The Science of The Trio
By Liar

Speculations On The Science (Fiction) Of The Nerdly Threat... Because It's Fun. :)


Technobabble. It's something anyone who's watched a bit of science fiction is familiar with. And it's something that geeks like me absolutely love to nitpick. But today I'd like to set the nitpicking aside for a moment, and work out a few explanations and rationales. Nitpicking may be fun, but it's even more fun to make the mythology work. Anyone who owns a copy of the Star Trek Technical Manual (I have it on CD-ROM!) understands this.


Buffy The Vampire Slayer attracts a wide audience, both nerds and non-nerds alike. And as a self-proclaimed nerd, I'd like to share some science-y speculation with the fellow citizens of Buffy Down Under.


Warren, Jonathon and Andrew: In Life Serial, we saw them use a tiny chip to screw up Buffy's perception of time. Move along to Smashed, and they had themselves a genuine freeze ray, a la Batman. And in Gone... well we all know how cool that was. I'll go over each of these three pretties in turn, feel free to just scroll down to the actual nteresting one... that is, the invisibility ray... teeheehee...


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The Evil Lint


"Inhibitor is on. Repeat, inhibitor is on. Initiate omega pulse sequence." - Warren, Life Serial


Warren places a tiny chip on Buffy's clothing. From the Supervan, we see a concave antenna/transmitter-y thing rise and start swivelling around. Then Buffy starts hearing a buzzing noise, and it seems, from her perspective, that everything is moving way too fast. When Buffy finds the chip, Warren presses a button in the van - and it self destructs.


So how could it have worked?


Can Warren warp the fabric of space-time? Did that little chip create a bubble around Buffy where time passed at a different rate to everyone else? Nah, I don't think so. Firstly, the kind of thing that would be required to do that is way beyond anything we've seen Warren do. Secondly, it didn't seem to jive with what we saw happening.


Now, the little dish we saw emerge from their van. With it, our villains were receiving information from the chip on Buffy's clothing - they were receiving a camera image, to be precise. They were also sending information back to it - such as the order to self-destruct and, we assume, the order to start doing whatever it was that the chip was doing in the first place.


Apparently, it was using an "omega pulse sequence" - a cute little bit of technobabble. What does it mean?


Greek letters (such as omega) are usually given to forms of radiation. Physicists speak of alpha radiation, beta radiation, and gamma radiation, and neurologists speak of delta radiation from the human brain. That and the word "pulse" leads one to suspect that the chip was emitting something. My theory is that these "omega pulses" are pulses of radiation emitted from the chip that screw up some of Buffy's brain functions. Things like her memory (perhaps), her attention span, and - of course - her sense of the passing of time. And according to Warren, the chip was an "inhibitor". It didn't so much directly cause Buffy's experience, rather it prevented something from working correctly - presumably, something in her brain.


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The Freeze Ray


"Oh, he'll be fine. Yeah, he'll defrost in a couple of days, no harm, no foul." - Warren, Smashed


The freeze ray is a fairly nifty gun-lookin' thing. In Smashed, we see Jonathon fire it at a security guard named Rusty. Poor Rusty ends up apparently frozen, coated in a layer of ice, complete with icicles. Unfortunately, so does Jonathon's hand and the freeze ray-gun itself. The security guard is apparently unharmed - Willow and Xander find a news report for us that tells of how Rusty was thawed out with hairdryers. He will live, he's unconscious at the moment, and Willow says that everything seems to be "slowed down. His nervous system, circulatory system."


So how do you freeze a person without harming them? With great difficulty.


When you heat something up, it expands. When you cool it down, it contracts. It doesn't matter if it's a liquid, a solid or a gas, it'll expand when it's heated, and contract when it's cooled.


Now water does do the same thing... heat water up, and it expands. Global warming should cause rises in sea level - not so much from the melting of the ice-caps, but from the expansion of the ocean as it warms. And when you cool water down, it contracts... untill you get to about four degrees centigrade. Then something else takes effect.


Water is composed of H2O molecules - they look like little triangles - a big atom (the O) with two smaller atoms (the 2 H's) attached. Water molecules are like teensy weensy magnets (thats essentially why water sometimes acts a bit strange - like when you fill a glass up slightly above the rim without it overflowing, or when you see a drop of rain running down the window and collecting and joining with other drops to form one big drop). Imagine throwing a bunch of these tiny magnets into a dish. When they're hot, they all race around like mad. Cool them down, and they move more sluggishly. Cool them down far enough (to 4 degrees Celsius...) and they move slowly enough that they begin to arrange themselves into patterns, because the magnetic attractions between them are now more powerful than the urge to dash about madly past each other. These patterns are ice crystals. Take the temperature below 0 degrees C and they become solid. Now, these crystals have an open structure. This structure takes up MORE space than the little H2O's would take up if they didn't act like little magnets. And so, when you cool water down below 4 degrees, it starts expanding.


