The Science of Everyday Life

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Speaker 1 only 10 more presents to wrap. You're almost at the finish line.
But first,

Speaker 1 there, the last one.

Speaker 5 Enjoy a Coca-Cola for a pause that

Speaker 6 refreshes.

Speaker 1 Hello, I'm Robin Inks. And I'm Brian Cox.
And in a moment, you're going to be hearing me saying, hello, I'm Robin Inks. And I'm Brian Cox.

Speaker 1 Because this is the longer version of the Infinite Monkey Cage. This is the podcast version, which is normally somewhere between 12 and 17 minutes longer than that that is broadcast on Radio 4.

Speaker 1 It's got all the bits that we couldn't fit in with Brian over explaining ideas of physics.

Speaker 7 I do object to the use of the word longer though, because that's obviously a frame-specific statement.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we haven't got time to deal with that, because even in the longer version, we can't have a longer intro. Can we just let them listen?

Speaker 1 I've got an idea.

Speaker 7 Can we just not have a podcast version of this intro to the podcast, which can be longer than the intro to the podcast? And then we can have a podcast version of the podcast intro to the podcast.

Speaker 1 We can't get started by now, but if you're still hearing this, I don't know what's going on.

Speaker 7 And then we can have a podcast, podcast, podcast version of the podcast, and then it would be.

Speaker 7 And I'm Brian Cox. And today's Infinite Monkey Cage comes from the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester.

Speaker 1 Now, on first look, today's subject looks like one of the few sciences that Brian is actually rubbish at, because we're looking at domestic science.

Speaker 1 And anyone here who has tried Brian's flapjacks will know they are extremely disappointing and overly dense.

Speaker 1 So, anyway, sadly, tonight, it's not about that form of domestic science.

Speaker 1 The domestic science we're going to talk about will have no recipe hints apart from those which are directly linked to Archimedes, entropy, and electrons. So, back on safe ground, Brian Cox.

Speaker 7 The objects you encounter in your home obey the same laws of physics as Higgs bosons, neutron stars, and lasers, and as such, they offer a deep insight into the fundamental workings of the natural world.

Speaker 1 So, I'd like to take this opportunity to congratulate all of those who are listening who have a very messy house.

Speaker 1 Well done, you are allowing your house to evolve in accord with the second law of thermodynamics, whilst those mithering, tidy uppers are pointlessly subverting the will of the laws of physics.

Speaker 1 My house is one of the great illustrations of entropy. That's what I constantly constantly tell my wife.
Well done, we're living according to the laws of physics.

Speaker 7 On the panel to discuss the laws of nature hidden in the everyday world, we are joined by.

Speaker 5 Hello, my name is Danielle George from the University of Manchester. I'm a professor of radio frequency engineering, and my favorite bit of physics you'd find around the home is the toilet.

Speaker 1 Do you want me to elaborate? Yes, you can elaborate.

Speaker 5 Excellent.

Speaker 6 So, if you think about principles of physics, potential energy, the buoyancy effect,

Speaker 5 pressure,

Speaker 5 these are all things that you'd find, conservation of energy, you'd all find these in the toilet. And it's something we take for granted every day.

Speaker 1 So that's toilet physics, but let's move on to our next guest.

Speaker 6 I'm Dr. Helen Chersky.
I'm a physicist who works in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UCL.

Speaker 6 And my favorite bit of physics in the everyday world is the coincidence that means I spill my tea every single day when I walk with it down the corridor from the tea room to my office.

Speaker 1 And so are we going to talk about this a little bit later on or do you want want to explain that now?

Speaker 6 So, when you shake a cup of tea, it slops from side to side, and you will notice, or you will from now on, that the bigger the cup of tea, the slower the slopping is.

Speaker 6 Small cup of tea, very small, very fast slopping. It just so happens that the rate at which you walk is exactly the slopping rate of the average cup of tea.

Speaker 6 And so, what that means is it pushes the sloshing higher and higher, and then you spill your tea.

Speaker 6 So, that little coincidence in the physics that your walking rate is the same as the sloshing rate of a mug is why it's so easy to spill tea when you're carrying it.

Speaker 1 And our final guest is.

Speaker 8 I'm Russell Kane, BA Honours English, Middlesex University, and

Speaker 8 Tottenham campus. And I'm a comedian, apparently, that's what people say afterwards.

Speaker 8 And my favourite bit of everyday physics is theta and delta wave manipulation and its nocturnal prevention of my existential equilibrium, which is the long way of saying putting my daughter on a sleep routine so I don't kill myself.

Speaker 7 And this is our panel.

Speaker 1 Helen, I'm going to start with you because part of the reason we're doing this show is based around a book of yours that we read, which is looking at the physics which is around us in the everyday.

Speaker 1 And this is tea time when this is first going out. This is a moment where the Radio 4 listener is getting their homemade jam out.
They are having a cup of tea.

Speaker 1 So, as well as the effect of reverberation we've been talking about already, what are the other things that are tea drinking, jam eating, radio 4 listener?

Speaker 1 What can they observe at this moment in terms of the laws and actions of physics?

Speaker 6 Well, the first, the most obvious thing you see is that when you add milk to your tea or coffee and you see the two liquids mixing into each other, they don't just sort of merge, they swirl around each other.

Speaker 6 And that's actually quite, that'sn't an important observation because you see something similar in the sky where warm and cold air is swirling around us, especially at these latitudes, we get these big rotating storms coming across the Atlantic towards us.

Speaker 6 And so

Speaker 6 that's actually really important that liquids don't mix just by joining into each other, they swirl around.

Speaker 6 So there's something, and you can see that pattern in lots of places in the world.

Speaker 6 And then you can play, this is a good one if you've got a teacup at home, to get a spoon and tap your teacup around the rim, and you will hear that the pitch of the cup changes. I've got, can I do it?

Speaker 6 I've got a teacup here.

