With Thursday’s release of the first trailer for Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters, fans finally got a good look at the highly anticipated reboot. The clip offered a peak into the movie’s setup, its setpieces, and its overall tone. But there’s one topic it left mysterious: the science.
Well, in a new and pretty fascinating marketing tie-in, the studio made a video going deep on the science of proton packs. Tucked inconspicuously into the trailer footage (at around the 1:05 mark) was a short shot of an equation-filled whiteboard. Appearing somewhat mysteriously atop it was a url: ParanormalStudiesLab.com. That link leads to a website filled with fun information, including photos and schematics of all sorts of Ghostbuster equipment. The biggest goodie, however, is a video featurette about the Ghostbusters’ famous proton packs, narrated by an actual particle physicist. It seems that when Feig decided to ground his supernatural comedy in a little hard science, he knew just who to call: James Maxwell, senior postdoctoral associate at MIT’s Laboratory for Nuclear Science. As Maxwell tells it, Feig tasked him with designing an updated proton pack that could plausibly work in the real world.
Like any sequel worth its salt, the equipment Maxwell came up with upped the ante on the 1984 originals, swapping a cyclotron for a synchrotron and throwing in some cryogen and superconducting magnets for good measure.
