Mark Brake - The Science of Doctor Who

To Emperor Whovian and Leader of the Robots of Death, Peter Grehan, the Doctor who never was, and whose mind is forever full of Daleks and Davros, Cybermen and Silurians, Master and Movellans

After all, in a world where very little is a surprise, and everything is viewed with cynicism, Doctor Who is a genuine rarity. It represents one of the very few areas where adults become as unashamedly enthusiastic as children. Its where children first experience the thrills and fears of adults, and where we never know the exact ending in advance. With its ballsy women, bisexual captains, working-class loquaciousness, scientific passion and unremittingly pacifist dictum, it offers a release from the dispiritingly limited vision of most storytelling. It is, despite being about a 900-year-old man with two hearts and a space-time taxi made of wood, still one of our very best projections of how to be human.

Caitlin Moran, on the set of Doctor Who, The Times (2011)

I arrived on this planet with the newborn Space Age: these days of space exploration and our modern culture catalyzed by the discoveries of space. The Age began with Sputnik 1 in October 1957, and has been with us ever since. Little wonder that the Age should spawn Doctor Whoa television program about an alien called the Doctor who explores the Universe in a time-traveling spaceship. Doctor Who first appeared on BBC television at 5:16:20 GMT on Saturday, November 23, 1963. The program airing was eighty seconds later than scheduled, due to the assassination of John F. Kennedy the day before.

Ive been a fan of Doctor Who ever since, from The Daleks to The Day of the Doctor and beyond. As luck would have it, I live just a half-hours drive from Cardiff and BBC Wales, home of the Doctor Who reboot since 2005. As I also designed and validated planet Earths first science and science fiction university degree program, I guess this makes me a kind of scholar-fan. The 2005 regeneration of the Doctor presented a perfect opportunity to study the science of Doctor Whonot just the Doctors adventures fighting Cybermen, Daleks, and the Master, but also his flirtations with Newton, Einstein, and Darwin.

Im hoping that readers who adore Doctor Who might also enjoy thinking a little more scientifically about their favorite television show. In terms of ideas and metaphors, Doctor Who has infused our language and made it richer. It has certainly colonized British consciousness more markedly than the many alien races that have appeared on the show. And Doctor Who has gone global. Millions of fans across six continents enjoyed The Day of the Doctor in a worldwide simulcast and cinema extravaganza. Fans in over seventy-five countriesfrom Colombia to Canada, Botswana to Brazil, and Myanmar to Mexicowatched the fiftieth anniversary show on November 23, 2013, at the same time as the BBC One British broadcast.

In this book, my focus is on televised Doctor Who, from 1963 to date. There will only be passing references of the Doctor in other formats, such as tie-in novels, graphic art, or fan fiction. Doctor Who is science fiction, of course. But the tales of the Doctor are a peculiarly British kind of sci-fi. In 1999, British journalist Jeremy Paxman interviewed that other man who fell to Earth in David Bowie. During the course of the conversation, Paxman asked Bowie about the nature and identity of British rock music. Bowies answer was fascinating, Weve always been good at music. Were not truly a rock nation. Everything we do in rock n roll has a sense of irony attached to it. We know that were not the Americans. We know it didnt spring from our souls. So, as the British always do, they try and do something with it, to make them feel smug. And thats what were good at doing. Its the same in other parts of modern culture. When RuPauls Drag Race was brought to the UK, contestants didnt adopt grandiose American names such as BeBe Zahara Benet, Pandora Boxx, or Sasha Velour, but far more ironically British names such as Cheryl Hole, Scaredy Kat, and Baga Chipz. This British sense of irony also pervades their science fiction. Think of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and Red Dwarf. And so it is often with Doctor Who. While brilliantly inventive, featuring ballsy women, bisexual captains, working-class loquaciousness, scientific passion and [being] unremittingly pacifist as critic Caitlin Moran put it, the program can also descend into the ludic and ironic excess of the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Doctors.

If Doctor Who has been about one thing over all these years, its been about the weird. All science fiction is about the cultural shock of discovering our marginal position in an alien Universe. Sci-fi works by conveying the taste, the feel, and the human meaning of the discoveries of science. Doctor Who is an attempt to put the stamp of humanity back onto the Universe. To make human what is alien. Even in the form of the Doctor him (or her) self.

The weirdness of Doctor Who is also concerned with the relationship between the human and the nonhuman. Doctor Who seems to present an infinity of nightmares and visions. A bewildering array of conflicting themes: aliens and time machines, spaceships and cyborgs, utopias and dystopias, androids and alternate histories. But, on a more thoughtful level, we can identify four main themes: space, time, machine, and monster. Each of these themes is a way of exploring the relationship between the human and the nonhuman. Taking a closer look at these themes will enable a clearer understanding of the ways in which Doctor Who works, and what the program has to say about science.

The space theme in Doctor Who sees the nonhuman as some aspect of the natural world, such as vast interstellar spaces in which the Doctor travels, or the alien, which can be seen as an animated version of nature. Here we look at the likes of space travel, baby Universes, and the science of exoplanets.

This theme portrays a flux in the human condition brought about by processes revealed in time. Tales on time often focus on the dialectic of natural history, so they are of particular relevance to evolution and biology. Here we look at topics such as time machines, alternate histories, and regeneration.

Machine stories deal with the man-machine motif, including robots, computers, and artificial intelligences. Dystopian tales are part of the man-machine theme; it is the social machine in which the human confronts the nonhuman in such cases. This part has entries such as Daleks and Cybermen, superweapons, and Doctor Whos very best invented machines.

Stories that focus on the nonhuman in the form of monster are usually situated within humanity itself. Especially if we read the Doctor as being essentially human as well as alien. In monster tales there is often an agency of change, such as nuclear war, which leads to the change of human into nonhuman, or Kaled into Dalek. Its within this theme that the remaking of humanoids through genetic design is encountered. Of course, monsters can be upbeat too, as the example of the Doctor as superhero testifies.

This way of thinking about Doctor Who, as the human versus the nonhuman, is pleasingly elegant and transparent. It helps us chart the Doctors ongoing dialogue with science:

At times, with stories like Sleep No More, science and the human in Doctor Who