This has grave implications for poor Rusty (and for Walt Disney's head, come to think of it...). Humans are mostly water. How do we know this? We're made up of cells, and each cell is basically an oily bag containing water with a bunch of other stuff dissolved into it. If you freeze something made of cells (like, for example, Rusty), the water inside the cells expands into ice crystals. And if it expands enough, splat. The cell can be broken open. Try putting various plants into the freezer section of the fridge, then take them out again later. They're a little more limp, and a little more mushy...


So how do we prevent Rusty (and Walt Disney) from coming out all limp and mushy? Flash freezing.


Recall my long-winded, boring explanation for why water expands as it freezes? The little molecules - essentially tiny magnets - are dancing about slower and slower as they cool, and they begin to orient themselves according to their positive and negative ends, to form crystalline structures. What if you cooled them down SO quickly that they didn't have time to orient themselves magnetically? You get solid water that quite possibly has been frozen quickly enough that it hasn't expanded at all. And instead of having his cells burst, Rusty just goes into good, old-fashioned science fiction "cryostasis".


So the freeze ray projects a beam of ultra-cold flash-freezing ice toward Rusty - he's coated by the beam, and he's completely frozen all the way through, and so quickly that his cells won't burst from the formation of ice crystals. Speed-of-freezing is the key.


I would, however, worry a little bit about the thawing out process for poor Rusty. Hopefully all his blood returned to a liquid at roughly the same rate, or we get problems with blood flow through frozen regions, and the possibility of heart attack (frozen blood would have even more trouble moving than blood thats restricted by clogs in the pipes (sorry if anyone's eating anything greasy while reading this...)), loss of limbs, that sort of thing...


Now... Jonathon's hand. If his hand was frozen like Rusty, then shouldn't it... well... drop off? I like to think that his hand, and the freeze ray, were only coated with ice, not frozen all the way through. Might this tell us something about the real mystery - the method by which the freeze ray projects it's flash-freezing beams? But such questions are for a greater nerd than I. Besides, I'm itching to start talking about...


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The Invisibility Ray


"I pictured something cooler. More ILM, less Ed Wood." - Andrew, Gone.


The three nerds have stolen a gem from the museum, a gem which, according to Willow, is "called the Illuminata, and there's rumors of it having quasi-mystical quantum properties." With this gem, Warren is able to build an invisibility ray. Fire it at something, and that something turns invisible. To make something visible again, just change the setting on the ray-gun. Unfortunately, it had some initial flaws - objects that had been invisible for too long began to lose their solidity and become "pudding".


With some modifications to the ray-gun, this problem can be overcome. And as Willow reveals during the climax, on the right setting you can accelerate the problem...


Let's start by thinking about how we can make something invisible - it's not like it hasn't been tackled before by science fiction, or by science fact.


We see with light. Pretty obvious. And most people know that light moves in straight lines through empty space (That's not actually true, according to quantum electrodynamics, but we can ignore that little factoid for the purposes of this discussion). Light can be emmitted, reflected or absorbed by something. We won't see it if it's absorbed - we'll detect an absence of light and call it "black" - we can obviously only see light that has entered our eyes.


So, how could we become invisible?


Well, if we took the light coming from behind us, and then emitted light of exactly the same colour and from the exact opposite point on our bodies that the original light hit, we'd appear invisible - there'd be the illusion of light passing through us. Kind of vaguely what chameleons and octopi and army guys are doing, except more exact than the mere optical illusion of blending in with ones surroundings.


But i don't think that's how Warren's ray works (why not? Well, we'll get to that when we start analysing the technobabble...)


Light can also be "bent" by passing through a substance (eg// the air itself, water, a prism, a glass lens...), and thus diverted. You can also divert it with gravity - massive objects like the sun can exert so much pull that light paths curve instead of going straight. And black holes can drag light into orbit of them, so it never gets out again to reach our eyes.


If you bend light paths around yourself such that instead of hitting you and being blocked, the light coming from behind you curves around and heads out from the other side of you, it would create the illusion that the light has passed straight through you. This is the premise of the television series The Invisible Man, in which the hero can secrete a chemical whose moledular structure is such that it bends light around objects that it coats.


But i don't think it's that either...


