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| Angels & Demons: the Swansea connection How do you make a bottle to store antimatter in? Don't ask Dan Brown; ask Professor Mike Charlton of Swansea University, who is researching the complex world of particle theory, in CernWhen Tom Hanks's character, Robert Langdon, hunts down the secret Illuminati brotherhood in the film of Dan Brown's bestseller Angels & Demons, the cameras follow him tracking down stolen antimatter in a secret laboratory at Cern, the home of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research and the infamous Large Hadron Collider. There, Langdon meets in-house scientist Vittoria Vetra and we viewers get an insight into the complex world of physics housed at Cern, in Switzerland.But for Swansea University professor Mike Charlton, the techy setting of Angels & Demons is just his own office. Every few weeks, Charlton, a senior research fellow in physics, heads to Cern to carry out experiments and develop his research into the complex world of particle theory. A world away from Dan Brown's findings – Angels & Demons is "science fiction but great for what it does to boost interest in science", says Charlton – he is leading Swansea's involvement in an international project on antimatter called Alpha.It's a massive collaboration, Charlton says, of around 40 scientists from institutions ranging from the University of California, Berkeley to the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil – but antimatter? I'm already a little lost. Luckily, he provides a potted physics lesson. Antimatter, I'm told, was formed in the Big Bang, when for every particle of matter created, a matching "antiparticle" was born, identical in mass but with the opposite electric charge. For the first few moments of its life the universe was balanced, but just a short time later the antimatter disappeared, leaving only matter to form the entire cosmos.When Brown's plot arrives at Cern, a stolen gram of antimatter is sneaked out of the Geneva science base with the aim of being used as a devastating weapon. In reality, Charlton explains, that's impossible. The Alpha research project is currently working on finding a way to collect and then retain antimatter – moving it around just isn't possible right now."We're currently researching how to make and then store antimatter in order to research and study its properties," he says. "That means making a very special bottle for it – since antimatter will annihilate on contact with matter – and it's hardly portable. It is connected to a huge power supply, because we need an enormous magnetic field to make and hold the antimatter, for one thing. Even if you could move that, our storage bottle is huge – about the size of five filing cabinets, and 10 times as heavy – so it would take a day to move it only 10 yards. Plus, the contents are incredibly fragile."Charlton also takes issue with the way Brown's novel suggests that physicists can create antimatter in amounts that could cause a destructive explosion. It's impossible, says Charlton. "If you wanted to make an explosion, you'd use materials that are ready at hand – which antimatter really isn't," he explains. "We're working on it, but the process means producing each atom individually, using an expensive machine which, every minute or so, can only make a few million anti-nuclei – the heavy parts we need to create the atoms of antimatter.""To make an explosion, you'd need a massive amount more than that. And it would require so much power that it's well beyond the realms of reality."The Cern project has been hitting the headlines over the last year or so, but it was back in 1986 that Charlton and a colleague started talking about prospects for making antimatter. They started to hear about a machine at Cern that might be able to help them out – but Charlton admits "it still took ages to get going".He realised that there was "a massive problem with antimatter": its very existence contradicts the understanding of how the universe formed and exists. "So now we know it does exist, we have to try to answer the question as to why did all the antimatter disappear in the early universe, and allow it to evolve resulting in the formation of stars and planets – and us?"On a day-to-day basis, however, Charlton says his work can be a lot more mundane. "When we're carrying out an experiment, it's almost entirely remote-controlled, since you can't go near the particle beams. So in between, we're focused on repairing or upgrading apparatus. Sometimes that involves software, other times it's just crawling around unbolting flanges – very unglamorous, but it has to be done!"When an experiment throws up an interesting result, the team has to try to interpret the data. "Often it looks like I'm not working at all, just lost in thought," Charlton says. "Cern work can be tough," he explains. The work runs to a tight schedule, since "the antiproton beam time is rationed and we don't want to waste any".Charlton and his fellow physicists work day and night shifts, and normally sleep nearby in one of the Cern hostels. "They have comfortable rooms, usually en suite," Charlton says. "And there are two canteens on the main Cern site, so if I'm busy I'll eat all three meals a day there. It can get quite draining. In the early days I once spent three weeks on site, without leaving Cern once. At the time I thought nothing of it – looking back I think I must have been crazy. On the whole, though, I love the work – I wouldn't want to be doing anything else."ResearchHigher educationCernDan BrownParticle physicsPhysicsLucy Tobinguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
