We are living through a heyday for films tackling physics and astronomy. New, full-length movie dramas about the lives of Stephen Hawking (The Theory of Everything) and Alan Turing (The Imitation Game) have been released. Gravity was a box-office and critical success last year, while the planet-hunting Interstellar movie could well follow in its footsteps. There’s also a new season – the eighth – of the evergreen TV series The Big Bang Theory.

But what about the use of physics in literature? Is it good, bad or indifferent? I decided to check out some recent “physics-lit” to find out.

Destination Geneva

One lab that features in several recent novels is CERN near Geneva. The top-seller here is Angels and Demons (2000), a thriller by Dan Brown. CERN, though, is no more than a prop: it’s the setting for a murder and a theft (of a quarter-gram of antimatter). The tale is compelling, although the writing about CERN is rather pedestrian. “Looming before them was a rectangular, ultramodern structure of glass and steel,” runs a typical sentence.

Another bestseller (according to the adverts) is Robert Sawyer’s Flashforward (1999), which envisions an event, triggered by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), that makes the world’s entire population black out and have visions of life 21 years in the future. Here, too, CERN’s a prop. There’s a chase in the LHC tunnel, but descriptions are again rather plodding, and you’ll guffaw at the author envisioning physicists being able to discover the Higgs boson (in 2009) simply by noting green lights on the ALICE console.

You’ll find better writing, but an even more outlandish plot, in Robert Harris’s 2011 thriller The Fear Index, whose main character is a former CERN physicist who now works in finance. The book has a few lab scenes and some well-crafted descriptions: “Up ahead, framed by the distant mountains, CERN’s huge rust-coloured wooden globe seemed to rise out of the arable fields like a gigantic anachronism: a 1960s vision of what the future was supposed to look like.” (Actually, the globe was built in the 2000s, though you could say it looks a bit retro.) The lab, Sawyer continues, resembles “an old university in northern England – ugly functional office blocks from the sixties and seventies spread over a big campus, scruffy corridors filled with earnest-looking people, mostly young, talking in front of posters advertising lectures and concerns. It even had the same academic odour of floor polish, body heat and canteen food.”

Different in tone is Catalyzed Fusion by former CERN physicist Francis Farley, whose book’s blurb dubs it “a sizzling romance and a romp with subatomic particles”. Featuring “love, discovery and adventure in the city where nations meet and beams collide”, it culminates in a death caused by a 50 tonne concrete shielding door at the synchrocyclotron – though, for me, the glider scenes above Geneva are the most vivid.

Other fictional labs

Not all lab literature is fiction. The Cuckoo’s Egg, (1989), by Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory astronomer Clifford Stoll, is about his real-life hunt for a spy (the “cuckoo”) who had hacked into an LBL computer and installed a program (the “egg”) that is fed privileges and information. The book provides a genuine sense of LBL, thanks to descriptions of such things as the lack of ceiling tiles, the bicycle ride up and down the steep Cyclotron Road, and the fog-bound, Oz-like San Francisco in the distance. Astonishingly, the book also provides a sense of the Internet, too, as a place – a special, wild arena, where one can communicate instantly with anyone all over the globe yet also be hidden, trackable only from clues in time lags, styles of computer commands, and phone and network tracers.

A Hole in Texas (2004), by Herman Wouk, is a novel about a fictional Higgs finding. It has one brief scene at the abandoned Superconducting Super Collider site in Texas. Despite the fact that Wouk won a Pulitzer prize for another book, the lab description is flat. The protagonists pass by “several huge bleak windowless buildings to a sizeable long low structure stretching off into the fog”. One character says “this brings back memories”, but we never learn them.

Weep for ISABELLE: a Rhapsody in a Minor Key (2003), by former Brookhaven National Laboratory physicist Mel Month, is about the rise and fall of an accelerator at the lab. Subtitled “A Historical Novel”, it unfolds through lengthy ruminations in the heads of the omniscient narrator and in the imagined heads of key (real) actors. But these voices are nearly impossible to distinguish. Not only is there no sense of place in this 600+ page book, but no sense of character either, which makes its prose thick, muddy and featureless. Reading it’s like trying to swim through porridge.

The critical point

Critical Mass (2014) is a satirical novel by “Duronimus Karlof”, which is clearly a pseudonym for someone who’s enough of an insider to make wicked fun of current practices in research, grant-getting and science policy, but also to not want his real name known. I couldn’t put it down, even though it zapped much of what I hold dear, including philosophy of science and California. At one point, contemplating an envisioned laboratory, the protagonist thinks “I liked the notion that our staff would be forced to live in close quarters, where they would not help but share ideas and discuss work out of hours…where the young people would inevitably start to worry about who was sleeping with whom, and where the achievements of Harry working on Project X might spur on Joe who was working on Project Y. The whole set-up seemed ideal to me in every respect.”

This whetted my appetite for more novels that explored the particular hothouse feature of laboratories, whose day-to-day of human experience blurs work and social life so intensely. What literature have I overlooked? E-mail me and I’ll discuss them in a future column.