Could You Make a Real-Life Sonic Screwdriver…?

Katie Gribble is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

Ever been bored? Ever had a lot of cabinets to put up? The perfect tool for the job in the mind of every Doctor Who fan is the Swiss Army knife of sci-fi, the sonic screwdriver. But can this handy little device ever really exist?

The sonic screwdriver first appeared in the Patrick Troughton story Fury from the Deep and since then it’s been helping the Time Lord unlock doors, conduct medical scans, reseal barbed wire, and even light candles and bunsen burners. Soon however it started to become an issue with producers such as Barry Letts not wanting the Doctor to become reliant on the device. So its use from the Pertwee era onwards was continually restricted until it was finally destroyed during the Peter Davison story, The Visitation, where it was blown up by the Terileptils. Its subsequent return to the series during the TV Movie and its inclusion from the beginning of the 2005 series demonstrates its popularity and how it has become recognised as a compulsory part of the Doctor’s tool kit.

Over the years, we fans have been equipped with our very own versions of the sonic with toy replicas and more recently the sonic screwdriver remote controls for our televisions, which I can guarantee we have all used when opening doors and cupboards at some point. But can a real life sonic screwdriver ever leap from the Doctor’s hands and into our own? According to some, yes it certainly can.

In his ‘Because Science’ series, Kyle Hill has explored the possibility of making a real life Sonic Screwdriver and has found that the technology already exists.

Hill takes the function of a sonic screwdriver to be the manipulation of objects from a distance with sound. Now sound is made up of pressure waves that hit your ear and it is through influencing these pressure waves that the manipulation can be achieved.

This can be seen on a very small scale in the technique of acoustic levitation, which has been used to suspend droplets of fluid on sound waves enabling them to float in mid air. If you direct sound waves in the right direction at the right distance, you can get a particle to pinball between the areas of high pressure, the sound waves themselves, which forces the particles to inhabit the area of low pressure between the waves. Furthermore, at the University of Tokyo, there is a mid-air acoustic levitation device which can manipulate the low pressure sites in real time and in three dimensions.

However, to be able to rotate screws and locks like a sonic screwdriver, the sound waves would need to twist in a helix-like shape to create rotational momentum instead of linear as seen in the acoustic levitation described above. This helical rotation is being experimented with at the University of Bristol under the supervision of Professor Bruce Drinkwater. His team have been conducting experiments causing flower particles to spin through the use of ultrasonics. This is all on a very small scale, but these experiments have led him and his team to conclude that it would now be possible, with the technology available, to make a ‘watch makers’ sonic screwdriver’ which would be able to rotate the tiniest of screws. Very apt for we wannabe Time Lords.

With this news, we are moving increasingly closer to the point where the larger scale of sonic manipulation of objects from a distance isn’t too far away. However, these continual advancements in sonic potential must come with a warning. The sonic screwdrivers of our future will still be unable to do wood.

(Via Laughing Squid.)

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