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Duck, Death and the Tulip by Wolf Erlbruch | Book review Meg Rosoff on a tale that breaks the ultimate tabooDuck, Death and the Tulip is the creation of award-winning German artist and writer Wolf Erlbruch, who has chosen childhood as his subject in the manner of, say, William Golding or Harper Lee. Erlbruch (probably best known as the illustrator of The Story of the Little Mole Who Knew It Was None of His Business) is a much-venerated figure in Germany; his subjects emerge from the uncosy side of childhood, a place populated by edgy creatures and uncomfortable themes. You won't find a fuzzy bunny or a little bear who can't sleep in Duck, Death and the Tulip.This extraordinary book, available in English thanks to New Zealand-based Gecko Press, is about death. And being about death, it is also about life. The story is simple. A duck notices that she is being followed. She is scared stiff, and who can blame her, for her stalker is an eerie figure in a checked robe with a skull for a head.Erlbruch gives the impression that he is an artist incapable of sentimentality, but his drawings have a delicacy and a sweet humour that helps us cope with the immensity of the subject. "You've come to fetch me?" asks the terrified Duck. But Death demurs, explaining that he has always been close at hand, in case of some mishap."Are you going to make something happen?" Duck trembles. But Death answers, no. "Life takes care of that." Slowly the two become, if not friends exactly, then familiars. They speculate about the afterlife, Duck kindly warms Death when he catches a chill, and they sit in a tree and discuss what will happen to the pond when Duck is no longer alive to swim in it. Duck begins to accept the presence of Death in her life, and eventually, on a still night as snowflakes drift down, she feels cold for the first time. She lies down and stops breathing.There is something infinitely tender in the way Death strokes her ruffled feathers into place, lifts her body and places it gently in the river, watching as she drifts off into the distance. "For a long time he watched her. When she was lost to sight, he was almost a little moved."Popular picture books usually tend towards the adorable in their choice of subject matter, and it is impossible to read Duck, Death and the Tulip without considering who its audience might be – not small children, surely, for the topic is dangerous and inappropriate, likely to inspire nightmares. Unless the opposite is true, and taboo subjects create more fears than they assuage? On this question I can only defer to the readers.I do know that children's books have always appropriated adult subject matter. Shaun Tan, author of picture books about depression and immigration (The Red Tree and The Arrival), deserves much of the recent credit – or perhaps the blame – for a spate of picture books with thoroughly unchildish subjects. And it can be no coincidence that the tradition which spawned the Brothers Grimm, and the most terrifying stories in all children's literature, also brings us Wolf Erlbruch.Outstanding books for young people have often proved difficult to categorise and market, and there seems little likelihood of this one taking over where sales of Guess How Much I Love You leave off. Erlbruch's simple eloquence in the face of life's most monstrous inevitability, however, suggests that Duck, Death and the Tulip will continue to occupy an important place in the literature of childhood long after today's bestsellers have been forgotten.Meg Rosoff's The Bride's Farewell is published by Puffin.FictionChildren and teenagersMeg Rosoffguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Marina Warner on the moral fables of the Arabian Nights Marina Warner warms to the RSC's production of Arabian NightsThe first translation of One Thousand and One Nights into English, under the title Arabian Nights' Entertainments, instantly sparked a craze when it appeared at the beginning of the 18th century, and set the tone for the stories' successful entrance into the history of drama and performance. The first Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp was performed at Drury Lane in London in the 1780s, with designs by Philippe de Loutherbourg, the artist who a few years before had created a fabulous Oriental mise-en-scène for William Beckford's 21st birthday party, which combined séance, orgy, gothic ruins and private theatricals. This inspired Beckford's original Arabian Nights fantasy, the novel Vathek, which is bathed, like the party, in what he recalled was "a strange, necromantic light". Since those days of heady dreams, shows such as Aladdin or Ali Baba have taken an ever more, and more rudely, comic turn. Their bawdy rough-and-tumble does reflect a strain of the multilayered Nights stories; but it's still the case that the traditional panto gives a false sense of the stories, missing the riches of their