Speaker 6 Because Radio 4, you know, there's always a teacup, right? It's one of the rule, the BBC rules. So, I've got a spoon, and I'm just going to

Speaker 6 so there's two different notes going on as I'm I'm tapping around the rim.

Speaker 6 And the reason for that is that all objects in the world are basically musical instruments and what you're hearing is their structure.

Speaker 6 And when you hit it, the cup vibrates, and it basically vibrates by squishing, going rugby ball shaped

Speaker 6 and then rugby ball shaped the other way. And it just so happens that one of those involves the handle moving and one of them doesn't.

Speaker 6 And the one that involves the handle moving, the cup is effectively heavier, it's got more inertia, and so it vibrates more slowly.

Speaker 6 So you can actually hear the extra mass of the cup, the extra mass of the handle, as you're tipping the tea, tapping the teacup around the rim.

Speaker 1 Because you've now explained that, can you actually do that again then, just so that you don't hear that?

Speaker 6 This is when I'm tapping exactly opposite the handle, so the handle has to move.

Speaker 6 And now I'm going to tap at 45 degrees to that, so the handle won't move.

Speaker 6 So, there's about a semi-tone difference in pitch, and it's just from the added mass of the handle.

Speaker 6 And so, and that's just like big bells making deep notes and little bells making high notes. It's to do with the speed of an oscillation, has something to do with the amount of inertia in the system.

Speaker 6 I can keep playing with teacups, that's probably enough for now.

Speaker 1 I don't know if anyone who just tuned in at that point are thinking they're on Radio 3 listening to the Andy Kerschall show,

Speaker 1 another session from the teacup players of Paraguay.

Speaker 7 These ideas, the study of the way that liquids mix and the complex patterns that emerge during that mixing, is actually one of the,

Speaker 7 I was going to say, I don't mean least understood areas of physics, but it's not fully understood by any means, is it? It is actually a very current research topic.

Speaker 6 Yeah, so I think that there are it's sort of under there's this there's this feeling that because it's in the everyday, it must be mundane and simple and just sort of you know trivial.

Speaker 6 And that is absolutely not true because there are these these three frontiers in physics research: the sort of quantum mechanics and the very small, and there's general relativity and they're very large, and then there's the bit where they're trying to get them to join up around the back.

Speaker 6 And then there's the complexity of the everyday world, which is mostly you know, Newton's laws of motion and simple thermodynamics and wave equations,

Speaker 6 but they interact in complex ways.

Speaker 6 You get simple rules, but they do quite complicated things when you set them going. And so you get the beautiful complexity of our world.
And it's not trivial and it's not understood.

Speaker 6 Things like, you know, dripping when you dip a spoon in honey and you watch the honey swirl around in a pattern.

Speaker 6 I had a friend when I was at university who did his entire PhD in the maths department in Cambridge on the swirling of that honey because it's not understood, right?

Speaker 6 It sounds very trivial, but actually the way it works, there's a lot of subtlety in there. And we have a lot of complex systems, you know, our weather is my or weather's in the oceans.

Speaker 6 The oceans are really my favorite example, but no one else thinks about them.

Speaker 6 But you know, you've got this

Speaker 6 interacting system that's doing different things in different places, and it's hard to predict, but it's absolutely following very simple laws of physics that we can see in the world.

Speaker 1 Is everything that you eat and drink actually cold by the time you get to consume it? Because I'm just presuming that you suddenly go, hang on, this is a fascinating.

Speaker 1 I'm going to have to research this. And then by the time you finish researching, you go, cold again.

Speaker 6 Well, I think people should play with toys. Like, you know, I'm not, hot food's quite nice.
I, you know, that's a good thing. But there's this thing that, oh, toys are for the kids.

Speaker 6 But you learn from toys. We can all play with them.
There's no reason the kids should have all the fun. And these are very important fundamental things, like Brian said, about the world.

Speaker 6 So, and everyone can look at the world. It's those questions that we sort of don't, adults don't let themselves ask, but they're really important.
And the thing is, it's all about patterns.

Speaker 6 Physicists are fundamentally really lazy. I'm sitting a long way from Brian, so I can say this.

Speaker 6 But instead of just learning a pile of facts, it's about learning patterns. And then you see the same patterns again and again and again.

Speaker 6 And so once you've seen the pattern in your teacup, you then see the same pattern in lots of other places in the world. And then it becomes a tool.
Then you can use it.

Speaker 6 And you're not helpless in the world. You can look out and understand what's going on around you.

Speaker 7 And also, Danielle, we see those patterns. So we're talking about the everyday scales, things you see in your house.
But it translates.

Speaker 7 The same problems appear across the universe and back in time towards the origin of the universe. So it's the same physics.

Speaker 5 Absolutely, yeah. So, so right from

Speaker 5 the cosmic microwave background, so the 3.8 billion years ago universe exploded,

Speaker 5 the radiation there, there is all of that sort of complex nature there, then into star formation and how that's all changed

Speaker 5 from 3.8 billion years ago up to now as well. You see it all.

Speaker 5 But I think the really good thing for me with trying to put it into the sort of the everyday mundane things is if you can see it there, we have all these big challenges, these grand global challenges, and that that could be sort of climate change or it could be looking into space or whatever it is.

Speaker 5 If people sort of look in their coffee cup and go, Wow, okay, now I know that what's happening here is this, that, and the other, and they can explain it just by the everyday things that they see around them,

Speaker 5 they might be much more interested in then looking further and developing their knowledge further to solving these big grand challenges and these big space challenges that we face as well.

Speaker 5 So I think it has a two-way thing as well.

Speaker 7 And they're the same fundamental laws of nature at work. So you're talking about patterns forming in coffee.

Speaker 7 It's probably more complex, actually, I suppose, in some sense, than stars forming in galaxies, or at least the same level of complexity.

Speaker 1 Certainly the same level.

