There’s a brilliant story on New Scientist today about why you should draw second in a gunfight. The best thing about it is the recollection that Neils Bohr, the father of quantum theory, used to force his colleagues to participate in gunfight experiments:

Niels Bohr once had a theory on why the good guy always won shoot-outs in Hollywood westerns. It was simple: the bad guy always drew first. That left the good guy to react unthinkingly – and therefore faster. When Bohr tested his hypothesis with toy pistols and colleagues who drew first, he always won.

Turns out Bohr was right: the circuits involved in reacting to a threat work faster than those that are self-stimulated. But it puts a whole new spin on Heisenberg’s troubled relationship with Bohr. Bohr was a big bully, and the man behind the uncertainty principle recalls one discussion over the implications of quantum theory ending “with my breaking out in tears because I just couldn't stand this pressure from Bohr.”

Heisenberg should be glad that quantum theory was invented before paintball – otherwise Bohr really would have given him something to cry about…
 

I have an article on the nuclear fusion reactor being built in the south of France in this week’s New Statesman. ITER ( the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) is an incredible project – the idea is to build something on Earth that operates at 150 million degrees, but generates useable, controllable energy through the same process that powers the sun.

The most interesting aspect of researching the piece was the fact that scientific objections are incredibly thin on the ground. There have been objections in the past, but now the project seems to have gathered enough evidence that it might just work.

It’s still an incredible longshot, though: a whole lot of factors have to come together to make it work. As someone said, "we're trying to put the sun in a box - but we don't know how to build the box." Others have been more directly scathing, and called it  “the science of wishful thinking”. Charles Seife’s book The Sun In A Bottle, for instance, concludes that, "so long as there are other energy sources available, fusion is unlikely to make a huge dent in humanity’s energy needs.” (It's a great book, by the way – Charles is an incredibly gifted writer)

For decades, people have joked that nuclear fusion is “just forty years away – and has been for forty years”. I don’t think that’s quite fair any more. Having said that, when you read the New Statesman article, you’ll find that it is still forty years away. At least...

I’m hoping that something staggering happened this morning. At 7.45 GMT, about an hour and a half ago as I write this, the spacecraft Rosetta performed a slingshot manoeuvre, using the Earth’s gravitational field to change course, rather than burning extra fuel. That’s not the staggering thing: that trick has become quite routine for spacecraft on long journeys. What is staggering is the possibility that, during the slingshot, Rosetta gained an extra 1mm/s in speed.

When the craft is travelling at 13 km/s, that doesn’t seem like a lot. But the gain in speed, if it happened, stands in defiance of all known physics. The prediction of an extra 1mm/s came from John Anderson, the man behind the NASA Pioneer missions in the 1970s. He has noticed that many spacecraft see anomalous speed changes during a slingshot. There is no law of physics that says why this should happen, but Anderson has worked out a formula that accounts for all previous speed changes in terms of spacecraft velocity, angle of approach relative to the planet’s spin, distance of closest approach and so on (you can hear him talk about it here). And, with Rosetta coming in for a near-Earth flyby, he was able to make a prediction about what would happen.

It’s scientific progress, right here, right now. We’ll find out what Rosetta did in a few days or maybe a few weeks. If Anderson is right, we have spotted a phenomenon that defies explanation. The history of science is full of such things; that’s how we got quantum theory started, for instance. If Anderson’s formula also works for Rosetta, maybe we will see the birth of something fundamentally new in science. It’s not often you can say that. Watch this space!
 

I got a nice mention in the Observer yesterday, in a review of the George Lamb Show on 6 Music. When you do these things, you forget someone might be listening, let alone that someone might be reviewing it.

Anyway, gratifyingly, Miranda Sawyer says George has “interesting guests”, I am the “regular clever bloke”, and I was “fascinating” when talking about the Large Hadron Collider:

“According to Brooks, one of the reasons why the LHC might keep going wrong is because time travel is too problematic to be allowed and someone/thing from the future is coming back to stop the collider working and save us all from broaching the space-time continuum. Yeah!”

