Doctor Who Pass Notes (contains spoilers)

Name: The Doctor

Age: Circa 1100 years, although he existed at the birth of the Earth and the end of time.

Appearance: Old/young/middle-aged/young again/truly ancient/young white male. Long/short dark/white/fair hair. Prefers to wear long coats, hats and scarves.

Background: Born on Gallifrey, fairly normal upbringing, then got a bit rebellious and stole borrowed rescued a decommissioned type 40 TARDIS from a scrapyard to explore the universe. Currently has arrest warrants out on ~5000 planets for interfering with causality.

TARDIS? Time And Relative Dimension In Space. A time machine, if you will. Also spaceship. Looks like a 1960s London police call box.

Is he a real doctor? He is a qualified medical practitioner, but has also carried out extensive studies in philosophy, language, physics, mathematics, chemistry, intergalactic law, robotics, vulcanology and cricket. Likes to consider himself a good all-rounder, but still has trouble with basic navigation. Rarely lands the TARDIS on target.

Any friends? Usually has one or more companions, generally human or humanoid but has also been known to carry a tin dog on board. Most companions end up dead or lost in a parallel universe.

Tin dog? K9. A talking mechanical dog, carrying basic armaments and possessing limited intelligence. Almost as lovable as Jar-Jar Binks.

And enemies? Cybermen, Shansheeth, Slitheen, Silence, Gelth, Nestene, Daleks -

Daleks? Giant pepper-pots with a single eye on a stalk. Lacking any depth perception, they tend to bump into things a lot. Perpetually cross as a result.

How does the Doctor deal with his enemies? The Doctor always attempts to talk his way out of trouble by way of peaceful negotiations. When that fails, he usually resorts to genocide. He has utterly destroyed the Daleks on at least four separate occasions, one of which destroyed his own homeworld. Worst. Pest controller. Ever.

What weapons does the Doctor carry? None, although he does own a sonic screwdriver. This is quite handy for turning sonic screws and not much else.

So the Doctor is the last of his kind? The Doctor's home planet was sealed off from the rest of the universe in the Time War with the Daleks. Although his own race, the Time Lords, are essentially extinct, he has a daughter, at least one wife and has dealt with other time-travellers.

He appears human. Only on the outside. On the inside, Time Lords have two hearts. Also, on the frequent occasions on which he gets killed, he is reincarnated or "regenerated" on the spot. Technically, this makes the Doctor a zombie.

Why does the TARDIS resemble a police box? The TARDIS has a chameleon circuit to allow it to blend in with its environment. When we first saw it, it was in 1960s London, so this camouflage worked perfectly. Then the chameleon circuit broke.

Isn't it a bit poky? Like the wardrobe in Narnia and the travelling luggage in Discworld, the TARDIS is bigger on the inside. Be sure to check out the swimming pool, the library, the spiral staircase, the alternate control room and the laundry room.

How does the Doctor communicate with aliens? He just speaks normally. The TARDIS is telepathic and performs automatic translation between all known languages and most unknown ones.

Not to be confused with: Harry Potter.

Do say: "Dock-torrrr!"

Don't say: "Pleased to meet you, Doctor Who!"

Nukular Fizzicks Fer Dummy's

Do I have to splain everything? Sigh.

Them scientologists over in Yerp want to find a teensy tiny particle called the Higgs Boson. Hey, there's a dude called Higgs here in Embra, I wonder if he's heard of it? Nah, what are the chances?

Seems the Merkans were too poor to afford both a Space Station and a Particle Smasher, so they abandoned their own little spermint after spending just two billion dollars on it, and concentrated on something that can only be reached by the soon-to-be-decommissioned Space Shuttle and the Dirty Commie Soyuz rockets. I ain't sayin', I'm just sayin'.

Anyways, the science part.

The universe is made up of stuff. Most of that stuff is completely invisible and therefore cannot be seen by astrologers with even the most powerful telescopes, even the one buried underneath the ice at the South Pole. (Hey Cletus, you sure about that part?)

But these boffins always need more money are pretty sure that if they smash some normal stuff together at really high speeds, they'll be able to recreate some of the same exotic stuff that was around at the Big Bang. So they'll be using their LHC machine to run one proton beam clockwise at 99.9999991 percent of the speed of light, and another beam anticlockwise at 99.9999991 percent of the speed of light. Then they'll smash them head-on into each other at - anybody? No? Me neither.

Ok, let's make it really simple.

Atoms are thought to be made up of quarks.

Quark's


Which are held together by gluons.

Glued On


According to String Theory, every particle has a super-partner.

Superpartner


The electron is matched by the selectron, the quark has the squark, the lepton has the slepton etc.

Slept On


But none of this splains the existence of Mass.

Mass


And without mass there would be no gravity.

No Gravity


So Professor Higgs (anybody remember him?) posited the existence of a field - let's call it the Higgs Field - permeating the entire universe, and as we all know from quantum physics, every field comes with a side order of particles. So the Higgs field imbues matter with mass, and the Higgs Boson, if discovered, will prove this impotent theory.

