More experiments to try at home

'I'm a bit of a pyromaniac,” says Dr Laura Grant, with a wicked laugh and a flick of her long black hair. She’s dressed in tight black jeans, Converse sneakers and a long silky top. Her eyes are kohled and she wears gold hoop earrings. She’s tanned and glowing, having just returned from honeymoon in Egypt. She looks like an off-duty Bond girl, but she’s actually a physicist. “Hardly anyone in my lab wears a white coat,” she insists.

She’s television’s hot new find, a 28-year-old beauty with a brain who they are billing as “the Nigella of science”, though she’s eaten fewer cakes. What the two women have in common is a passion for their subject and allure. Given the chance, plenty of viewers would happily experiment with Grant. She’s knowledgeable but not intimidating, serious but happy. “I have a light-hearted approach to myself,” she says cheerfully.

As she excitedly describes blowing up a car, purportedly to test the strength of Kevlar, the polymer often used in bulletproof vests (a sheet of it was in the car’s boot), it’s easy to see why the teenagers who she was tasked with enthusing about science were won over. “Half of the car just launched into the air and set these trees on fire! It was brilliant!” She’s like a small child with a box of matches – only these days the matches are usually confiscated and the child is told to find something safer to play with. Which is a shame; we’d still be walking on all fours if curiosity hadn’t propelled us forward by trial and error.

Grant’s childlike wonder at the world is infectious. The Big Experiment hits the small screen on Thursday, the first of a six-part series. Method: take a class of underachieving kids from east London, impress them with whizzes and bangs till they have your attention, then fast-track them through science GCSE. Results: teenagers who are more confident and interested in learning. Conclusion: science can make a difference. Easy-peasy. It’s Top Gear meets Jamie’s Kitchen. It’s visually entertaining, it’s socially intriguing, it’s informative. It’s good telly. Beyond that, could we learn from it?

Off screen, as is frequently reported, something is very wrong with science in this country. The figures are alarming. Britain needs more scientists, but we’re producing fewer. If we don’t double the number of new science graduates in the next seven years, the jobs will go overseas. In November, an OECD-funded study found British 15-year-olds’ science knowledge had slipped from 4th place in 2000 to between 8th and 12th place, with Japan, Estonia and Finland all ahead of them. Between 2004 and 2014, the number of people needed for jobs relating to science, engineering and technology will have doubled to 2.4m, but according to the CBI, 80% of engineering or industrial companies expect a shortfall in graduate recruits. Businesses that rely heavily on scientists, such as pharmaceutical companies, could just move abroad if the talent is not here.

Why? “I think a lot of it is down to how science is taught in schools,” says Grant. “People generally are interested in science, whether it’s Mythbusters or Scrapheap Challenge – there’s an appetite for science and the newspapers are full of science stories. In a Mori poll, 86% of people said they thought science makes a good contribution to society. People are fascinated by how the world works.” It’s getting school children to study it that’s the problem.

In 1984 physics was the most popular science A-level, taken by nearly 55,000 students. Last year that figure was down to about 27,000, a marginal increase on 2006, but still half the numbers of two decades ago. This makes Grant’s blood boil. “Anyone can do physics,” she says, adding (I’m looking incredulous), “it’s not hard.”

Grant is based at Liverpool University, where she took a degree in physics followed by a PhD in science communication. She has lectured on particle physics, the science of sound and nuclear fusion. She co-presented the 2003 Faraday lecture. She’s a proper scientist, in other words. On the other hand, when the Institute of Physics came up with a formula for high heels, she was happy to give a frivolous comment: “Many of my colleagues have no trouble understanding quantum mechanics, but can’t figure out how women can wear high heels. Now I can explain to them how I minimise the probability of tripping up.

“There is a danger of dumbing down,” she admits, “but simplifying things is fine. That high-heels research was just some physicists thinking about something and applying a formula to it. That’s what physics is all about: ‘What factors contribute to that?’ It’s that process of looking at something in everyday life and finding a pattern.”

