the curious world of science A visual miscellany of stories, theories, discoveries & curiosities plucked from the scientific world.
To some, science is simply a means to an end; to others, it is an almost spiritual meditation on theories and formulae. Focusing on the human endeavours at the heart of science, it presents a collection of essential classifications, intriguing biographies, amusing curiosities, and irresistible trivia. Bite-size morsels of text explore the worlds of physics, chemistry, biology, and maths, while also venturing into those magical areas where science meets art. This is the newest addition to Icon’s programme of illustrated, coffee-table-style, hardback editions of our most popular backlist titles. It combines the original text of The Science Magpie (30,000 copies sold) with pages of beautiful, full-colour graphics and illustrations.
S P E C I F I C AT I O N S 246 x 190mm (7.5 x 9.7in) 224pp four color throughout 200 Illustrations approx Estimated word count: 60,000
This edition includes a system of icons that signpost different paths through the miscellany. From the Large Hadron Collider rap to Isaac Newton’s infamous list of sins - it offers a dizzying flight through the wonderfully human world of scientific knowledge.
CONTENTS 6–7
INTRODUCTION 8–213
MISCELLANY ‘Hymn to Science’................................................................ 8 How Do They Do IT? ......................................................... 9 Congratulations, You’ve Won a … ......................................10 To Marry or Not to Marry, that Is the Question ................12 What’s a Mole Worth? .......................................................13 The True Measure of Things (Zooming In) ........................14 As Easy as Al, Be, Cs..........................................................16 A Room Full of Monkeys ...................................................18 A Call for Concision ......................................................... 22 Name that Number ........................................................... 24 A Thing of Mathematical Beauty ...................................... 25 ‘In Chemic union’ .............................................................. 26 It Takes Two ..................................................................... 28 To a Measurable Infinity and Beyond ............................... 29 Shaking Things Up ............................................................ 30 And the Winner Is … ....................................................... 32 Geological Time Piece ...................................................... 33 ‘Twin limb-like basalt columns’ ......................................... 34 ‘Oh Death, where is thy sting?’ .......................................... 36 Triple Letter Score! ........................................................... 37 Taking Acid ....................................................................... 38 A Good Indicator of … ..................................................... 39 Solar Eclipses Galore......................................................... 40 I Holy See the Error of My Ways ..................................... 42 Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit-rabbit, Rabbit-rabbit-rabbit, Rabbit-rabbit-rabbit-rabbit-rabbit ................................. 46 Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide! .............................................. 48
‘A remarkable book, sure to make a mighty stir’................. 50 The Truth Will Out … Eventually .................................... 52 ‘Endless forms most beautiful’ ........................................... 53 Are You Cleverer than a Fifteen-year-old … from 1858? ........ 54 Just a Pinch of Vanadium .................................................. 56 Taxonomically Speaking .................................................... 57 Biodiversity Under Pressure .............................................. 58 The Big Five ...................................................................... 59 Evolutionary Patterns ........................................................ 60 The Torino Impact Hazard Scale ....................................... 62 It Has Been Long Known that … ..................................... 64 The $11 Million Book ....................................................... 66 It’s a Laughing Matter....................................................... 67 When Left Can Be Right and Right Can Be Wrong ....... 68 Energetic Thoughts ........................................................... 70 A Fully Rounded Member of Society................................ 72 You Can’t Win, You Know..................................................74 A Hot and Cold Problem .................................................. 76 Throwing a Tumblerful of Water into the Sea ................... 78 On the Other Side of Silence ............................................ 80 The Answer to All Problems.............................................. 81 Quite an Illuminating Lecture .......................................... 82 When It Comes to What’s in Your Genes, Size Isn’t Everything ...................................................... 84 Would You Adam and Eve it? ........................................... 85 Particularly Taxing ............................................................. 86 A Key to Unlocking the World ......................................... 90 The Periodic Snail.............................................................. 92 A Singing Science Sensation ............................................. 94 Light-years Away .............................................................. 96 Unweaving the Rainbow ................................................... 97 The New Atlantis .............................................................. 98 A World of Worlds in Every Earring ...............................102