Speaker 5 Yeah, yeah, I would say so, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 5 And again, it's it is all about patterns and about knowing how, you know, where it goes, where it started from, and where it's going as well, and trying to predict that pattern, trying to predict what happens in star formation or

Speaker 5 galaxies or the beginnings of the universe, or where the universe is going as well.

Speaker 1 Well, I wanted to get Russell in here because, yeah, as a comedian as well, one of the things is you are meant to try and maintain that childish ability to just go, but why, but why, but why, which is that wonderful, the natural thing which we, as the older we get, as you've kind of mentioned, Helen, there's a moment where that's meant to become embarrassing, to be constantly inquisitive about the world.

Speaker 1 Do you think when you wander around your house, when you look at the behavior of those things around you, have you still got that ability to be curious? Yeah, I think I'm going backwards if anything.

Speaker 1 Like, I ask why all the time.

Speaker 8 And one of the brilliant things about being in the building where we're recording this right now, the Museum of Science Industry, there's loads of naked machines where you can see inside them and see exactly how they work.

Speaker 8 Because what I'm finding is as we go on, particularly sort of post-iPhone technology, the machines are getting more capable and more complex, but I've got less of a clue of how they work.

Speaker 8 So I think, this is because I've been swatting up on Helen's book, like a girly swat, there should be more see-through machines.

Speaker 8 Like, at least one of every major machine that makes our life work should be see-through. So, there should be like a see-through iPhone.

Speaker 8 There should be a see-through steam train, I think you use the example, or a see-through train in your book. Because

Speaker 8 the more stuff we have, the less we know how it works.

Speaker 8 Whereas if I was a Victorian, I'd be like, oh, I'd shovel some coal and then go and visit my Lady of the Night, and I know where my top hat was stitched, and I'd come home again.

Speaker 1 You sound like Jack the Ripper. Yeah, well, I shovel the coal, I'd see my lady of the night with my top hat.
Finally revealed

Speaker 1 a monkey case.

Speaker 8 Say what you like about Jack the Ripper, he's very technologically aware.

Speaker 8 So

Speaker 8 that's why I ask why, because I don't like being given something brilliant and going, Oh, this is the new so-and-so computer, it's so many megahertz because it's got an I six.

Speaker 8 And I'm like, what's an I six? It doesn't mean anything. What do you mean its internal processor does this? It's just a piece of plastic now.

Speaker 8 Whereas a hundred years ago, I would have been able to see the satisfying cogs turning.

Speaker 8 And I think as human uh human beings, if you're not trained as a physicist or a scientist, it's harder to translate what a machine's doing if you can't see bits turning and smashing against each other.

Speaker 7 You're a professor of engineering, and one of the challenges we have actually today is to inspire people to go into engineering. We have a shortage of engineers.

Speaker 7 Do you think there's a link between that idea that you don't see the engineering? I mean, when I was growing up, we had a valve television. I can mention valves.

Speaker 7 But

Speaker 7 you had T V repair people that would come in and repair the T V. You would have to put the valves valves in in the early 70s.

Speaker 7 You had access, and then people like me when we were growing up would build radios from electronic sets and things.

Speaker 7 So, do you think there is a correlation between that completely invisible technology now in a modern cell phone, for example, and the lack of you can't see the world?

Speaker 5 Definitely, yeah, yeah, absolutely. But I think we've sort of started to come through that terrible era, and it's like the dark ages, because they are just all black boxes.

Speaker 5 You know, like you're saying, Rosalie, everything is just

Speaker 5 your iPhone or your tablets or whatever, they're black boxes. The manufacturers don't want you to get into them.

Speaker 5 Whereas, you know, when we were younger, it would be, let's get it open, let's tinker, let's see what it is, let's break it, let's fix it. And

Speaker 5 the manufacturers now don't really want you to do that.

Speaker 5 And so, I think we've had this era, and we've seen it with students coming into university as well, where it is just that, well, it works, and if it doesn't, I'm just going to throw it away and get another one.

Speaker 5 A very sort of disposable society.

Speaker 5 But I think we're coming out of that now, and I think it's really good with the sort of the Raspberry Pis, the Arduinos, and all of these bits of electronics that do allow people to start building the radios of the future,

Speaker 5 start to do more like wireless technology. They can create their own systems in the house, they can add it to Minecraft if that's what they play on their PlayStation or whatever.

Speaker 5 And so, I think we are coming through it, but it has had a really detrimental effect to engineering and manufacturing in this country for sure.

Speaker 7 So, this resurgence in coding,

Speaker 7 I suppose, the Internet of Things in the house and the fact that you have all these things talking to each other and you can get in and do the basic level coding again, that's w why is that happening actually?

Speaker 7 Is it demand from people to or is it some great altruistic it's almost like you know it would be great for engineering departments if this happened.

Speaker 7 But what what is driving do you know what's driving that resurgence?

Speaker 5 The lack of engineers is one of them. I mean we we are short of just under two million engineers in this country, and that's just this country.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 software and coding and

Speaker 5 sort of electronics is very much at the heart of so much that we do in this country. So, the idea was: let's get children, primary school children, coding.

Speaker 5 Let's get them doing so that by the time they come to university, we've got to really up our game because they're going to be really, really hot on the coding, the application of those codings, the hardware that they can use.

Speaker 5 And so, by the time they get jobs,

Speaker 5 what are they going to be able to solve by that time? It could be amazing.

Speaker 7 So, it's a direct intervention, partly then, in the curriculum and at primary schools, that you're really seeing that feeding through? Yes, absolutely.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Helen, you want to start with.
A couple of things.

Speaker 6 The first,

Speaker 6 one of the things that gets lost, I think, in the age of touch screens is the appreciation that anything's happening.

Speaker 6 Like, the appreciation for how much science and technology it takes to create that is getting lost. And actually, in this very room, a couple of years ago at the Science Festival,

Speaker 6 Matt Parker made one of his domino computers. So

Speaker 6 it does binary adding up with dominoes. It's brilliant.
And I was there with my family, some of them are in the audience, and several generations. And the older generations are really excited.