Likewise, she says, Dr Len Fisher wasn’t wasting anybody’s time or money when he calculated the formula for how long you could dunk a biscuit in tea without it crumbling into the mug, which won the punningly titled Ig Nobel prize for whimsical research in 1999. Nor, presumably, Arnd Leike of Munich University, who managed to prove that beer froth obeys the mathematical law of exponential decay. Then there was Professor Jean-Marc Vanden-Broeck, who worked out how to make a teapot spout that does not drip. “Yeah!” she says enthusiastically. “There’s another formula about a dinner-party setup – where the best place to sit is on the table. If it’s a long table, the best place to sit is second to the end. Someone’s thought about that and worked out the pattern. It’s exactly the same process that’s applied to particle physics. You might not be applying that exact piece of knowledge, but it’s the same questioning, testing process. Collecting the evidence and then drawing a conclusion: that’s science, whether you apply it to quantum mechanics or dunking biscuits.”

So what’s the formula for whether or not your marriage will work out? She laughs, happy newlywed that she is (her husband, Ashley, is a government press officer), and ducks the question. “I do think about things quite logically. My husband doesn’t think about things logically at all, so we balance each other out well. Sometimes I do it to an extreme and get to a strange sort of conclusion, like, ‘And therefore, that means I must have six eggs for breakfast! Hmm, there must be an error somewhere.’”

She’s the sort of person who works out her average speed on the motorway, based on how far the mileometer says she’s travelled and the signs stating how far it is to her destination. “It does make my friends laugh,” she admits. “I’ll work out how long it’s going to take me to do the next stretch. There are parts of the motorway where the signs are wrong. I probably am insane, but I do like thinking about why things might happen and understanding patterns in different ways.”

The teenagers Grant set out to turn onto science, at a school in Newham, were, let’s say, less than keen initially. Not just on science but on pretty much anything resembling a lesson.

“’s boring! I hate my teacher!” a girl says to the camera. “I’ve never done a bit of homework in my life,” says one boy, with no discernible embarrassment. “People like bunking a lot ’cos they don’t like the lessons,” explains another. Then there’s the classic: “The bits of science I like least are physics, chemistry and biology.”

The team filmed for six weeks in a block last summer, and then just before the November exams. “We were teaching them all day, every day, and filming them five days a week – teaching Monday to Friday and then doing big experiments at the weekend. We realised quite soon that it was great taking them out somewhere to blow something up, but they also needed to have notes and make sure they had it in their minds.”

Her own route into physics was unusual: after doing three science A-levels at Maidstone Grammar School, she applied to study veterinary science at six universities. She was rejected by all six, but, having got an A in physics, found herself invited to join the physics department at Liverpool. “Physics departments used to have a policy of phoning up failed vets and medics and convincing them to do physics,” she giggles.

“So when I was commiserating, my parents got a phone call saying would we like to come up and have a look around. I thought, why not? A lot of the stuff I’d liked doing in chemistry I’d actually study in a physics degree, like atomic structure.”

She loved the course. “You got all the equipment and a piece of paper telling you what you needed to find and you had to figure it all out yourself – in school I often felt there was so much stuff you had to get through that there wasn’t enough time to explore things.” She didn’t come from a particularly “scientific” family; her mother is a physiotherapist, her father does management consultancy for a primary-care trust. One brother works in finance, another in production for sports television. But science is all around us, she insists.

“Science is about curiosity and engaging with the world around you. At a practical level, the citizens of the future will need to be able to make sense of the information they’re given.” She refers to the MMR debate, or the controversy over GM food. “People understand that they make decisions based on risk every day when they cross the road; it’s about how to weigh evidence from different sources. It’s not about knowing how a mobile phone works, it’s knowing about the process of science, how it works, including how it’s funded. The difficulty is that because scientists are held up as really knowledgeable, science is seen as black and white, like it can’t be wrong, or questioned, in the same way people might challenge other sorts of information.”