poetry, enchanted atmosphere, protean originality and endlessly ingenious narrative logic.The book's earliest readers in France belonged to a courtly world that hardly distinguished between performance and ordinary round, so stylised and ornamented was the royal day at Versailles or in noblemen and women's hotels particuliers, where the first exclamations of delight greeted the fantastic tales of One Thousand and One Nights. But very quickly, the book's storytelling devices were taken over by other voices placed at different, dissenting angles to power: Elizabeth Inchbald and Frances Sheridan put on Oriental disguise to satirise sexual hypocrisy and social conventions; Voltaire, Addison and Swift also found they could use the mode to mock and attack their targets. In the theatre especially, the sheer abundance of the plots of the Nights opened up possibilities: the book presented magical twists and turns that intrinsically lent themselves to high-spirited performance and to technical experiment. The history of the Nights on the stage is consequently intertwined with some brilliant early stagecraft for transformation scenes, flying machines, conjuring illusions, innovatory limelight and other effects (in Islington in the 1890s, the genies in Aladdin were called after the new gases, Paraffin, Benzoline and Colza).This effect on drama (let alone cinema) has never subsided, though its pulse beats to different rhythms in different cultures: from Japan to Russia to the US and Latin America, the tales have attracted theatrical treatments in public forums and in private, rich men's divertimenti. Fantasy spectaculars from pantomimes to grand opera, musicals and romantic ballet, puppet shows and cross-dressed all-girl teenage revue (Japan's alluring Takarazuka), toy theatre children's cutouts, fashion parades, shows on ice and wire, charity balls and theme parks the world over (you can ride on "The Magic Carpets" whirligig in Disneyland) have borrowed from the pattern book of the Nights.In 1893-94 at the Olympia in London, one of the pioneers of this mass-market Orientalism, a Hungarian-born producer called Bolossy Kiralfy put on a sort of world fair, called "Constantinople at Olympia", which displayed "an Arabian Nights museum, bazaar, and hall of 1,001 columns"; there were tableaux vivants showing slaves in the slave market on the harbour front ("spoils of war"), and a skit about a grand tourist travelling in the east with "Twitters, his valet". But unfamiliar as well as familiar stories from the Nights were staged as waxworks – there was Scheherazade telling stories, the Fisherman and the Genie, and Morgiana pouring boiling oil on the 40 thieves, but also several others, including one of my favourites, not told often enough: "The Tale of the Young King of the Black Isles", also known as "The Ensorcelled Prince", about the city that is laid under a spell by an evil enchantress, who turns the inhabitants into fish and her poor young husband half to stone.Most of us who feel we know the Arabian Nights know only a scant handful, those that have dominated the history of entertainment. Dominic Cooke's production of the Nights for the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) shows that he's looked hard and thoughtfully at this ever narrowing performance history, and how much he wants to refresh it by returning to the fountainhead, the book itself and its earliest layers, from India and Persia. His sequence of six tales represents different kinds of story in the book: adventure, quest, romance, and fabliau-style capers, and his adaptation threads them on a string provided by the frame-story of Scheherazade and the murderous sultan she marries.Cooke's approach also shows his wide Shakespearean experience, but on the whole he inclines to rude mechanicals rather than to fairies, and wants to amuse rather than enchant. He's steered the Nights away from absurdly fantastical and irrational embroideries (no genies or sprites; no flying; no vanishings or fiery transformations; some animal metamorphosis, but not much emphasis on the inexplicable, on wonder and its mysteries). Instead, in a time of crisis on many fronts, Cooke and his company have rediscovered the early roots of the Nights in exemplary literature and turned it into a kind, moral fable. Cooke's Arabian Nights makes much of Scheherazade's pluckiness and altruism as, night after night, she tells stories to save herself but also all other women from her husband, the sultan. And within that, this play version explores the book's central theme, that vexing topic that so obsessed the middle ages and on: the craft or wiliness of women. Is Scheherazade just trying to trick the sultan with her stories and befuddle him with her sweet ways? No, she gradually shows him something different – not least the close and loving alliance she enjoys with her sister Dinarzad (a sensitive performance from Chetna Pandya). And the play ends when he realises that she is telling him their own story – he recognises himself and recovers from his madness.The production's point about women not being crafty in the sense of deceiving, but clever in a positive, ethical sense, is well made; it's on message for little girls – and little boys – in the contemporary audience. It's a shame that the RSC's King Shahrayar doesn't