The BBC/HBO dramatization of Philip Pullman’s magnum opus His Dark Materials has been one of the televisual highlights of the year, if not the decade. The alternative reality of Lyra Belacqua’s Oxford, with its airships and daemons and gateways to other worlds, is so strange and yet somehow so familiar. The violent dogmatism of the Magisterium mirrors the rising tide of nationalism; the Gyptian children severed from their daemons might serve as a metaphor for the scars of a decade of austerity.

What is perhaps most captivating is how Pullman draws on cutting-edge developments in science to tell his story. At the centre of the His Dark Materials trilogy is the mysterious substance known as ‘Dust'. In developing his theory of Dust – he likes to talk of it as a process of discovery rather than creation – Pullman drew inspiration from dark matter, the equally mysterious substance that is predicted by our best scientific theories but which we have thus far not been able to observe directly. Another source of inspiration was the Higgs Boson – also known as the ‘the God particle’ – the fundamental particle discovered in the Large Hadron Collider in 2012. The Higgs Boson is in fact an excitation, an all-pervasive field known as the Higgs field. And the Higgs field plays a very special role in physics; it gives mass to the particles that make us up. Without the Higgs field, electrons and quarks would be weightless and travel at the speed of light. It is the interaction of these particles with the Higgs field that slows them down and gives them weight.