Vi Hart explains the Higgs Boson

As regualr readers will know, I very much enjoy the work of Vi Hart. The recent discovery of the Higgs boson (probably) is something that has rather amused me. It's been quite hilarious listening to newsreaders desperately try to deal with the science despite clearly not having a clue what the frigging thing is.

So here to the rescue is Vi Hart with a rather clever little sonnet explaining the place of the Higgs in the whole scientific scheme of things.

String theory explained

I'm vaguely aware of how string theory works (or rather, might work). It's an attempt at a theory of everything that tries to unite quantum mechanics. Basically it suggests that quarks and electrons within an atom are one dimensional strands (strings, one might say) and that by being so this makes everything work out. That's about all I know. Superstrings, string field theory, the holographic principle and heterotic strings are just a mystery to me though.

So I was enormously pleased when I was shown the following videos. In them, Professor Edward Witten of the Institute of Advanced Study (at Princeton) explains in fairly simple terms (fairly simple - you do still need to be smart) where string theory came from and how it works.

I love that the internet has this stuff. The cute cat pictures are nice and all, but I wouldn't have any difficulty in getting hold of them without the net, but access to the thoughts of the world's leading theoretical physicist? Kick ass.

Oh and the videos seem to have been taken from something Italian, which means you might have to skip a couple of sequences of graphics as the narrator speaks in that ridiculous jibber-jabber that Italians think is a language. But it sure beats listening to Hawking burbling on in his robot voice.

Oh and I realise that some of you might think that Steven Hawking is hot shit because he's always on The Simpsons and he's written a couple of books that people pretend to have read, but Witten is the real deal.

Professor Nishiyama: King of Science - The Mathematics of Egg Shape

I was delighted to see a comment on my Boomerang article by none other than Professor Yutaka Nishiyama. I like that I'm the kind of person who has a blog that attracts comments from Japanese professors. I was slightly less pleased that I'd made a second-rate joke about the Japanese language and he didn't pick up on it being a joke. I actually felt embarrassed about that. But I'm chuffed silly that he links to my article on his blog.

But it's Easter (well, it was) and I've had a bit of a run of egg-related posts. And guess who wrote a paper about the mathematics of eggs? None other than my favourite scientist: Professor Nishiyama.

Nishiyama has devised a mathematical formula (using the work of Descartes and Cassini) to describe the shape of eggs and their properties, such as how they roll on an inclined surface. As always, the paper is concise and very easy to read. The Professor also encourages you to carry out your own experimentation:

"I'd like for those readers who have until now had no interest in the shape of eggs to begin by confirming this experimentally."

Read the paper (in English) here:
http://www.osaka-ue.ac.jp/zemi/nishiyama/math2010/egg.pdf

Via: http://www.neatorama.com/2012/03/26/why-are-eggs-egg-shaped/

Do mobile phones cause cancer?

No

That was a short article. But I suppose I have some kind of responsibility to actually write a bit more than that. I probably also ought to examine the reason I feel any kind of responsibility for writing this stuff, but that can wait.

Mobile phones don't cause cancer because they can't. 

In 1905, Albert Einstein published a paper on the photoelectric effect. He described light as being composed of quanta (what we now call photons) and theorised that the energy in each photon was equal to their frequency multiplied by Planck's constant. This theory predicted that a photon above a certain threshold frequency would have sufficient energy to eject a single electron.

It doesn't matter if you don't quite understand what that all means. By 1921, enough scientists had been able to prove Einstein's theory through experimentation that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for this very theory.

Did you ever have to do a high school experiment with one of these? It's a gold leaf electroscope. Pretty much every school student has to do a basic physics experiment with one of these and static electricity. You rub some plastic rods or something to build up a static charge and then touch them to the metal disc on top and the little gold leaf deflects away from its metal mount. This is because you have built up a negative charge in the electroscope. If you then shine an ultraviolet light on the disc, the gold leaf falls. This is because UV light is above the threshold frequency so the photons have enough energy to liberate electrons from the disc. Normal visible light is below this threshold so it's unable to dissipate the charge.

