Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Even in the Television Universe, warp drives, androids and photon torpedoes all seem to have vague scientific plausibility, especially today when robotic vacuum cleaners and laser pointers have become commonplace. But what place does physics have in a fantasy world in which a teenage girl and her friends spend their formative years fighting vampires, demons and “killer snot monsters” with magic and martial arts, all in a contemporary alternate reality known to its fans as the “Buffyverse”?

To find out, Jennifer Ouellette turns the literary equivalent of an electron microscope on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and its spin-off, “Angel,” and comes up with a lighthearted yet informative primer, “The Physics of the Buffyverse.” Blending fizzy pop culture with serious science, the book illustrates many common theories and laws of physics using examples from the plots of these two defunct cult television shows.

“Metaphor can be a powerful tool for communicating abstract concepts,” Ouellette writes, “and the Buffyverse offers a unique lens through which to view the precepts of science through fresh eyes.”

If there’s anything the two series did well - besides whipping Evil with quips and roundhouse kicks - it was metaphor. Joss Whedon, the creator of both shows, has said the original “Buffy” series “was intended as a metaphor for how high school can seem like hell to teenagers.” In Whedon’s world, a young girl in every generation is chosen as “The Slayer” to protect the world with her enhanced strength and skills by whacking vampires and other assorted baddies.

Ouellette, a science writer and a fan of both shows, cites many examples of scientific principles at work in the fictional realm: “A high school girl becomes invisible after months of nobody noticing her - a clever twist on the quantum notion that observation determines the outcome of a subatomic-scale experiment.” Some associations to the show’s action are a bit of a stretch, but once a connection is made, many work well enough to keep the reader going on to discussions of complex topics like wormholes and time loops.

The author even associates physics with the main character’s origins: “Entropy dictates that every time the primordial power is transferred to a new Slayer, a little bit of energy must be lost as heat in the transformation, because no energy transfer can be 100 percent efficient.”

The examples in the book are so tightly tied to the TV shows, though, that one really needs to be familiar with each series to make sense of it all. “Clearly,” Ouellette writes, “in the thousand years she spent as a vengeance demon, Anya picked up a little physics.” But it may not be so clear to anyone not already a Buffyverse fan.

The book does not delve too deeply, but biology, electricity, cryogenics, string theory, temporal anomalies, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Schrödinger’s cat and thermodynamics are all touched on in the context of “Buffy” and “Angel” plot points. Examples are often reinforced with descriptions of recent scientific experiments and developments.

With a title like “The Physics of the Buffyverse,” most of the uninitiated will probably take a pass on the book, but it makes an earnest effort to introduce the laws of physics to couch potatoes in a relatively painless way. For fans who find their inner scientists awakened (or even nudged a bit), it includes a bibliography for serious physics reading, along with a list of pertinent “Buffy” and “Angel” episodes for those with the complete DVD box sets of both shows handy.