Her pet hate is wilful ignorance. “It winds me up when I hear intelligent people on the radio saying, ‘Oh, I was never any good at physics, it was my worst subject! Ha ha ha.’ Why are you proud of that? It’s almost a badge of honour – ‘I fit in with normal people because I found science hard.’ Science just doesn’t have as high a place in our culture as it should. Somehow it’s acceptable to say, ‘I don’t know anything about science,’ whereas if you said, ‘I don’t know anything about literature, I never read books,’ people would think you were a philistine. Why is it okay?

If you were to think of one activity that defined what being human is, I would say that’s science – the process of asking questions about the world in which we live and finding an evidence-based process to try and solve them, and building on that knowledge. I don’t understand why it’s not up there with the arts. So I’m happy to go on about it for ages.” She’s pretty cheerful even when she’s angry.

It’s a particular challenge for universities to attract women into the sciences, and this is something Grant would like to see tackled. The situation is improving, she says; when she was doing her undergraduate degree at Liverpool there were five or six female students and about 40 males in her department, and no female lecturers. There’s a wider issue across academia generally, which is that it’s difficult for women to take career breaks to have children. Science departments are rated according to something called the Research Assessment Exercise, she explains, and marks are based on the number of papers you publish in scientific journals.

“If you take a break to have a child, then there’s that break in your list of published papers, and although that can’t be used in itself to discriminate against you, you are effectively at a professional disadvantage. That’s not just in science, it’s across the board in academia. But in areas that have been more male-dominated, there hasn’t been as much impetus to develop policies to address the issue.”

There’s also a long-hours culture, and the fact that physics is an international community. “A lot of work is done at facilities in Europe, so you might have to go to Geneva for three weeks, and you have to present at conferences around the country.” But she’s keen to sell physics as a great degree choice. “There’s this idea of what a scientist does – they work in a lab and wear goggles – but actually there are scientists everywhere: up volcanoes, on the ocean floor… if you want to have a job that lets you travel and do loads of stuff in different places, science is great. Scientists aren’t inward-looking, they’re involved in society.”

Physics has a particularly bad image problem – dry, dusty, men with white hair. Biology is easy to put across – it’s about us and other creatures that you can observe very easily. Chemistry has good props – test tubes and bunsen burners and visible substances to mess around with. “But a lot of physics is about abstracts. If you’re looking at light, for example: what is light? It’s a particle – you can’t feel it. I think that makes it more interesting, but it can also make it seem more inaccessible.” This is partly why she’s on a mission to communicate it to anyone who will listen.

She loved working with the teenagers. The experiments were designed for maximum effect. Remember dissecting a sprat in biology – or, if you were lucky, a frog? These kids got to dissect a horse. And instead of eliciting an “Ooh” at a little spark in a Van de Graaff generator, the programme makers shocked the youngsters with lightning bolts. “We had a Tesla coil, an electromagnetic device that generates an electrical discharge of 400,000 volts. It looks like lightning, it acts like lightning… it is, basically, a bolt of lightning.”

They took several things you might shelter under in a storm – a tent, a beach umbrella, a garden shed, a phone box – and told the teenagers to stand under the one they thought would offer the best protection. “Then we struck them all with lightning.” What – with the kids inside? She smiles a naughty smile, like Willy Wonka when another nasty little child is about to get their comeuppance in the chocolate factory. “Well, unfortunately we couldn’t do that with the ones that were going to actually catch fire. But the one that’s the safe one – the phone box – yeah, we did. By that point we were like, ‘Let’s torture them as much as we can!’, hee hee. And we had these great torsos that looked like blancmange in all the other shelters, which we reduced to nothing just to hammer the point home. It’s all about the electricity getting to Earth. So the phone box, being metal, is fine.”

In another experiment, two of the children were winched 40ft off the ground and then had to jump off a platform, suspended by giant helium balloons. “We split them into teams and they had to work out how many balloons would need to be strapped to their classmates to enable them to float safely,” she says. Parental permissions had to be obtained, and the experiments carefully designed to appear dangerous without being so.

“We had to be a bit careful,” she says, slightly regretfully. “Part of learning and developing is taking risks, and making mistakes.”