See? The shit you learned in high school is actually useful.


So what does this have to do with mobile phones? Well, it's this very Einsteinian theory that governs mobile phone radiation; the very theory that you proved that with the gold leaf electroscope.

See that little graph there? That's the electromagnetic spectrum. See where ultraviolet light lies on that spectrum? Now d'you see where microwave radiation is? Yeah, that's it down there, well below the threshold at which electrons can be liberated.

So, uh there's no way that mobile phones can cause cancer. There simply isn't enough energy in mobile phone microwave radiation to push electrons around give you cancer.

So why the fuck are we spending so much money on studies to find out whether mobile phones cause cancer?

Yeah, exactly. On the one side, we have the entire physics community and the Nobel Prize committee. Oh and Einstein. On the other we have wilful ignorance, stupidity, fear, lawyers and journalists.

Everyone in authority is scared to say that mobile phones are safe just in case it turns out they're not and the biggest class action lawsuit in human history washes over them like a tasteless analogy involving tsunami.

Seeing as there's no possible mechanism by which mobile phone microwave radiation can cause brain cancer, all the pointless studies have used epidemiology to try and find a link. Epidemiology uses statistics to try to identify trends in populations. For instance, one can map the incidence of a disease and compare it to maps of other factors in order to try to discover possible causes.

Okay, so this mobile phone actually does cause cancer. Thanks, China

The problem with epidemiology is that much of the work comes after the identification of possible causes. Whilst we've all heard the phrase "correlation does not imply causation", it seems that journalists haven't. So when an epidemiological study reveals a correlation between datasets, it indicates further avenues for research, not definitive answers.

In the United States, the incidence of brain cancer has steadily fallen over the last two decades at the same time as mobile phone use has massively risen. Shit, if I was some lazy journalist, I could bang out 2,000 words on how mobile phones prevent brain cancer (and I'd earn a lot more for doing so than the twenty pence this article is likely to earn me in ad clicks).

Now this isn't to disparage epidemiology. It's a highly useful science which informs public health research and evidence-based medicine. Dr John Snow famously used epidemiology to identify a water pump in Soho that was the cause of a cholera outbreak and saved goodness knows how many lives. But in the hands of a lazy journalist in search of a sensational headline, epidemiological studies can be a horribly blunt tool that misleads millions.

The excellent Snapshot Science website has a Powerpoint presentation that illustrates the danger of inexpert journalists getting hold of data they don't understand in order to create populist headlines. The second slide shows the data from the study. Note how if you pick any one group from the list you can come up with whatever headline you like.

People love to say "science doesn't have all the answers" and of course they're right, but generally anyone who invokes that phrase is actually trying to suggest that the bullshit they're pushing is somehow on a par with the painstaking research and experimentation of peer-reviewed science. There's a remarkable modern tendency to denigrate the vast achievements in all fields of science in favour of appealing bullshit or beguiling nonsense.

Mobiles phones don't cause cancer because they can't. There is no mechanism by which this can happen. So the interesting question isn't whether mobile phones cause cancer, but why we can't accept the overwhelming evidence and truth that they don't and can't. Entertaining the fearmongers and the frightened by carrying out endless expensive epidemiological studies is to the detriment of us all because it undermines already well-established scientific principles in favour of weak horseshit. Allowing crap the same same consideration as Nobel Prize-winning science isn't being fair or rational; it's being dangerously ignorant. Giving this rubbish equal airtime isn't even harmless.

The always excellent Bob Park (emeritus professor of physics at Maryland University) wrote the following about the dangers of wilful stupidity:

BAD DIAGNOSIS: THE HIGH COST OF IGNORANCE.