Just wanted to throw in a note of clarification. Before any of the world’s physicists turn on me (again) I wasn’t quite saying that. I was saying that a couple of quite respectable physicists have suggested it. It’s appealing, especially when a couple of Russian mathematicians have suggested that the LHC could rip holes in spacetime and allow time travellers from the future to visit. But if that seems far-fetched (fun, though, huh?!), the new idea is just plain crazy. They seem to have forgotten Occam’s razor: the simplest explanation is usually the right one. And when you know that a couple of solder joints are the cause of the failure, there’s no need to invoke interference from the future.

The LHC is due to start up again in mid-November. If it fails for some inexplicable reason, then maybe we can invoke Stephen Hawking’s Time Cops. But until then…

I am running badly behind schedule with my posting, thanks to a heinous deadline load. So, here’s two for the price of one, and weird science Wednesday is on an indefinite break (I'm switching to Thursdays on George Lamb's show, cos we're taking it up a notch or two - more on that later).

Got a piece on the Mars conspiracy (is there one?) on the Times science blog. It gives a little insight into the mind of Gilbert Levin, the man who is convinced he discovered life on Mars in 1976.

And the cover story in New Scientist this week: the Seven Mysteries of Gravity. My favourite is the role of gravity in biology – turns out you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.

Back to the grindstone... 

Weird Science Wednesday again. This week we mostly discussed rollercoaster science on George Lamb’s show (47 minutes in). That’s because I went to Thorpe Park on Monday: thrills all round.

Rollercoaster design is an ongoing, and pretty lucrative (I imagine) scientific discipline. It didn’t start out well, though.

Coney Island's first loop-the-loop coaster made its debut in 1895, but the first intrepid passengers disembarked rather unamused: they had suffered whiplash injuries and broken collar bones on the way round. Loops have to be elliptical, not circular, to ease the forces on the body.

Then, in 1902, Coney Island’s Cannon Coaster came online. The original idea was that the cars would use their momentum to make a death-defying leap over a missing section of track. However, on a breezy day, they often missed.

Today, interestingly, rollercoasters are about as good as they can get, in terms of what kinds of forces the human body can take (and enjoy). But that doesn’t stop researchers trying to go further.

In pursuit of the perfect sensation, researchers have rotated volunteers head over heels while also making them cartwheel or pirouette like a ballet dancer. It turns out that if you move on all three axes of rotation at the same time, even air force pilots are close to blackout when they get off. You can't walk, and you’ll have headaches that last for days. This is not what theme park designers are after.

The Holy Grail, something rollercoaster designers have never managed to recreate in a coaster, is the Coriolis illusion. Kids get it while rolling down a grassy bank. Basically it’s when you tilt the head while spinning with the eyes closed, and suddenly, an intense tumbling sensation. Apparently it’s fascinating, and rather enjoyable. It’s all to do with what the fluid in your inner ear is doing.

The trouble is, when it goes wrong, it’s a nightmare. Aircraft pilots know all about this: when they are doing a big wide turn, if they suddenly look down at their instruments with their head at the wrong angle, they get the sensation of tumbling. It’s like they’re falling out of the sky. Then they automatically try to correct for it, and send the plane into a nightmare spin.

The problem with going further means that the ride of the future is not more demanding physically, but psychologically. The people at Thorpe Park reckon the only way forward is psychological, like the Saw ride. But there are other ways of scaring you: Make it unpredictable: chaotic, where the ride you have will depend on the weight and distribution of the people in your car.

Even worse, though, is the idea of a passenger-decided ride, with switching paths that will depend on how everybody on the coaster votes. Though some people might want to take the easy path, there’ll always be some who want to push things further. At Thorpe Park I discovered my wife to be a total thrillseeker: she sat next to me cackling and whooping while I wore my mask of terror. In a passenger vote system, I’d take the next ride after her…

My thought for the day was short and sweet. Which do you think is the biggest number - the number of cells in your brain or the total number of stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way?

The brain wins! I think that’s pretty impressive.
 