Scratching at the Surface ..................................................104 A Law by Any Other Name … ........................................105 Just Not My Cup of Tea ...................................................106 Number Sifting Made Simple ..........................................107 The Body Electric .............................................................108 For Goodness' Sake, Show Your Working ........................112 Kicking Up a Stink ...........................................................114 Diabolic and Erotic ..........................................................116 The Music of the Spheres .................................................118 Unsung Heroine of Science ..............................................120 Working with Black Bodies ..............................................124 A Pluto-sized Problem .....................................................126 Leaving a Trace in Space ..................................................128 The True Measure of Things (Zooming Out) ...................130 Nature and Nurture ..........................................................132 One Clear, Unchanged and Universal Light.....................134 Another Hue unto the Rainbow.......................................136 On a New Kind of Ray .....................................................138 Centenary Icons of Science and Technology ....................139 Chocolate, a Microwave and a Ruler ................................140 ‘Like a swan that can’t settle’.............................................142 It’s All Relative ................................................................ 144 A Popular Choice .............................................................148 Tearing Up the Rules .......................................................150 Left, Right, Left, Right ....................................................152 Evolution – It Runs in the Family ....................................153 There’s Electricity in the Air .............................................154 Checking the Dosage .......................................................156 Gateway into Radioactivity ..............................................158 A Sports Hall Goes Nuclear.............................................159 An Unholy Trinity ............................................................160 In Cold Blood ..................................................................161 More than the Germ of an Idea .......................................162
From Greek Particles to Plum Puddings and Beyond ......164 Letting the Cat Out of the Bag........................................168 ‘Scientists Anonymous’ .....................................................170 Truth to Their Fictions .....................................................172 The Life of π .....................................................................176 A Slice of Indiana π ..........................................................178 A Monk Who Liked His Peas .........................................179 Meet Tom Telescope and Friends .....................................180 The Sins of a Fledgling Scientist ......................................182 The Monkey Trial .............................................................184 What if Earth Can Clothe and Feed Amplest Millions at Their Need ................................................................186 Five, Four, Three, Two, One … We Have Lift-off! ............190 Blowing Hot and Cold .....................................................192 There Is More to Seeing than Meets the Eyeball .............194 Conceding to the Laws of Metre......................................198 Machine and Man Side by Side .......................................199 First, Do No Harm .......................................................... 200 The Size and Gravity of the Situation ............................. 202 Your Reading List for this Week Is ................................. 204 All Together for a Tea Luncheon .................................... 205 An Unacknowledged Debt .............................................. 206 Elements of Colour ......................................................... 208 The Ten Greatest Ever Equations … According to Nicaragua ................................................210
Appendix 214
Selected Bibliography 218 Index 220
Picture Credits & Permissions 224
INTRODUCTION science, n.
5.b. Science. In modern use, often treated as synonymous with ‘Natural and Physical Science’, and thus restricted to those branches of study that relate to the phenomena of the material universe and their laws … Oxford English Dictionary
To help guide you towards particular types of information, each entry is marked with an icon identifying the subject area you will discover there.
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Measurement & Classification
Theory & Discovery
Mathematics & Formulae
Biography & History
Lists & Curiosities
Culture & Humour
S
CIENCE. What does that word conjure up in your mind? Writing over two hundred years ago, the great German authors Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe gave this rather neat (if slightly silly-sounding) description in their collection of poetic epigrams, Xenien:
To one, it’s a high, heavenly goddess. To another it’s a cow that provides them with butter.