Speaker 6 Look, the dominoes, you can see the ones going along and making a two, and the twos going along and making a four.

Speaker 6 And the kids who were sort of under ten, I think, were just going, what is this about? And we were like, this is how your computer works. And they were like, you just touch the screen and it works.

Speaker 6 And there was this moment where there are these four adults standing around these poor kids going, but this is really cool. You can see it and it's dominoes.
And the kids just didn't get it.

Speaker 6 They didn't really appreciate that there was something to, you know, that. And the thing is, someone has to build the modern world.
And it's not just it's great to be able to do things on computers.

Speaker 6 The other thing is that we still live in a physical world. We still have bodies that are about this size.
We still live on a planet which functions in the physical world.

Speaker 6 We still need materials to build things. So although the modern, you know, the things that computers allow are really important,

Speaker 6 it's not, we still need to understand physical materials and how to actually build things out of stuff.

Speaker 6 Because we're still going to sit at tables that are about this height and sit on chairs that are about this height.

Speaker 6 And I think it's really important that we don't lose that because if we lose that, then we feel helpless.

Speaker 1 But to me, it shouldn't be one or the other as well.

Speaker 5 I think using the technology that is the future, you know, the electronics, the tablets, the laptops, etc., which children are so used to way more than us.

Speaker 5 You know, my child's not even two, and she knows how to swipe my phone and open it and get onto twirly woos on iPlayer and things like that.

Speaker 5 And you sort of think, oh, that's a terrible thing, that's bad. And you're like, well, is it bad?

Speaker 5 Can't we use the fact that it is a physical world and I want to teach her about the physical world and use that technology to teach her that? So I don't think it should be one or the other.

Speaker 5 It should be all of that is important, and we can use the technology, which is only going to get more and more

Speaker 5 to help educate people and to make them understand the physical world around us.

Speaker 1 How do you feel about that, Russell?

Speaker 8 I mean, you have a young child as well, this kind of going into a new world where you will be looking at them playing with things that you probably don't understand at all and do you is there a luddite side to you or you she's what she's one and already the the floor can be covered with toys and all she'll want is iPhone or iPad and even even when you get like smashed up old iPhone off eBay she'll that's a smashed up one I want the real one that's really online that's really going to mess up your life if I dribble into it

Speaker 8 so it is that I they see I don't know if it's the blue light that emits from these machines I don't know or they just know that that that is the real world and that's the adult path into the world.

Speaker 8 She just seems to be attracted to this stuff, which is terrifying because I'm like, yeah, my child's going to grow up only surrounded by penguin classics and just bed in hummus every night.

Speaker 8 And she's already like, where's Kim Kardashian on my iPhone? I'm like, I want to kill myself in the bedroom.

Speaker 8 There is a bit of a reaction happening, and not just with Krusties, like us.

Speaker 8 There is like vinyl, people going for vinyl and stuff like that. It's coming back.
And in other fields, it's happening as well. It's not just the vinyl record.

Speaker 8 I think there will be more of that retro rediscovering of technology in a nostalgic, affectionate way, and not just in a patronizing way. People are putting real records back on and stuff like that.

Speaker 8 But

Speaker 8 I mean, I suppose the solution is going to have to be a compromise. Like, you could wear, I've just been on the latest generation of 3D headsets.

Speaker 8 I don't know if anyone's been on them, they are mind-blowing. Stick your nan in them, it's amazing watching your grandma choke on her worthers as an alien comes towards her.

Speaker 1 It's going to impregnate me. Waha, grandma.

Speaker 8 And

Speaker 1 she got, anyway.

Speaker 8 But I think you could wear this and then sort of design in the virtual 3D world and then use 3D printers.

Speaker 8 So although you're not physically manipulating objects, it's an analogous experience because you're in the 3D mask manipulating virtual objects.

Speaker 8 Therefore, arguably you could work with more physical objects than you could in the physical world.

Speaker 8 Stuff that no longer exists, or stuff that's endangered, or stuff that would be dangerous, or the one from the group of metals that when you throw them in the water explodes.

Speaker 8 I can't remember, the one underneath lithium.

Speaker 8 So you could get the big one and just...

Speaker 1 I love the way you know that though. You know the one just under lithium, just to the left.
Which one is it?

Speaker 8 It goes all the way down the grid. Which is the one that really goes off, where it writes a proper row.

Speaker 1 So potassium.

Speaker 8 Potassium underneath that. Potassium, I'd have potassium all day long, I'd stick him a drink.
There's one underneath it. A proper nutter.

Speaker 1 Cesium, that's it.

Speaker 8 Absolute nutter.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 8 you could, but imagine, imagine I could put on my virtual reality mask and I could throw cesium into a lake and I could do that experiment, which I'm never going to do in real life.

Speaker 8 You can watch some YouTube clip, but to be you could have a more immersive scientific experience, and that would square the circle of doing the physical with the non-physical. I rest my peace.

Speaker 1 By the way, Radio 4 does not encourage you to play cesium in a lake. I think we should make that very clear.

Speaker 8 I can't get it. I searched everywhere.

Speaker 1 It's so annoying. What's the one that if you have physical contact with? One of you all know this, Brian won't.

Speaker 1 and it means that you you start to smell of garlic instantaneously pretty much and you'll be dead in three days. Oh, I just feel that I need to

Speaker 8 take away at 2 a.m.

Speaker 1 There is it it's a it's a very soft metal. Does anyone know it there? Thallium.

Speaker 1 Which one? Thallium. Thallium.
Thallium. Not thallium.
No, not thallium. I was going to say, thallium, we're ruined.

Speaker 1 Thallium you can order on. What's the one you're doing? Thallium! Thallium! Sorry, it's thallium.
Thallium, yeah, thallium.