Bullshit is dangerous. In 1998 in London, Andrew Wakefield a British gastroenterologist, warned that the MMR vaccine causes autism. In the following months the papers daily carried stories of the tragedy of autism and the heroic doctor who had found the cause. In the months following, MMR vaccinations of children dropped from 90% to 70%. In 2006, the first child in more than a decade died of measles in London. In the first four months of 2011, the HPA reported 334 cases of measles, a 10 fold increase over the same period a year earlier. In France, 7000 cases have been reported this year. Autism was unaffected.


http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN11/wn060311.html

Mystery Monday: Shangri-la

In an attempt to make life more difficult for myself, I'm going to try for themed days on the blog. Yes, it's not enough to come up with five articles a week, I'm now going to constrain myself to set themes on certain days. Let's see how long it takes me to crack. Today is, ugh... Mystery Monday - I should offer a prize for a better name.

A mystical lost mountain kingdom yesterday

Back in 1933, James Hilton wrote a novel named Lost Horizon. British diplomat Hugh Conway survives a plane crash in the Himalayas. He wanders through a snowstorm and is guided to the monastery of Shangri-la hidden in the peaks. The monastery itself is quite odd, having central heating, modern bathtubs, a grand piano, a large library and all kinds of other luxury items. Conway is shown the surprisingly snow-free valley below from where their food comes. It all gets a bit weird after that when Conway is told that the monks barely age and the High Lama reveals that he is dying and would like Conway to take his place. Obviously, Conway does leave and the whole story is actually told in retrospect whilst Conway is recovering in a Chinese hospital. He then buggers off, presumably to return to Shangri-la.

Oddly, the book didn't become successful until Hilton wrote Goodbye, Mr. Chips the following year, which was an instant hit. Odder still is just how many people took the idea of Shangri-la literally. Not long before the book was written, a number of accounts of travel in Tibet had been published in National Geographic magazine and many of the places featured bore a resemblance to the fictional Shangri-la of the book.

A lot of the other places mentioned in Lost Horizon are real enough. Muli, Kunlun and Chongqing all exist. Since the book became popular, Zhongdian in Yunan Province, China has now been renamed Xianggalila (Shangri-la) to attract tourists. It's funny that, in contrast to other mythical places, Shangri-la actually does exist.

It's all jolly pretty and a lot more accessible than Atlantis

Within Buddhist traditions there are mentions of the kingdom of Shambhala, a Pure Land (pretty much a Buddhist equivalent of Heaven). The concepts of Shambhala and Shangri-la are often thought to be one and the same. It's probably adapted from a Hindu myth (like so much of Buddhism) which  is part of the Kalachakra tradition. It's all a bit complicated, so feel free to look it up some time if you fancy a lot of tortuous reading.

The Shambhala/Shangri-la myth came to the West via Catholic missionaries in the 17th century, but it wasn't until the 19th century that interest really picked up. Hungarian scholar Sándor Kőrösi Csoma (yeah, every name in this article is unpronounceable) who travelled extensively in the region, wrote of Shambhala and even gave a geographical location: "a fabulous country in the north...situated between 45' and 50' north latitude." Following his description leads to the eastern region of Kazakhstan, which is characterized by green hills, low mountains and lakes in stark contrast to the barren mountainous terrain of Tibet and Yunan. Hmm.

Hard to believe that this waterfall could contain the essence of uber-nazis and
super-communists, but a surprisingly high number of people thought so

Theosophist Madam Blavatsky claimed to be in contact with Himalayan ascended masters (enlightened beings) and regularly mentioned Shambhala and Shangri-la, introducing them to a wider audience. Lost Horizon appeared at the time that the Theosophical Society's ideas had most currency with the public and at a time when Nazi Germany was rather interested in using German and Eastern mythology to promote the idea of a master race. In 1938, Heinrich Himmler sent an SS mission to Tibet (under Ernst Schäfer) to investigate Asian mysticism and try to find the truth of Shambhala and Shangri-la.

Whilst the German mission to Tibet is relatively well-known, few have heard of the similar Soviet mission. Senior intelligence officer and chief cryptographer Gleb Bokii (no, really) was fascinated by the teachings of the Theosophists and met with several Mongolian lamas. He gained a fascination with Shambhala and Shangri-la and organised an expedition to Inner Asia with his writer friend, Alexander Barchenko. They wanted to prove a link between Kalachakra-tantra and the tenets of Soviet Communism. Although their mission didn't go ahead, Bokii and Barchenko founded a laboratory (under the auspices of the secret police) to experiment with Buddhist techniques in order to try to create perfect communists. Crikey. They weren't the only Soviets interested in Shambhala and the the Soviet Foreign Commissariat did later send an expedition to Tibet. I don't know if they managed to make a super-Soviet-Buddhist-ubermensch, but I presume I'd have heard if they had.