So far, all that has been tested is that a clockwise beam and an anticlockwise beam of protons can be sent around the loop. Next month the eggheads will make their first attempt to cross the streams.

Crossing the Streams


If it all goes tits-up, the absolute worst that can happen is that the Earth and anything else made of matter or energy, like the universe, will be sucked into a black hole.

Black Hole


And if not, well, there'll be plenty more pretty pictures like this one, so stop whining.

LHC First Beam


Any questions?

Summer Caption Competition

Be it pleaseth yowe, Maistre Geoffrey Chaucer hath inspiredd me with his chronicle ycleped Doctor Hwaet and the Daneleks. It hath been wandering arounde mine head for monthes, lyke unto Marco Polo on his travelles.

Any road uppe, Ich haue effected an peynture depicting an Danelek Shippe, but Ich am at an compleat losse for a suitably sombre title.

Et this ys where yowe, gentil reedere, can make yower owne contributione!

Alle yowe have to doo ys to provide yower suggestiones in ye usual place; Ich shall runne an totallye fayre refferendumme to fynd the moost popular one and poste it yn mine blogge. There shalle be an pryze of an actual moving, talking Danelek. (Paynture not to scale, Companion not included.)
Prize ⇒
Competition ⇓



So putte on yower thynking cappes! Competicioun closeth on Vendredi, Juin 20, 2008. Goode Lucke!

Science Spurt

So what amazing facts can I amaze you with today? Amazingly, not a few. Prepare to be amazed.

Things ain't what they used to be

Boffins (God, I love that word!) have decided that the Astronomical Unit (AU), which is used to measure distances within our solar system, isn't as constant as they'd hoped. As any fule kno, variables don't and constants aren't.

An AU to you and me is the distance from the Earth to the Sun (or is it vice-versa?), but to slapheads it's "the radius of an unperturbed circular orbit that a massless body would revolve about the Sun in 2π/k days (essentially, one year), where k is a constant derived from a fixed estimate of the Sun's mass." And since the Sun is losing mass like nobody's business (about 16 Empire State buildings-worth per second), the AU is slowly growing.

The answer seems clear enough to me: switch to an alternative, much more familiar standard unit of measurement - the London Bus. Everybody knows what size they are, they don't shrink or grow unexpectedly...it just seems that way during the rush hour. If you're on the outside, say driving, they seem to get bigger while if you're a passenger on the inside they get smaller. Like an inverse Tardis.

Things can only get better

Over at CERN (should that be pronounced sern or kern? Meh.) eggheads are about to switch on the world's first time machine. (Did you see what I did there?)

According to Einstein's equations of blah, any time machine built in the future can only come back in time as far as the creation of the first one, and the Large Hadron Collider (which is either a large collider for hadrons or a collider for large hadrons, or possibly both) could be used to create "closed timelike curves" - wormholes, mini-black holes and shit - which will allow our psychotic grandchildren to come back and murder us. Um. And that's good because?

You've goat to be kid-ding

The British Navy is to finally stop acting the goat and terminate its experiments on goats in submarines.

*Checks calendar. Nope, definitely not April.*

I can follow that the animals were used to help submarine crews judge whether it would be safer to abandon a stricken vessel or wait to be rescued, but why this particular animal?

Because they're escape goats. B'dum tsh!

And finally, a double-whammy

Newton's First Law of Motion states that an object in motion tends to remain in motion. Darwin's Law of Evolution states that only the fittest will survive. Add these together...

A 55-year-old Romanian train driver chased down his own runaway train after leaving the handbrake off. Finally catching up with it after six kilometres, he tried to stop it. Not being Superman, he wasn't stronger than a locomotive. The train trundled over him and kept going for a further 26 kilometres.

The funeral will be held in Bucharest, Urziceni, Buzau, Focsani, Garoafa...

Naked Singularities and the Grandfather Paradox

According to New Scientist, it's theoretically possible, if you can find a naked singularity, to build a time machine. Apparently, naked singularities are an embarrassment to physicists, prancing about with no clothes on and that.

"I don't know why people immediately think that time travellers will be overcome with a desire to commit murder," says boffin Fernando de Felice, referring to the grandfather paradox. This states that you can't go back in time because you might kill your grandfather and thus prevent your own birth.

I think he's got it back to front.

Alex has a rich and powerful grandfather and can't wait for the old miser to keel over and pass on his riches. So he borrows capital against his inheritance and builds a time machine to take him back to the years of his grandfather's youth, neatly sidestepping the security guards in the process.

He murders the defenseless youth, then realises that Grandad hadn't yet made his fortune as the time machine promptly disappears.

But wait! Alex knows a bit about the stock market, so he's able to buy low and sell high when there are large, "unpredictable" swings in the market - which he remembers from his history lessons.

He makes his fortune, marries a nice girl, and gradually comes to realise that his wife is Grandma. Which make Alex his own grandfather. How to prevent his own grandson from going back in time and killing himself?

I hate naked singularities. They give you a sore head.