You might want to read that again. What they appear to be saying is that science can be viewed in terms of powerful ends (I’m thinking of the very best metaphorical butter here) and almost spiritual, aesthetic means. In Schiller’s and Goethe’s eyes, at least, people’s responses tend to depend on which of these they focus. But why not consider both? Why not acknowledge that one reason science is so special is that both these aspects can be true? There’s more though. Science isn’t just about laws, theories, formulae, processes and experiments. At heart it’s a human activity. Without the incredible individuals who have occupied themselves with uncovering the workings of nature and applying them to our benefit, where would we be? That’s the last rhetorical question, I promise. This miscellany is intended to showcase just some of the many and varied facets of science, plenty
of which are unashamedly and idiosyncratically human. It’s people who provide great stories and heart-warming anecdotes. Partly for this reason, the story of Erasto Mpemba, an African schoolboy who didn’t give up in his quest to understand something (and who has a physical effect named after him as a result), and the note of English naturalist Charles Darwin on the pros and cons of marriage are among my favourite entries in these pages. Although this book is a miscellany, certain themes and ideas echo through its pages. One of these is mathematics. You may have noticed the ‘ … ’ at the end of the definition of science given at the start of this introduction. That’s because I cheated slightly – the definition actually continues, ‘… sometimes with implied exclusion of pure mathematics’. However, I side firmly with the 13th-century English philosopher Roger Bacon, who said, ‘Mathematics is the door and the key to the sciences’ and, as such, it’s included. At least I’m honest. A non-scientific realm that features rather heavily in the book is the arts, and particularly poetry. In contrast with science, artistic expression of any kind is typically felt to possess a power beyond the material. I’m not sure quite how fair a view of science this is. But I believe that an appreciation of both realms of human endeavour can only be for the good, given the great wonders each offers. So, as writers are often told, ‘show, don’t tell’. That has been the intention in those places in the book where the two cultures overlap, such as the entry ‘The poets’
scientist’ and the poem ‘Letter from Caroline Herschel’ (see pages 26 and 122) by SwedishAmerican author Siv Cedering. And so, to the final big theme in The Curious World of Science. The splendid New Zealander short-story writer Katherine Mansfield once wrote, ‘It is of immense importance to learn to laugh at ourselves’ – and I couldn’t agree more. From a smattering of groan-inducing jokes in some of the boxed fillers to moments of more delicate wit from practitioners of science in entries such as ‘Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide’ and ‘In Chemic union’, science’s lighter side is very much on show because, as the French author Colette put it, ‘Total absence of humour renders life impossible’. Science has the power to enrich people’s lives, both figuratively and practically. What follows is a celebration of it, warts and all. I hope you enjoy it. P.S. In case it has been a while since you last did, or read, any science, I’ve put together a brief back-to-school appendix (see page 214), which will hopefully remind you of some of the science you were taught at school and come in useful when reading this book. Don’t worry, there won’t be any exam at the end of it. Simon Flynn
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A Hot and Cold Problem
THE MPEMBA EFFECT First revealed in the Physics Education journal in 1969, this is a story to lift the heart, and is a powerful lesson to us all. In 1963, Erasto B. Mpemba was in his third year at secondary school in Tanzania. During a physics lesson, he asked his teacher about something that had been puzzling him – why was it that the ice-cream mixture he’d made and had been boiling had frozen quicker than his friend’s more tepid mixture, even though both had been placed in the freezer at the same time? The boy was simply told he must have been confused.
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Mpemba didn’t just accept this brush-off, and the problem continued to trouble him. His conviction in the truth of his observations increased as friends who regularly made ice cream confirmed it was quicker to do so the hotter the mixture was when put in the freezer. After passing his O level qualification a few years later, Mpemba found himself in high school. The first topic he studied there was heat. He asked his new teacher the ‘hotter ice cream freezing faster’ question, and again he was told he was confused and even guilty of believing in ‘Mpemba physics’ as opposed to real physics. The teacher didn’t let this go and it became a running joke with both him and Mpemba’s classmates. Despite this, Mpemba persisted and experimented further with water in beakers. His findings proved the same as before.
A VISITING PROFESSOR One day, Dr D. G. Osborne of University College Dar es Salaam visited the school and, at the end of the session, invited questions from the students. Mpemba bravely asked, ‘If you take two similar containers with equal volumes of water, one at 35°C and the other at 100°C, and put them into a refrigerator, the one that started at 100°C freezes first. Why?’ The rest of the audience sniggered, but Dr Osborne asked Mpemba to confirm he’d performed the experiment before promising to try it himself, even though he thought him mistaken. Dr Osborne recognised the ‘need to encourage students to develop questioning and critical attitudes’ and felt that there could be a ‘danger… [in] authoritarian physics’. Much to his surprise, Dr Osborne got the same results, as did the university students he put to work on the problem. Furthermore, no answer could be found in any scientific literature to Mpemba’s observation. Finally, in the paper in Physics Education, jointly authored by Mpemba and Dr Osborne, a request was made to readers for further information. It turned out that the question had already puzzled many acclaimed minds, including the philosophers Aristotle, Francis Bacon and René Descartes. Today, the problem is fittingly known as the Mpemba Effect. Towards the end of June 2012, the Royal Society of Chemistry began a competition to find the ‘best and most creative explanation’ for the effect. The winning entry listed four factors: evaporation, dissolved gases, the mixing of the water through convective currents and supercooling. Something terrible then happened in 2016 – a paper was published in the journal Nature that declared there was ‘no evidence to support meaningful observations of the Mpemba Effect’. Curiously, this didn’t prevent further research into the effect and, in 2020, Professor William Zimmerman at the University of Sheffield explained the strange phenomena as being due to microbubbles. He also explained 2016’s findings as being the result of the researcher in question using pure water, while Mpemba and Osborne had used tap water. Whether this proves to be the final word remains to be seen.