Speaker 1 the thallium thallium confusion can lead to a very disastrous I don't seem to be relaxing at all and I smell

Speaker 8 either way you're going to be very sleepy in three days

Speaker 7 I don't believe that well you don't believe in thallium no I believe in thallium

Speaker 1 because I'm a periodic table denier or something

Speaker 7 very extreme physicists

Speaker 7 higher level descriptions of nature and nonsense and but so you're saying that you interact with thallium, you start smelling of garlic inside, which you can't by the way, because it in the middle of the morning.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 there is the contact basically, the will, it then creates this smell of

Speaker 1 garlic.

Speaker 1 And I'm not sure, it's just, I mean, it's not garnish, it's obviously the way that the molecules and the way that they interlock in the nose, or whatever the system is.

Speaker 1 Did you read this on Breitbart? No, no, no, I watched a scientist talk about it. It was shortly before he died.
Robin, I think you were doing it. And

Speaker 1 I was up in Glasgow and I was watching various different public events and this man went, I'm not going to take this one particularly out of the thing. Do you want to check it now?

Speaker 1 This show's never been. It's always been about Wikipedia this year.

Speaker 8 If you got it right, you could become like a really rubbish superhero. You know, like, because you get bit by the spider and don't die, you become Spider-Man.

Speaker 8 So you could have just enough thallium, you could withstand any garlic breath.

Speaker 8 I can take it, I am thallium man.

Speaker 1 But only for three days. Only for three days.

Speaker 1 Daniel, I wondered, because we were also talking there a little bit about, I suppose, in some ways, when technology becomes invisible.

Speaker 1 And I was thinking that for, again, for the generation that are kind of my age or Brian's age,

Speaker 1 which bizarrely enough, we are pretty much the same age, even though I have aged in a very different manner.

Speaker 1 That's thallium for you, Peter. Stay off the thallium.
This is what happens if you abuse thallium.

Speaker 7 So it's chemically similar to potassium.

Speaker 7 So it can enter the body through the potassium channels and then disrupt the biochemistry because it substitutes for potassium, and that's why it's extremely toxic.

Speaker 7 Call my bluff, isn't it?

Speaker 1 Yeah, so

Speaker 1 thallium, it's a 1950s car. It smells a garlic and can't be a little bit more than a million.

Speaker 7 I want to talk about bubbles.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 we've both got a robot orchestra and a bottle of lemonade and some raisins, which is the biggest budget we've ever had on this show.

Speaker 1 And so, we should kind of return to some of the ideas of actually what around the house people can.

Speaker 1 So, if you are listening now and you have this, should be going out in mid-January, so you should still have some dried fruit left over that you didn't use, and hopefully, one bottle of lemonade.

Speaker 1 This is all you require. And now, I hand over to you, Helen.

Speaker 6 So, I've got a bottle of lemonade. I've taken the label off.
So, two litre, two litre bottle. And I'm going.
This is terrifying because if

Speaker 6 I don't want to spray all the people next to me with lemonade. Okay, so I've taken the lid off.
And this is something that's really good to do

Speaker 6 if you are bored at a party and you either want to encourage the interesting people to come to you or have an excuse to leave. It works for both.

Speaker 6 I'm going to put the raisins in the lemonade in the top. There's a small handful of them, and the people who are near me will be able to see what's going on, which is that they're dancing.

Speaker 6 The raisins sink to the bottom and they sit there for a bit, and then they grow bubbles because bubbles, there's lots of dissolved gas in the lemonade, but in order to come out of solution, it needs a place to start.

Speaker 6 And a wrinkle in a bubble is an excellent thing for that on a raisin.

Speaker 6 So the raisins sink to the bottom, they grow themselves a little jacket of bubbles, and then overall the raisin is less dense than the fluid around it. Gravity is pointing downwards.

Speaker 6 And so the raisins rise to the top and then they turn over until they get rid of all the bubbles and then they sink back down again.

Speaker 6 And if you want a cheap lava lamp, this will keep going for about half an hour. After that,

Speaker 6 after that, what you have does look a bit like a bottle of urine with dead flies at the bottom, but up till that point, it's awesome. And the thing here is, this is a buoyancy-driven flow.

Speaker 6 So, when whatever is more dense will tend to sink in the direction of gravity, which is downwards, less dense things will rise to the top. And the analogy here,

Speaker 6 so these raisins at the top are pretty much doing exactly what happened to the Titanic to go from the quite nice to the quite seriously nasty.

Speaker 6 The little bubbles are like the air-filled spaces in the bottom of the Titanic that were keeping it buoyant because they were making the ship displace more water than its weight.

Speaker 6 And when those bubbles pop, the raisin sinks back down.

Speaker 6 And it just so happens that the size of a raisin relative to the depth of the lemonade bottle is almost exactly the size of the Titanic relative to the ocean it sank in, which is just a useful thing to know.

Speaker 6 But this buoyant, so this buoyancy thing is not, you know, you can play this game with the raisins, but this is happening all the time. This kind of thing is driving our weather.

Speaker 6 Convective flows, buoyancy-driven flows, are driving our weather and our oceans.

Speaker 6 So you can see a lot. And it's also good for keeping people quiet.
They're all just watching. It's

Speaker 7 We were talking about the analogue world, the digital world. This is ultra-analogue television for the listeners here.

Speaker 7 Because what you have to do is you listen to us, but you have to build what we're seeing.

Speaker 1 But you can do it.

Speaker 7 It is interesting.

Speaker 7 It's literally a two-litre bottle of lemonade, drop some raisins in, you see this complex behavior. There are loads of bubbles in there.

Speaker 7 And I know that you were actually talking about the,

Speaker 7 you mentioned actually about your daughter and said, what gets people into science and engineering? I know that you have now become quite obsessed with bubbles. It is my job.

Speaker 1 Was it your job? It's actually my job, yeah.

Speaker 7 Didn't you do a PhD in explosives?

Speaker 6 Yeah, I did a PhD in explosives physics. And then I shifted into bubble physics, which it takes a similar type of experiments.

Speaker 6 There's a lot of high-speed photography, so it's the same type of experiment, just now I do it in the ocean instead of in a lab. Does it have a name?

