What does the discoverer of room-temperature superconductivity look like?

The science-fiction TV show Primeval has recently started its fourth season. Set (for the most part) in modern Britain, the show is based on the possibility that dinosaurs, humans, and other animals can travel back and forth through anomalies in the fabric of spacetime.

The show’s computer-generated imagery is highly accomplished and ensures that the dinosaurs look real and scary. Most of the show’s drama, however, revolves around how the few humans who know about the anomalies react to the reality of time-traveling dinosaurs and the possibility of traveling into Earth’s future.

Time travel is hard for physicists to stomach. In Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which has passed all experimental tests, time can slow down, objects can become heavier and shorter, but a cause must always precede its effect.

Of course, without time travel there’d be no Primeval—no Kaprosuchus preying on homeless people living by the Thames, no dodos running around the Home Office, no Pteranodons swooping on golfers. As if to restore physics verisimilitude to the show, the fourth season features a new main character, Philip Burton, who is, and looks like, a physicist.

Burton is a billionaire industrialist, who made his money after discovering room-temperature superconductivity. He’s played by Alexander Siddig (shown here), whose previous roles included Julian Bashir on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

At 45, Siddig-as-Burton is about the right age to have made such a momentous discovery. Heike Kamerling Onnes discovered superconductivity in 1911 at the age of 58. When they discovered high-temperature superconductivity in 1986, Georg Bednorz was 36 and Alex Müller was 59. The newest class of superconductors, the iron pnictides , was discovered in 2008 by Hideo Hosono, who was 55 at the time.

Siddig-as-Burton also resembles some successful physicists in his self-confidence (or arrogance, if you prefer) and his appearance. He wears a jacket, but no tie, and sports a short, stubbly beard.

Siddig himself is of mixed parentage. He was born in Sudan to an English mother and a Sudanese father. In the past he has played a Pakistani terrorist, an Emirates oil minister, and a Persian poet.

I don’t know whether Siddig’s ethnicity was a factor in his casting in Primeval but I like to think the show’s producers believe, as I do, that the person who discovers room-temperature superconductivity for real could come from the Middle East.