I Have A Theory... that their ray actually changes some fundamental property of the matter that it hits, that causes the atoms making up that matter to no longer interact with outside light. And i think this can explain the "dissolution" of the invisible things, along with most of the technobabble that otherwise looks meaningless.


Firstly, just a little run-down on light itself. Light is energy, obviously. And units of energy are measured in "quanta" (or "quantum", in the singular). A quantum of light is called a photon. When photons hit an object, they can be absorbed, or reflected, or they can be transmitted through. In our case, photons either hit us and reflect off, or are absorbed, so we're visible because of the photons relfecting from us and the fact that we block photons from passing through us.


Now, what if the matter in your body was changed so that photons did not interact with us? Anyone here heard of neutrinos? They are tiny particles that are described as "weakly interacting" - that means they don't affect many things. They don't interact with much. Right now, trillions of neutrinos could be passing right through your body, and because they are "weakly interacting" particles, they just pass on through without having any effect on you. So you don't notice them. What if Warren's ray changes the matter in your body so that it interacts weakly with photons - the way that neutrinos do with normal matter? So photons pass right through it without being absorbed or reflected.


Ok, so how do we go from this, to porridge? Why would something like this cause us to break down after too long if the invisibility ray is on the wrong setting?


Let's look at the structure of matter. Most matter that you'll encounter on Earth is in the form of atoms. Atoms are like little solar systems, with a nucleus in the centre, and particles called electrons orbiting them. Now, why do the electrons orbit the nucleus? Because of magnetism. The nucleus of an atom is positively charged, and the electrons are negatively charged. They're attracted, in a way similar to the moon being gravitationally attracted to the Earth, and the Earth being gravitationally attracted to the sun.


Have you heard the term "electromagnetism"? It refers to light. Light (or a photon) is "electromagnetic" radiation. Note that the word "magnetic" makes up part of this word. Physicists sometimes talk about magnetic attraction as the exchange of photons. eg// An electron is attracted to the nucleus of it's atom, and this magnetic attraction is 'personified' by the electron exchanging photons with the nucleus. "Virtual" (that basically means we can't see them) photons go back and forth between the electron and the nucleus. This 'causes' the magnetic attraction, which causes the electrons to orbit the nucleus, which causes the atom to remain stable.


If the atoms in your body have been altered so that they no longer interact with photons coming from outside, isn't it only a small step to make it so that the atoms also no longer interact with photons coming from INSIDE? So that the electrons no longer exchange photons with the nucleus? So the atomic structure just breaks down? And molecules - electrons are basically the part of the atom that binds atoms together to form molecules. If they're no longer reined in by this magnetic exchanging of photons with the nucleus, well, as Warren said: "Eventually her molecular makeup will start losing its integrity and then ... pfft".


And consider one of Willow's comments, later on: "The gun, it's not set for reversing the particle ionization." What is "ionization"? It basically refers to atoms either having new electrons added, being partly stripped of their electrons- exactly the situation described above.


We know the device can be fixed so that it doesn't have this effect - Warren did it, later. In fact he implied that the gun actually had to overload in order to cause this effect. Obviously some distinction must exist between the photons coming from outside the invisible matter, and the "virtual" photons generated on the inside, between the electrons and the nuclei of the atoms.


Now, there's one big flaw with this idea. Sight. Your retina is an array of very special light-sensing cells. These light sensing cells rely on particular molecules (with cool sounding names, like "rhodopsin") that enable you to detect light.


If light passes right through the atoms in your body, becuse the atoms have been made to be "weakly interacting" with photons, then it should also pass right through the photon-detecting molecules in your eyes. Essentially, when you become invisible, you also become blind.


Let's weasel our way out of this one by asking, "how do the molecules in our eyes detect photons?" In principle, it's not too complex. Remember how i said that the electrons in atoms are responsible for binding the atoms together to form molecules? They form bonds between atoms. Now, electrons can have different energies. When they absorb a photon, obviously, they have a greater energy. When they emit a photon, their energy level drops. It's basically a book-keeping system. Photons carry energy, and emitting or absorbing them can change an electrons personal energy-level. An electron's energy level determines roughly where it is in orbit of an atoms nucleus. Higher energy electrons orbit at higher levels, and so on. An electrons energy level also roughly determines where it is in a molecular bond, as well.


When a photon hits a special colour-sensing molecule in your eyes, it is absorbed by one of that molecule's electrons. Specifically, an electron in one of the molecule's bonds. This changes that electron's energy level, thus changing the electron's position, thus changing the shape of the molecular bond, thus changing the shape of the molecule. And it is this changed molecule that starts the chain reaction that leads up to a nervous signal running from that retina cell and into your brain.