Speaker 8 Have you christened it like bubble, not bubbleology, but.

Speaker 6 Bubble physicist is a real job.

Speaker 1 And now, Russell, if you'd like to explain exactly what Helen's face looked like as she said that to you.

Speaker 8 I wanted a posh, long-sounding word. I'd go yes and met Helen.
She was a bubblerologist or something like that.

Speaker 6 Bubbles are really cool, and I'm not biased because they you take to so I'm not talking about soap bubbles, I'm talking about gas bubbles in a liquid.

Speaker 6 And the reason they're interesting is that there are things that a gas does, there are things that a liquid does, but when you mix the two together to get bubbles, completely different things happen.

Speaker 6 And the best example, I think, is if you drink cappuccino with sort of you know thick layer of foam on the top, sometimes I have observed coffee snobs, which is not me,

Speaker 6 put rest a spoon on top of the foam and they count the number of seconds it takes to fall through the foam.

Speaker 6 And that's if it's longer than ten seconds, the milk foam's all right, apparently. Which is weird, right? Because if you rested spoon a spoon on top of the coffee, just the coffee, it would fall in.

Speaker 6 And if you rested a spoon on top of air, it would fall through. But you mix the liquid and the gas together, and suddenly something has completely different properties.

Speaker 6 And so bubbles are really important in the world because they're an example of what we call a two-phase flow. You've got two phases, a liquid and a gas, and they do things that

Speaker 6 neither phase by itself can do. And so, they're really useful in engineering, in the ocean, they help the oceans breathe.

Speaker 6 We use them in medicine. You know, these are little workhorses of the physical world.

Speaker 6 And so, yes, they're in bubble bath and they make everyone happy, but they're also really important for getting things done.

Speaker 7 In terms of understanding the oceans,

Speaker 7 what are the great unknowns that this bubble liquid, the gas-liquid mixture is bringing to the system?

Speaker 6 There's a few places where bubbles are important, and my area of specialty is the upper few meters of the ocean, where when you get big storms out at sea, they push up waves, those waves break, and then you get this sort of mismash underneath the breaking waves.

Speaker 6 So, we're used to seeing that white patch on the top of foam, but that is a tiny part of what's going on.

Speaker 6 What's directly underneath it is this turbulent patch of bubbles and water all mixing together. And there's two things that happen: the gas is carried down into the ocean, so it dissolves out.

Speaker 6 So that's how oxygen gets into the ocean.

Speaker 6 It's how carbon dioxide gets into the ocean. So about a third of all the extra carbon dioxide we're putting up into the atmosphere ends up in the ocean.
And bubbles are really

Speaker 6 important part of the mechanism that gets them down there. And then they also rise to the surface and they spit, which is nice.

Speaker 6 But you know, when you hold a fizzy drink up under your nose, you can feel it spitting up particles up your nose.

Speaker 6 The foam patches on the ocean are doing the same thing. They're spitting these tiny particles called aerosol particles up into the sky.
And those are really important for cloud formation.

Speaker 6 And so, those bits of the climate system that we're not understanding, you know,

Speaker 6 the Earth system has traditionally been seen as five different systems: the atmosphere, the oceans, biology, rocks, and the ice.

Speaker 6 And what is becoming important is that what's becoming apparent is that it's how they interact with each other, how they share things between each other.

Speaker 6 Those are the real keys to how the engine works. And so the bubbles are right in there as one of the mechanisms that helps that engine work.

Speaker 6 And we need to understand that in order to understand our climate because

Speaker 6 I think of each of us as having three life support systems: right, a human body, our planet, and our civilization.

Speaker 6 And if there's no, you know, that's great to do science for curiosity, but if you're pragmatically minded, you probably want to understand how your life support systems work.

Speaker 6 And our climate is a life support system, and we need to understand it.

Speaker 1 Can I just get the because it feels like the people on stage right have had a lot of fun watching the radio.

Speaker 1 I feel we should show the people over this side as well who feel sorry. Can I just ask, by the way, because obviously radio fall listeners are more likely to be heavy gin drinkers.

Speaker 1 Will this work with tonic water as well?

Speaker 6 Yeah, and

Speaker 6 if you get a fluorescent, a UV light, the tonic water will also glow.

Speaker 6 In that, if you black out your room and switch on the UV light, your tonic water will glow blue, which is, you know, all sorts of science. A Scorpio.
Exactly like a Scorpio. He's read my book.

Speaker 1 Yes. Now we're going to find out how like Delia Smith we are.

Speaker 1 Whether you remember when Delia Smith would talk about an ingredient and suddenly you'd see it zoom up in the Waitrose or some other supermarket chart.

Speaker 1 Let's find out if half this episode, raisin sales have gone through the roof.

Speaker 7 Danielle, I can see that you like engineering because you've got

Speaker 7 16, is it 16 floppy disk drives?

Speaker 7 For our younger listeners, do you want to explain what a floppy disk drive is?

Speaker 7 And then say why you sat there with 16 of them in front of you.

Speaker 5 So, floppy drives are what used to be in computers, and they could hold 1.44 megabytes

Speaker 5 of data.

Speaker 7 I remember when I first got one of those in my computer, it was in in the 1990s, wasn't it? 1.4 megabytes.

Speaker 7 That's less than one song, isn't it? As an MP3, significantly less actually. It's one picture, isn't it? It's like one picture, one JPEG.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 with a tiny rubbish camera.

Speaker 5 But at the time, that's all we needed.

Speaker 5 But of course, they're obsolete now. So, what do you do with them?

Speaker 5 So, a student from Cardiff University

Speaker 5 designed this for us, and it's floppy drive motors moving and creating music. So I'm going to play it.
So

Speaker 5 they've got an electronic brain that brings them all together.

Speaker 7 I should say that it's quite an array because floppy disk drives are quite big, I suppose. They're what about the size of a CD, oh, even a CD, I suppose.
I mean, what's that?