Then there was the Kevlar experiment. First they shot a sheet of Kevlar with bullets, to no avail. Then the students drove over it in a tank, which didn’t destroy it. Then they blew up the car with it inside. (“The Kevlar still survived, it was just a bit charred.”) Finally, they stuck plastic explosives to it and managed to blow a hole in it. “It was a fun way to demonstrate that it was strong, and also, it exposed the structure of it – it’s a long polymer chain and it’s made up of sheets.”

While we’re on the subject of man-made materials, we talk about how science’s image problem has been worsened by the kind of cheap environmental talk that pits nice, wholesome nature against nasty, man-made industry. This riles her. “It’s science and technology that will solve problems like global warming. And science has made things affordable and accessible to more people, allowing us to produce food more cheaply, and to make medicines and have better health. It’s not just about ‘without science you wouldn’t have a mobile phone’. Without science you wouldn’t have a long life, or enough food, or clean water.”

It’s unhelpful when people talk unthinkingly about “nasty chemicals”, she says. “What do you think you’re made of? What do you think things are? This idea that we should have organic, natural everything… well, okay, but your organic pepper is still made up of chemicals. It’s not helpful to use that kind of language when you’re talking about particular additives that have been shown to be detrimental to people’s health. Chemistry helps our lives in innumerable ways.” But that’s the bag of one of her co-presenters. She’s a physicist through and through. “Where did we come from? What are we made of? You can look into the sky and see the remnants of the big bang and track them back to what we know about the age of the universe – it’s fascinating.”

Could science save the nation’s youth? It’s not such a ridiculous idea. The young people in the programme were not high achievers.

“Their literacy isn’t at such a high level, and we had to explain words like electromagnetic and ultraviolet.” But they clearly gain from the experience. As one of the kids said, at the end of the week, “It was great to set loads of stuff on fire and not get in trouble.” “He loved being able to just burn stuff,” says Grant.

“We haven’t taken a bunch of kids and made them into scientists, but some of them might end up in science careers at some point in their lives – and more importantly, we built their confidence, so they went from, ‘I don’t understand science’ to ‘I don’t understand this now, but I’ll be able to get my head round it.’

And every single one of them had a flash of scientific brilliance at some point.”

The Big Experiment is on the Discovery Channel on Thursdays at 9pm from March 6. The first episode can be seen on next week’s free DVD. For more experiments to try at home, visit www.timesonline.co.uk/discoveries

Balloon kebabs

Ingredients: Blown-up balloons

Wooden kebab skewers

INSTRUCTIONs:

1. Line up the skewer point with the darker patch on the balloon, opposite the tied end. Push the skewer through gently

2. Once the skewer is through one side, push it through the balloon until the point is at the opposite end — the darker area around the tie

3. Insert the tip through the soft part of the balloon where the tie is. Voilà! You have a balloon kebab!

HOW DOES IT WORK?

This works through understanding surface properties. Most of the balloon is stretched evenly, but there are two points where the rubber is least stretched – and there is the lowest surface tension. This is the tied section and the dark section opposite. Most of the balloon is under high tension, so trying to push the skewer through makes it pop. But at the low-tension sections, it is possible to make a hole without the tension pulling the balloon apart

Alka-Seltzer rocket

Ingredients: Empty film canister

Alka-Seltzer tablet

Water

INSTRUCTIONs:

1. Place the Alka-Seltzer tablet in the film canister

2. Add water to a depth of approximately 1cm

3. Fit the lid on the canister, making

sure the seal is tight

4. Turn the canister upside down and place it on a flat surface

5. Stand back!

HOW DOES IT WORK?

When water is added to the Alka-Seltzer tablet, the chemical reaction that happens releases bubbles of carbon dioxide. When the lid is fitted tightly to the canister, this gas is contained within an enclosed space. As more gas is given off, the pressure inside the canister rises until there is enough force to overcome the seal of the lid. The built-up pressure exerts enough force to shoot the canister into the air, forming the rocket

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