 

It's not really about duck-billed platypuses. I just came back from holiday to find a segment I recorded a couple of weeks ago for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's The Science Show has gone out already. Here's a link to the piece (there's a link to the transcript there too). It's about the main theme of 13 Things: that science has to embrace the unexpected. But it focuses on the varying alpha idea, explained extremely ably here by Michael Murphy of Swinburne University. The lovely creature above is from here.

This is a picture of the sun, taken in the UV part of the spectrum by NASA's STEREO telescope. You can't see UV, so it's coloured blue for your viewing pleasure.

Why am I boring you with blue suns? It's a metaphor. Forgive me.

Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the cold fusion announcement by Pons and Fleischmann. The idea is, basically, that you can release nuclear energy by the same process the sun uses, but without all the drama. Since the American Chemical Society was meeting, today’s cold fusion pioneers took the opportunity to present their latest results. I think they make pretty interesting reading.

When Pons and Fleischmann made their first announcement (boy, what an error of judgement that was), everyone basically said, “where are all the neutrons?” Nuclear fusion reactions are meant to give out high energy neutrons.

Well, now it seems they’ve found the neutrons. As this report from New Scientist says:

The team used a low-tech particle detector: a plastic called CR-39 that is otherwise used for spectacle lenses. When CR-39 is bombarded with subatomic charged particles, a small pit forms in the material with each impact.

The researchers placed a sample of CR-39 in contact with a gold or nickel cathode in an electrochemical cell filled with a mixture of palladium chloride, lithium chloride and deuterium oxide (D2O), so-called "heavy water". When a current was passed through the cell, palladium and deuterium became deposited on the cathode.

After two to three weeks, the team found a small number of "triple tracks" in the plastic – three 8-micrometre-wide pits radiating from a point (see diagram, top right). The team says such a pattern occurs when a high-energy neutron strikes a carbon atom inside the plastic and shatters it into three charged alpha particles that rip through the plastic leaving tracks. No such tracks were seen if the experiment was repeated using normal rather than heavy water.

Read the whole report – the case for taking this seriously is getting more and more persuasive with each publication these guys make.

But - and here's where the metaphor kicks in - there’s also a report on the BBC website, which quotes noted cold fusion critic Frank Close. This provides a near-perfect example of someone in an entrenched position being pathologically unable to assimilate new information.

He says:

"Nothing's really changed in 20 years.”

Erm, so not true.

"It is an interesting date in the calendar of wrong results that claim to be science."

Erm, meaningless.

"If I come up with a weird phenomenon and call it cold fusion, I know that reporters will be interested. Convincing the scientific community is another matter entirely."

Ah, the old character assassination move. (Actually, I met these researchers during research for 13 Things, and the one thing they are really not interested in is reporters. I had a very hard time getting their attention even when I was in the same room).

If you think the progress of science is all about a careful weighing of the evidence, boy, you really are 20 years behind the curve…

(Frank Close's book on Antimatter is very good, by the way...)

   

This is the craziest thing I’ve ever come across. I’m about to bend your brain, and – be warned – it may snap. Or catch fire. Or something.

You know how you think of negative numbers as just maths? They couldn’t possibly correlate to something in the real world: you can have two particles, or three, or four…but you can’t have minus two particles, or minus three particles….? Think again. A paper came out in Physical Review Letters this month showing you can have exactly that. As you might have guessed, it’s a quantum trick. But it’s real, nonetheless.

It resolves a fascinating and long-standing paradox of quantum physics. It's called Hardy's paradox, after Lucien Hardy, a quantum researcher who works at the Perimeter Institute in Ontario. Basically, the paradox is this. First you set up a quantum system of mirrors, particle sources and particle detectors. Then you fire in a particle and its antiparticle in a way that means they meet. The thing is, they will fail to annihilate each other.

The situation is to do with the fact that, according to quantum rules, the particles can simultaneously be in two places at once.

OK, I hear you - meeting but not annihilating is weird, but quantum stuff is weird, and I’ll buy that two places at once thing as a get-out. But here’s where it starts to get crazy. The results you get (when you set it out as Hardy suggested) suggest that there are actually two pairs of particles in the apparatus at the same time, not one.