Speaker 1 Yeah, oh man.

Speaker 7 How can you describe how big?

Speaker 8 Two betamax next to each other.

Speaker 1 Two beta max.

Speaker 1 Sick, that's what I was looking for.

Speaker 1 But it's quite a a big array.

Speaker 5 Yeah, so what you're going to hear is just literally the motors, these 20-plus-year-old motors moving and creating music. So I'm going to play some music and

Speaker 5 see if you know what it is.

Speaker 1 Remarkable.

Speaker 7 It's incredible, isn't it, that that technology can now be the equivalent of one man with a kazoo.

Speaker 1 It's

Speaker 1 one of those remarkable things.

Speaker 1 That's really. But it is still, it's a break.
Have you got any other tunes on it?

Speaker 1 Let's just do that whole show. Cancel everything else we've done, right? Everyone get involved.
Here we go.

Speaker 7 This is Donald Trump's signature tune.

Speaker 7 It also looks like the motor is a motor.

Speaker 1 So you've got that. That was, is that Vegas March? Is it called Vegas March?

Speaker 1 Imperial March.

Speaker 7 So, what that's actually doing is changing the speed of the motors?

Speaker 5 It is, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 5 So, so, what James, the student who did this, um, did was: so, there's the 16 of them, and there's a range, um, a physical range that the motors can move, and then he has uh fed in a MIDI file into

Speaker 5 uh so lots of MIDI files, different music files,

Speaker 5 into the electronic brain, this MyRio,

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 that then controls how far the motor moves, physically, how far the motor moves. And depending how far it moves, it will play a different note.

Speaker 7 Oh, so but it's so what you're hearing is the speed of rotation of the motor change because of the position, because that's how the fluffy disk drive works.

Speaker 5 That's right, yeah, yeah. So you're seeing the motors physically moving, and that's what you can hear.

Speaker 7 Because it's rotation of rotation.

Speaker 7 What do you think Michael Faraday would have made of this use of his invention?

Speaker 1 Can it play things can only get better? Or is it not

Speaker 1 within its range? With nearly one out of it.

Speaker 1 But we didn't ask the first question today, which was when exactly do we see experimental physics end up in the home, which distracted you. No, I think it's the idea about

Speaker 7 the frontier research now. So it didn't take long, I suppose,

Speaker 7 for transistors, for valves and then transistors to make their way into the home. It was extremely fast.

Speaker 7 So what are the things that we're learning now, do you think, to speculate that you might see in 10, 20, 30 years' time?

Speaker 5 Familiar things I think will be a lot of sort of mobile technology and medical applications.

Speaker 5 So, sort of before going to the doctors, you could check your cholesterol level, you can check your blood, you can check this, that, and the other.

Speaker 5 Sort of diagnostics, early diagnostics for medical care. So, what people are working on now is putting

Speaker 5 sort of wearable tech. There's a lot of wearable tech going on now.

Speaker 5 And so, putting wearable technology into a lady's bra that will detect very, very early signs of cancer. So, very, very early signs.

Speaker 5 So, it's not meant to be instead of going to the doctor and having a full check-up, but it literally, very early signs,

Speaker 5 because all you're looking for is a temperature difference, because a tumour is a different temperature to the skin.

Speaker 5 And then your mobile or a watch or whatever it is could then say, mmm, there's something a little bit funny here. I think you should go to the doctors.

Speaker 7 It's the idea of building sensors into clothing and then finding easy

Speaker 7 diagnostic signals.

Speaker 1 Russell, what would you like to see in terms of in your house, what do you feel at the moment this is what you're hoping science is working on?

Speaker 8 I like the idea of having a magic glove that can do my bidding in the home.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 8 I can just be like, put the kettle on, it'd be like, indeed, why would you just not sort of have a butler or something?

Speaker 7 Why do you want just a hand?

Speaker 1 It is more fun, though, isn't it?

Speaker 8 It would be like, yeah, the the robot butler hand.

Speaker 1 That's it.

Speaker 8 That's why we call it Handrew. Handrew the robot butler.

Speaker 8 He would just do my bidding silica with a little bow tie across the index finger. And

Speaker 8 it would obviously have drone technology so it could take off and then go about.

Speaker 8 The thing about a robot butler, I don't want to turn around and a full metal geezer staring at me going, anything else? Jenny? Like, please get out. I find that creepy.

Speaker 8 Whereas a hand can't watch you while you're going about your business.

Speaker 1 So, Helen, I don't know if you're going to up the ante from a disembodied hand being the thing that science has lacked so far.

Speaker 1 What would you like, Danielle? What are we seeing? What are we going to be expecting in the next decade?

Speaker 6 I'd like a transparent kitchen. I want to be able to see inside my toaster, my kettle, and my washing machine.
I want to see what the bits are doing. And I think we could almost get to the stage.

Speaker 6 Someone does sell a transparent toaster for a horrendous amount of money.

Speaker 6 But that sort of thing, so you can actually see that things are happening. So, that's what I would like to have.

Speaker 6 When it comes to technology, the problem is we're making it all invisible.

Speaker 6 That's why I want some things to be visible because everything else is just going to disappear into the that's one of the difficult things when you talk about electricity because we are the measure of our success with electricity is basically that we have no idea it's there.

Speaker 6 It is running the modern world and yet we can't see it. You occasionally get an electric shock.

Speaker 6 So I think the technology will become invisible and as a resistance to that I want all the things that can still be visible to be even more visible.

Speaker 7 I think that's a brilliant idea. I'm surprised no one's made a completely transparent washing machine or something like that because

Speaker 6 it's really cool things different coloured bits and different coloured wires and things on the inside.

Speaker 8 Will it ever be possible to charge electrical objects just by them being in the room and go charge that there?

Speaker 6 So I have a device actually that measures air pollution now that is and it's powered entirely off Wi-Fi networks.