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Chocolate, a Microwave and a Ruler
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It took more than 300 years of experimentation and refinement to arrive at the figure for the speed of light that we use as standard today. There’s also a method for determining the speed yourself that might seem more than a little surprising. All you need is some kind of food that can melt (chocolate is good but you can also use marshmallows or cheese), a microwave oven, a microwave-safe dish to put the food in and a ruler.
Now look on the microwave casing (probably on the back) to find its frequency – this is typically 2.45GHz. We know that c = λv, or the speed of light = wavelength multiplied by frequency. So, v is the frequency of the microwave. If it’s 2.45GHz, then the figure you’ll use in your calculation will be 2,450,000,000 (whatever the frequency listed is, it will almost certainly be in gigahertz – 1GHz is 1,000,000,000, so make sure your calculation reflects that). You now need to multiply this by λ, which is double the distance you measured in metres (for example, 15cm is 0.15m, which doubled becomes 0.30m). See how close to the true speed of light – 299,792,458m per second – you get.
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Place the food on the dish.
HOT CHOCOLATE
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Remove the turntable from the microwave – it’s important that the dish can’t move.
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Put the dish in the microwave.
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Cook on a low heat until it’s clear the food is beginning to melt in spots. Begin by trying 30 seconds. These spots relate to the peaks of the ‘wave’ – the distance between two peaks is half a wavelength.
MEASURING THE SPEED OF LIGHT
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Crest
The melted spots in the chocolate are a result of the crests and troughs of the standing waves the oven produces. The distance between a crest and its adjacent trough is half the wavelength. Melted spot
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Wavelength
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Melted spot
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Crest
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Once the melted spots appear, remove the dish and measure the distance between the centres of these spots. One distance should repeat again and again. Trough
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y z y z
Elements of Colour
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TITANIUM Intense white
BARIUM Green
STRONTIUM Red
ALUMINIUM Intense white
THE RAINBOW SCIENCE OF FIREWORKS The characteristic colours of fireworks are due to metals, and their salts, being added to the gunpowder. Particular hues are due to particular metals and their salts – exactly the same ones are seen in laboratory flame tests. When a metal salt is heated, such as in a flame or the ignited gunpowder, the electrons in the metal atoms get promoted to higher energy levels. When the electrons return to their normal, or ground, state, energy is emitted as light at wavelengths specific to that metal. In the case of our fireworks, these frequencies lie in the visible region, and it’s the frequency that determines the colour we then see.
SODIUM Yellow
MIXTURE OF STRONTIUM & COPPER Purple
CALCIUM Orange-red
LITHIUM Red
COPPER Blue
MAGNESIUM Intense white
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The same principle lies behind the magnificent colours of the aurora borealis and aurora australis (northern and southern lights). Electrons in atoms and molecules high in the Earth’s atmosphere, such as nitrogen and oxygen, are promoted to higher energy levels by charged particles from the Sun. As they fall back to their ground state, the swirling, heavenly lights are produced.
Police arrested two kids yesterday – one was drinking battery acid, the other was eating fireworks. They charged one and let the other one off. TOMMY COOPER (1921–1984), BRITISH COMEDIAN 209
THE AUTHOR
SIMON FLYNN has enjoyed an eclectic career. With a genuine passion for science, he currently works as a science teacher, having previously been a writer, editor, and publisher. Simon has degrees in Chemistry, Philosophy, and Science Education, and his other published titles include The Internet From A to Z. He currently lives in North London with his wife.