Back in 2003, someone came up with a solution to this. They did a “thought experiment”, where they basically did lots of quantum calculations (but not a real experiment). Here’s their answer: you can make everything add up if there is minus one (yes, -1) pair of particles sitting in another part of the interferometer.

You could dismiss this as “not a real solution” if it were just a thought experiment, but now it's been done for real, and that -1 pair of particles REALLY is there.

Don’t ask me what it means. I don’t know. It's truly bizarre, but it is also an enormously important validation of the true weirdness of quantum physics – we really don’t know the half of it yet.

Anyway, if you want to know more, I wrote about this in a New Scientist cover feature in 2003, back when the thought experiment was published. Just don’t blame me if your head explodes while trying to make sense of the fact that this is real.
 

 

 

...I took part in a debate on “What Science Can’t Tell Us” last night at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. It was chaired by the “fabulous” (my friends’ word) Vivienne Parry, and there's a review of the event at Spoonfed.

Almost inevitably, we ended up discussing Rupert’s experiments with dogs that allegedly know when their owners are coming home. When I made the point that no other scientists agreed that the experiments were conclusive proof a psychic ability in pets, he said that the skeptic Richard Wiseman had gotten exactly the same results. But then, in public, Wiseman denied it, Sheldrake says.

That’s just not true: the truth is, Wiseman and Sheldrake interpreted the same experimental results very differently. Here’s an extract of what Wiseman has to say (you can download the pdf this is taken from here). RS=Rupert Sheldrake; RW=Richard Wiseman

We do not believe that RS’s re-analysis of our data provides compelling evidence for the notion that Jaytee [the dog] could psychically detect when PS [the owner] was returning home.
 
First, it appears that RS's observed patterns could easily arise if Jaytee did very little for some time after PS left home and then began to visit the porch more often, and for longer periods, the longer she stayed away.  This pattern of behaviour would make sense for a dog waiting for its owner's return and would result in Jaytee being at the window most often when PS is returning, as her journey home will always constitute the final time period in each experiment.  It is therefore possible that the pattern that RS describes is not evidence of some inexplicable power of Jaytee to detect PS's return but an artefact of an easily explicable pattern in Jaytee's natural waiting behaviour.

And later…

we feel that the description of our experiments in RS’s book, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals, is misleading. RS has presented the results of our work in the main text of this book.  However, instead of stating that we had concluded that our experiments did not support the existence of Jaytee’s claimed abilities, he described our data as follows:
 
The pattern was very similar to that in my own experiments, and confirmed that Jaytee anticipated Pam’s arrival even when she was returning at a randomly chosen time in an unfamiliar vehicle. (Sheldrake, 1999b, p. 46).
 
RS only described our actual conclusions (i.e., that we believe that our experiments do not support claims about Jaytee’s psychic abilities) in an endnote, published in a very small font, at the very back of the book (Footnote 1).
 
In short, we strongly disagree with the arguments presented in RS’s commentary.  We believe that our experiments were properly designed and that the results did not support the notion that Jaytee could psychically detect when PS was returning home.

Rupert’s claims that the world is permeated by special (almost magical, in that they lie outside the ken of science) fields still lacks the extraordinary evidence it needs for me to be convinced.

Not that I care a great deal: I think that many dog and cat owners have beliefs about their pets’ abilities/preferences, and there’s no harm in it. It’s no different to believing in God, really: some people do, some people don’t and some say they just don’t know. And most of the time, as long as we live and let live, that works fine. It’s not like there’s much you can do to change people’s fundamental beliefs.

Rupert, for instance, thinks he can probe the canine telepathy best by studying the dogs that do it best. It seems obvious to me that this route starts with a founding assumption: that the effect is real. It’s going to be far more instructive to take animals that “can” and animals that “can’t”, and compare and contrast. The trouble is, that approach runs the risk of seeing the effect evaporate…

I actually think  - and I didn’t get to say this last night – science benefits from the work of people like Rupert Sheldrake. They are an irritation that keeps scientists on their toes and hones their critical faculties. It would be terrible to get complacent, after all.