of pride that a show’s evil genius reads the same textbooks, publishes in the same journals, and habituates the same conferences as I used to.
Her wickedness doesn’t trouble me. I went to Cambridge, not Oxford.
Charles Day
