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