bring anything but obtuse and preening vaingloriousness to the part, so that it's hard not to be both perplexed and disappointed that Scheherazade shows such love and care towards him and wants to stay married to him.The founding nucleus of stories in the Arabian Nights contains only 35 tales, according to the Arabist Mushin Mahdi, who in 1984 established the definitive edition of the earliest manuscript extant; but the book grew and continues to grow, and it's one of the odd circumstances of its long popularity that so many of the best-loved stories don't belong to that founding core and might have been made up by the book's many translators. Aladdin and Ali Baba fall into this category, called "orphan tales"; the RSC Arabian Nights has set aside Aladdin, but has succumbed to Ali Baba and to Sinbad (here called Es-Sindibad). Even the child-friendly, crowd-pleasing squib included here, about the unfortunate bridegroom Abu Hassan who farts on his wedding day and never recovers from the disgrace, was probably interpolated by Richard Burton, one of those Victorian gentlemen Orientalists who had a taste for such breaches of decorum.One aspect of the production does nag at me: the designer Georgia McGuinness has drawn visually on Mughal Indian and Persian imagery rather than on the Middle Eastern (Palestinian, Syrian) and north African (Egyptian, Tunisian) settings and mores of the Nights, with the effect of playing down allusions to Islam. It's as if invoking that deep context of the stories might stir uncomfortable contemporary issues. This would be why there aren't any capricious genies or vanishings, magical automata and talismans – those features emanate from the strain in Arabic literature that aims at 'aja'ib – wonders and marvels – rather than belonging to the improving fabulism of the Persian line or the folklore character of the popular, mongrel tales.This RSC production began a decade ago, at the Young Vic in 1998, when Tim Supple was the director there and was pioneering a wonderfully inventive and energetic series of shows inspired by the world's mythological and fairytale corpus. Like the RSC Arabian Nights, these were highly physical and irreverent interpretations, placing folk materials back into a direct theatrical line from Shakespeare. With the different, current tensions in the Middle East in mind, Supple is tackling a new, hugely ambitious production of The Tales of the 1,001 Nights. At a recent conference on the Nights held by New York University at Abu Dhabi, he explained how he has begun touring the book's settings, from Morocco to Iran to India, in order to find a vast company of acrobats, musicians, puppeteers and actors, who will be performing the new play of the Nights all over the world for three years at least. When he did the Grimms' fairytales at the Young Vic, Carol Ann Duffy wrote the script; for this production of the Nights he has asked the Lebanese-born, London-based novelist Hanan al-Shaykh to create it. This return to the Middle East as the proper terrain for the stories responds to the RSC version by taking its underlying principles further and moving with contemporary political change.Arabian Nights is at the Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon until 30 January. Box office: 0844 800 1110.TheatreRoyal Shakespeare Companyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Jonathan Ross starts new career as comic book author The TV and radio presenter is making his debut as a writer of comic books with a story of vampires in Prohibition-era New YorkJonathan Ross may have quit the BBC earlier this month but a new profession is beckoning for the television presenter as he prepares to make his comic-writing debut in April.Ross's comic, Turf, is set in Prohibition-era New York. It will tell the story of a gang war between booze-smuggling mobsters and vampires – the bloodthirsty Dragonmir family from eastern Europe – with an alien thrown in for good measure. Written by Ross and illustrated by American comics artist Tommy Lee Edwards, publisher Image Comics said it would offer "a twist on the hardboiled crime thriller", pitching it as "crime noir with bite"."As an ancient prophecy unfolds amidst the maelstrom of violence, the entire city is up for grabs and it's anyone's guess who will come out on top," said Image, which was set up in 1992 by seven Marvel Comics artists. "The only glimmer of hope is an unlikely alliance between tough guy Eddie Falco and a stranger from another world."Ross will be in good company. Earlier this month it was revealed that former footballer turned actor Vinnie Jones was to be the model for the character Jake Noble, a violent government agent who will star in an upcoming comic book series. And horror author Stephen King is making his first foray into the genre this spring with a comics series about an American vampire, who is powered by the sun.Ross said that working on a comic of his own had "long been a dream", and that he was "looking forward to introducing the comics reading public to our mad war between gangsters and vampires – and the extraterrestrial who will either save or destroy them all". Turf will be a four-issue miniseries, with the first 32-page issue on sale on 7 April.ComicsJonathan RossAlison Floodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |