Physics at WonderCon

Most years, I attend San Diego Comic-Con International, the giant convention where fans of comics and related genres gather to dress up, meet their idols, and learn about new movies, TV shows, video games, and other manifestations of popular art. This year, however, I decided to go to Comic-Con’s smaller, younger relative, WonderCon .

Held over Easter weekend in Anaheim, California, this year’s WonderCon attracted about 60 000 people. After I’d picked up my press badge on the first day, I wondered: Given that WonderCon is roughly half the size of Comic-Con, would I be able to find enough physics to write about?

Fortunately, just as I entered the exhibition hall, I received an email inviting me to visit the Hollywood Sci-Fi Museum’s booth. There, I met the museum’s founder, Huston Huddleston, who explained that the nucleus of the museum is a Hollywood prop: the bridge of the USS Enterprise from the original series of Star Trek. Huddleston and his fellow enthusiasts have also located other props and artifacts. They hope to open their museum in North Hollywood next year.

Last year I wrote about a similar, not-fully-realized venture, the Museum of Science Fiction in Washington, DC. Mandy Sweeney of the DC museum had told me that promoting an interest in science among children was one of her museum’s core missions. Did the Hollywood museum have a similar mission?

Huddleston explained that his museum’s emphasis was on entertainment. A Dalek exhibit might convey the history of the villainous cyborgs; it would examine the Dalek’s design. But it would also explore the real science of human–machine interfaces. Most of the exhibits, he told me, will tackle the question of how close current science is to the fictional science embodied by the exhibits.

My next physics encounter in the exhibit hall was at the Quantum Spirit Books booth. Author, publisher, and founder Sallie Haws told me about her self-published 2013 young adult novel, Quantum Spirit Apocalypse. The book’s main character is 13-year-old Salena Hawthorne who discovers that she has the ability to shift between the Third Dimension, where everyday life happens, and the more evolved Fifth Dimension.

Curious, I asked Haws what inspired her to make quantum physics a central element of her novel. “The God particle,” was her answer. She also told me that she was fascinated by wave–particle duality and had read a news story about the recent Nature Communications paper, “Simultaneous observation of the quantization and the interference pattern of a plasmonic near-field.” As my friend and colleague Ben Stein wrote , the paper was widely misreported. Still, I was impressed and gratified by Haws’s interest in quantum physics.

Two years ago at Comic-Con I bumped into Madeleine Holly-Rosing, author of the steampunk webcomic Boston Metaphysical Society . At that point, the comic’s first chapter had just been published. It introduced the story’s existential threat: the Shifter, an evil being from a parallel dimension, who terrorizes late 19th-century Boston. Also introduced are the three main protagonists: former Pinkerton detective Samuel Hunter, medium and spirit photographer Caitlin O’Sullivan, and scientist Granville Woods. In later chapters, the trio is joined in the fight against the Shifter by BETH, a group made up of Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and Harry Houdini. I was happy to learn from Holly-Rosing that her webcomic is doing well.

Science fiction museums, whacky quantum mechanics, and fictionalized inventors are what you might expect at WonderCon or Comic-Con. My final encounter with the physical sciences was more surprising. At the Reynolds Advanced Materials booth, I learned about the manufacture of objects, such as a Star Wars storm trooper helmet, from polymers poured into molds. The company’s newest product, XTC, is a thick coating that is painted over a 3D-printed object to mask the ridges that appear between layers as the object is being made.

I asked the Reynolds rep what are the most challenging scientific problems that his company faced. He told me about two. The first is to find a cheap replacement for platinum as a catalyst in the manufacture of silicones. The second challenge was similar. Organic compounds of mercury have long been used as catalysts in the manufacture of polyurethane. The mercury remains in the product, posing a health threat. “That’s often the problem,” the rep said. “The stuff that makes things good is bad.”