Nicholas Roerich, Song of Shambhala: Thang-La (1943)

Today, you can visit Shangri-la for yourself on any number of package holidays. It's maybe not at its best right now though. Whilst making his 2005 film Wu Ji (The Promise), Chen Kaige and his crew built massive sets in Shangri-la and they got into trouble a bit afterwards for messing the place up. The Chinese government got a bit shirty after Chen and his boys cut down quite a few trees, destroying an entire local eco-system and then left behind massive sets, many of them made with concrete.

It was like that when we got here

A big boy did it and ran away

So there you go: Shangri-la is real and Shambhala might be. But if you want to find a mystical mountain kingdom, don't bother going to see Hitler or Stalin, just hire a Chinese film crew, but remember to tidy up after yourselves. What's especially annoyingly is that The Promise is a bit of a shit film. Ah well...

Phlogiston and magic smoke

Back in the 17th century, German scientist Johann Joachim Becher was attempting to explain the mechanism of fire (and rust) and he came up with an interesting theory that fit with most observations that could be made. His hypothesis was very interesting and attracted widespread support, but the downside was that he was pretty much completely wrong.
Now before I get into this, I do want to make clear that Becher was no fool; he was a well-respected and successful physician, an important political theorist and one of the first to define and study chemistry. But just in case you go thinking he was a genius, I should also say that he was an alchemist who believed that, if he could just find the right material, he could make himself invisible.

Becher's explanation of fire and combustion was quite simple: stuff that burned was full of phlogiston. The wonderfully-named phlogiston (pronounced pretty much as it looks: flodge-iston) was the very substance of fire. When things burned it was because their phlogiston was escaping into the air.

Although the notion of phlogiston seems quite silly these days, it actually makes a great deal of sense. The science of chemistry was only just becoming separate and distinct from alchemy and the phlogiston explanation tallied with observable facts. Combustion and rusting had been correctly linked as different aspects of the same thing and experiments were devised to prove the existence of phlogiston. The theory of phlogiston remained the pre-eminent explanation of combustion and oxidation for well over a century. Even as it lost ground, many of it supporters still regarded phlogiston as a principle rather than a literal substance.

Many experiments were conducted to investigate the existence of phlogiston and a lot of them yielded results that did indeed appear to confirm it. The experiment below was devised by Joseph Priestly:

Mercuric oxide is heated and the effluent passes down the

pipe and into the cylinder, displacing the water. The gas

collected in the cylinder supports combustion better than air.

Bear in mind that no one knew about oxygen (and thus oxides) at the time and that seems a perfectly reasonable experiment that seems to confirm the existence of phlogiston. These days we know that oxidation is caused by oxygen, but the very idea that there was a magic stuff in the air that allowed things to burn or rust seems more fanciful than the idea that it would originate inside the substances themselves. They had the right idea, they just had it backwards.

You might have been told how computers work. you might have been told that electricity flows through the circuits and chips and somehow makes it all go. This is obvious nonsense, but it's how we explain things to beginners so it's easier for them to grasp. It also sounds complicated enough that no one ever asks any questions after that kind of explanation. The real truth is that all electrical and electronic devices run on a substance known as magic smoke.

All wires, chips, etc are filled with magic smoke. When they are damaged, the magic smoke escapes and they stop working. Look at this wire. It's been damaged and the magic smoke is escaping. Soon it won't work any more. You know it makes sense.

The odd truth about quicksand

It doesn't really exist. Well that was an easy blog post.

Oh, you want more? Okay well quicksand does exist, but it's not quite how it's normally portrayed. There are two types: wet and dry.