So what if the invisibility ray also makes a distinction for the particular absorption of a photon by an electron in a particular kind of bond that happens to be in a colour-sensing molecule?


So, what do we have so far? The invisibility ray makes matter "weakly interacting" with photons that aren't involved in the magnetic effect, and that aren't interacting with the particular kind of bond that absorbs the photon for a colour-sensing molecule.


Another thought: the invisibility ray's effects seem to have a time delay. At least, it takes a while for something to turn into porridge. But how can that be, if the ray is supposed to change the "interactivity properties" of atoms in your body all at once? Lets also take something else that Warren said: "The Slayer got slammed with a big-ass dose of radiation when the gun overloaded. Her cells are mutating at an accelerated rate." Now that's a bit weird. Why? Radiation is an "all-at-once" thing. Any mutation that occurs as a result of it happens as soon as the radiation hits the DNA inside one of your cells (and thus causes a mutation). So for her cells to be mutating "at an accelrated rate", radiation has to be continuously hitting them. Not just one big dose, but a constant dose.


How do you get a constant dose? Well, you eat something that is emitting radiation. If you swallow uranium, it's dangerous because the uranium may be constantly emitting radiation, thus keeping up a continuous rate of mutation. So what if the invisibility ray fires particles that are continuously emitting the radiation that makes your atoms "interact weakly with light"? So Buffy, and the traffic cone-thinggy, would have these particles lodged in them. Now, at first, let's say these particles have no effect other than to make the atoms immediately around them turn invisible. But over time, maybe the particles start decaying to something else - you can't emit radiation without losing something! Remember the "book-keeping" of electrons? If you emit something, then you must be LOSING something (like energy levels).


A particle that emits radiation MUST decay, to form something different - to form a particle of lower energy. Maybe when the invisibility ray's particles decay, they form a slightly different version of themselves. A version that makes atoms NOT JUST "weakly interact with outside photons", but ALSO "weakly interact with their own 'virtual' photons" - thus leading to the atomic break-down - the "porridge" factor.


Maybe these particles are little peices of the crystal? The supposedly magical crystal that they stole? Maybe the crystal emits the radiation that makes you invisible (when properly stimulated by Warren's gun), but when the gun overloaded, it fired off an excess amount of radiation, and that radiation included tiny particles from the magic crystal. These tiny particles lodged into Buffy (and the traffic cone), and when they had decayed too far, they started causing the electrons in Buffy's atoms to stop exchanging photons with their nucleus and... porridge.


So, if you MUST decay in order to emit radiation, why doesn't the crystal itself start decaying over time? Because Warren's ray-gun is constantly stimulating it. There's an input of energy - not just an output. So the crystal itself might never decay to the dangerous porridge-making form. It was only when particles from it where accidentally fired off, due to an excess of radiation, and these particles were seperated from the power source of the gun, so they no longer had that energy input, thus they had to start losing energy in order to keep emitting radiation, thus they decayed into the dangerous form.


And that's my theory!


As to why the crystal itself works... the special thing about crystals is usually their structure - not the things they're made of. Diamonds are made of the same stuff as burnt toast, but their structure is what makes them a crystal, and thats what makes them so special. Does this mean that the special invisibility radiation (lets call them I-rays, teehee) is emitted only because of the structure, and nothing else? I don't think so. Warrens comment implies that some continuous source of radiation had lodged itself inside Buffy's body. That implies these particles, contuously emitting I-rays. And that implies that the crystal is actually made of these magical particles. Or that it has these particles trapped inside it's structure, somehow.


Willow tells us that the crystal was rumoured to have "quasi-mystical quantum properties". Maybe this "quantum property" is the emission of I-rays - a new kind of quantum (remember, a quantum is a unit of energy, like a photon) that causes matter to become invisible.


As for the "mystical" part of her description? "Mystical" refers to the idea that everything is "One". That the whole universe is the same on some level. Remember that scene from The Matrix, when Keanu Reeves looks at the agents and the hallway, and he sees them all as streams of computer code? THAT is mysticism. Maybe the I-rays, by changing the nature of an atom, are somehow tapping into one of the cooler ideas in modern-day physics: that at some level, way low down, everything in the universe - all matter, all energy, everything - is just vibrations along folds in space.


The I-rays, perhaps, are somehow manipulating the vibrations that make up electrons, so that they no longer interact with outside photons - and perhaps that explains Willow's reference to it's properties being "mystical"?


And the one final thing that i can think of to discuss... the gem's latin name. The "Illuminata" - it refers to light. Interesting.
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