Speaker 6 So it's harvesting energy from the Wi-Fi in the room and it doesn't take very much but it is it's not ever going to need batteries and as long as it's somewhere in civilization in the Western world I guess

Speaker 6 it's it's going to have power.

Speaker 8 Point to my phone and go Andrew, charge my phone.

Speaker 6 And it would just charge without being connected to the so it's not an efficient way of transferring energy, but it does work. Not yet.

Speaker 5 But there's a way now, as well, that instead of using Wi-Fi, because the

Speaker 5 Wi-Fi channels are very, very well used now. So there's something called Li-Fi.

Speaker 5 So it's using light.

Speaker 5 So the idea is that you have LEDs in your home, you know, on your ceiling or whatever, and that is the thing that's then transferring data, transferring, you know, charging your phone.

Speaker 5 So instead of using Wi-Fi, using Li-Fi.

Speaker 8 Amazed. That's going to blow my mum's mind.

Speaker 1 There won't be nothing left. You've done awful nothing to your grand with that helmet you made her wear.

Speaker 1 Now we've got the audience, we've asked them a question, and normally we make it kind of clear on the piece of paper that it's meant to be a light question, but we forgot to do that.

Speaker 1 So the punchlines are sometimes more specific than you might imagine to this.

Speaker 1 What scientific innovation would you like in your house and why, wireless electrical, to leave to make sure that the number of water-related fatalities was lower?

Speaker 1 Instant medical diagnosis that would reduce NHS waiting times.

Speaker 8 Ba-bum, ba-bum. Sorry.

Speaker 1 Oh, no, that's

Speaker 7 this is this is more like it. A portable black hole for waste disposal.

Speaker 7 That's a brilliant idea because it would compress compress the waste into a very small region.

Speaker 1 Ricky would like whatever Lazarus stroke fountain of youth device Brian uses to keep him so youthful.

Speaker 1 Something to pick Lego up because I'm fed up with standing on it. I agree with that.
Some kind of Lego magnet would be very, very useful.

Speaker 7 This is a good one. Anti-gravity, so I can rise above the argument.

Speaker 1 A telepathic headband, so I can fulfil my duties as a husband and know the answer to the question my wife has been mulling over in silence for the last three hours without without telling me, and it's flabbergasted that I haven't intercepted her thought waves.

Speaker 1 That's from Jerry the Unwise.

Speaker 7 This one's kind of this is a

Speaker 7 so a toilet seat that can recognize gender and lifts or lowers accordingly.

Speaker 1 Danielle, you'd be up for

Speaker 1 funny priest physics of the toilet there. A better method to construct flat-packed furniture.
There's always a bit left over.

Speaker 7 A cryogenic fruit bowl, so my strawberries will be immortal.

Speaker 1 A robot to clean up up after the kids why I have to kids is thatrew we've already done that one this is a teleportation station preferably a hand-sized one again this is very a teleporter to get me home and avoid the Manchester motorways and roads an automatic ironing machine they don't mean a a teleportation that will only teleport a hand-sized object I think they're thinking of handrew I think Russell is someone is on trend here

Speaker 7 immediately it's a portable teleportation station that's about as big as a hand but would teleport teleport the whole person. It would be no good if it just teleported your hand.

Speaker 8 But how good would it be though if your hand were just holding it?

Speaker 1 It's definitely something to transport a hand. It isn't a consistently friendly cat.

Speaker 1 See

Speaker 7 the thing about teleportation is it destroys the object at one point and the object, not even a coffee, but the object appears at a different point so it gets destroyed.

Speaker 7 So if you had a hand-sized one you you would end up with just one hand.

Speaker 7 It would remove your hand and send it to Alpha Centauri or something. That's not useful.

Speaker 1 So that's not what it means.

Speaker 6 Why does it need to be next to the bed?

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's a good idea. I didn't notice that.

Speaker 7 This is a hand-sized teleporter next to the bed.

Speaker 1 Why? Okay, I was just going to say that.

Speaker 1 It's because, is it Craig's?

Speaker 1 Right, so it's because Craig doesn't want to do anything. He wants to just go, I need to be there and I can't be bothered to get up.

Speaker 7 Why would he just send his hand?

Speaker 1 Because his hand is obviously does most of the work. He's a traffic policeman.

Speaker 8 You don't need to with this new invention I painted, the handrew.

Speaker 7 It will do your jobs for you.

Speaker 1 So handrew comes to the hand-sized teleportation device. Exactly.
Right, brilliant.

Speaker 8 You're not left with the stump.

Speaker 8 Because if you send your hand away, you're not going to have a hand.

Speaker 7 Danielle, is there any chance of building this handrew with his hand-sized teleporter? When do you think we're going to see that on the market?

Speaker 1 I believe I've got it in.

Speaker 5 I'd like to say really soon. And next to everybody's bed, that's where it's got to go.

Speaker 1 What possible use is it?

Speaker 7 Why would you like to see it?

Speaker 1 Thank you very much to our guests, who are Professor Daniel George, Dr. Helen Chersky, and Mr.
Russell Kane.

Speaker 1 You might want to keep quiet about next week's show, as we do plan on telling you how to break the bank at Monte Carlo and improve your Sudoku score.

Speaker 1 And as this is a Radio 4 show, I imagine most of you are much more excited by the latter rather than the former. So thank you very much for listening.

Speaker 1 And to play us out, here is the Floppy Drive Orchestra.

Speaker 7 Podcast, podcast

Speaker 1 Brian doesn't even know that you have actually now listened to the whole of the show

Speaker 1 and this is all he's been doing for the last 47 minutes.

Speaker 1 And it's not going to end for a while either.

Speaker 7 It's a nested infinity of podcasts.

Speaker 1 This is my life.

Speaker 7 You just end up with the podcast.

Speaker 1 Be our guest at Disney's enchanting musical, Beauty and the Beast. Fill your heart with joy and Disney magic.
Brought to life like never before.

Speaker 1 Coming to the Orpheum Theater July 14th through August 9th. Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.