Wet quicksand is the type we've sort of heard of. It's made of particles of sand or mud suspended in water. Normally when sand becomes wet, water seeps into the gaps between grains, but with quicksand the water flows around the grains encasing them in a layer of water. It happens because of a nearby water source pushing water up through the sand and causing each grain to be suspended in water.

In the films, as soon as you step into quicksand it sucks you in and you're dragged under to die. In real life, quicksand isn't very deep and it won't suck you under. As it's mainly water, you can float in it without any problem. But as soon as you step onto quicksand, it will just part beneath you and you'll sink down quickly. It won't suck you down per se, but there is suction all around you which makes it more difficult to extract yourself, especially if you're wearing shoes. The flat surface that is the sole of your shoe will cause a vacuum to attempt to form under it when you lift it and then you're fighting against the suction of that vacuum.

It's rarely more than chest-deep so you won't necessarily die from the quicksand itself, but it can be rather hard to get out and that's what really kills you. There are regular reports of lone hikers getting stuck in a patch and not being able to get out. Then exposure to the elements, dehydration, etc will kill them.


In the video, note that guy is smart enough to remove his shoes before stepping into it. He'd have a lot harder of a time getting out if he didn't. Now the quicksand in the video is relatively easy to spot because of the wet surface, but often the surface will be covered with leaves or even a dried layer of sand so it can be very hard to spot.

That's wet quicksand and that's the kind we've sort-of heard of. But there's another kind which has long been a rumour, but has only recently been confirmed to exist: dry quicksand.

Dry quicksand is really scary. Instead of water flowing through it, it has had air. The airflow moving through the sand causes it to become more loosely packed. Ordinarily sand has a packing fraction of around 60% - that's the ratio of sand to air in the mixture. Because of sand's rounded shape, it can't be packed tightly. Consider a ball-pit at a kids playground; that's how sand is packed. In dry quicksand, the airflow through the sand has flowed around each grain separating it from the others. As the sand has fallen back, the packing fraction has been reduced making for a much looser sand mixture. In a recent experiment published in Nature, Dutch scientist Detlef Lohse and his mates built a box with a perforated base, filled it with fine-grain sand  and passed air through it. When the air was turned off, the packing fraction of the sand had been reduced to 40%.

Now reducing the packing fraction from 60 to 40% doesn't seem like a big difference, but look what happened when they dropped a ping pong ball onto the sand.

It sank down to a depth equal to five times its diameter before the sand underneath became compacted enough to support its weight. So if you were unlucky enough to find some of this stuff and step onto it, within a second or so, you'd be 10 metres down trying to discover a new method of breathing.

There had long been rumours of desert caravans vanishing into dry quicksand, but it was generally assumed to be bullshit. It wasn't until Dr Lohse's experiments that the existence of dry quicksand was confirmed.

During the Apollo lunar missions, there was a very real fear of something like dry quicksand. Previous lunar probes had confirmed a rocky, dusty surface on the Moon and there was concern about the packing fraction of the lunar dust. The Apollo sites were particularly chosen for being hard and rocky to reduce the risk of the Lunar Lander just vanishing below the surface into a pit of dust. The bottoms of the Lander legs were fitted with dish-like pads to help prevent this. Even though the Lander made it down okay, nobody knew for sure if it would be okay for the astronauts to step onto it. There was a chance the Neil Armstrong might have stepped off the Lander and disappeared into the dust.

Oh, Princess Bride, is there nothing you can't teach us?

Of course, NASA and  Dr Lohse could have saved themselves a lot of trouble if they'd just watched The Princess Bride. Look, there's the Lightning Sand (called Snow Sand in the book), the second trial of the Fire Swamp. That reminds me: I really must write an article about Cary Elwes and his odd connection with the Lord Lucan mystery.

Getting back to quicksand... It ain't like in the movies, but it's real enough. Wet quicksand can be dangerous, but dry quicksand is downright terrifying. I read a statistic somewhere that 3% of all movies made in the 1950s and 1960s featured quicksand as a plot element, but it's now sadly missing from modern films as too much of a cliché. Well, apart from The Princess Bride and the Chinese film Kekexili: Mountain Patrol (which is on my list of films I need to watch).