Dave Macindoe

A pre-eminent scientist was recently asked what single piece of information he would preserve if some sort of Asimovian catastrophe destroyed all our scientific knowledge and only one idea could be preserved. The scientist neglected such profound insights as evolution by natural selection and instead favoured passing on the concepts of atomic theory to this hypothetical knowledge-impoverished society. The reason given was that there exists no other simple idea which provides such a wide scope of insight, that idea being that all matter is made up of irreducible units called atoms.

For those among us who chose not to pursue scientific education in later life, atomic theory most likely is one of several factoids that you vaguely remember learning in high school. You recall something about Neils Bohr, and that plum puddings were somehow important. Well your lack of recollection is perhaps more forgivable when we consider that the Ancient Greeks long debated this theory whose validity we now all take for granted.

Long before they decided to stop paying taxes and mooch off Germany, many great Greek minds devoted themselves to the question of whether all matter was a continuum, or whether it was made up of discrete units. In the case of the continuum, this would imply that you could divide any piece of matter into forever smaller parts and it would never fundamentally change. For example, say I had a piece of bread, then I could keep cutting it up and no matter how small I cut it, it would still be bread. The other school of thought took the position that there would come a point where you’d get to an irreducible element, so if you tried to divide that element the matter making up your bread would somehow be different. We now know that it was the latter school of thought who were correct in asserting that our universe is made up of many different types of discrete elements, called atoms.

The consequences of this knowledge are perhaps not readily apparent, what does it matter that if I divide up my sandwich a near infinite amount of times then I will eventually split a carbon atom into two lighter elements? Well this discovery has spawned off many significant fields of study, to name a few, nuclear, quantum and particle physics. Furthermore, this idea is the central tenet of chemistry, for which you can thank our current knowledge of fermentation, the process that drives brewing beer. So while the chances of all scientific knowledge being lost seems remote in the face of our tendency to ‘back up, early and often’; it is perhaps worthwhile reflecting on the power of simple ideas to radically shape our understanding of the universe in which we live.

Dave Macindoe

Contrary to the belief of some citizens of the state of Alabama, the theory of special relativity does not describe the “special” joys of inter-familial marriage. As it happens, special relativity actually describes what happens when something travels near the speed of light. This theory is notorious for some of its strange results that go against our everyday experience and our understanding of the universe. One such weird result is that of time dilation, which opens the door for the possibility of time travel. Disappointingly enough for those of you hoping to witness the building of the Pyramids or any other exciting historical events, it only allows for travel forward in time.

Special relativity is based around two important ideas, the first of which is that the speed of light is constant and never changes. This postulate may not seem revolutionary, until you really think about it. Take, for example, a car travelling towards you at 100 km/h, if a person in that car were to throw a ball at 10 km/h at you, you would measure the ball as going at 110 km/h, right? Well, according to this theory, light radiating off any object will always be measured at the same value, no matter what the object’s speed is.

To understand special relativity, it is important to let go of some prejudices that result from our everyday experience. One prejudice, that is especially difficult to get rid of, is that the passage of time is always constant. However, once you look at the mathematical basis of this theory, you can see that if the speed of light can’t change, then in some cases, the flow of time must change: this phenomenon is called time dilation.

A favourite example to illustrate this bizarre phenomenon is called the ‘twin paradox’, which basically goes as follows: imagine there are two identical twins, one of whom tried hard at school and became an astronaut, while the other didn’t listen to his teachers and grew up to be an unemployed loser. The astronaut twin gets in his spaceship and flies to Alpha Centurai, our nearest neighbouring star, while the other twin stays on Earth. In order to get to Alpha Centurai in any reasonable amount of time, he has to go at close to the speed of light. When the astronaut twin comes home from this local star, he finds that while only several weeks have passed for him, many years have passed on Earth, because of the effects of time dilation. The young astronaut finds his brother to be old and decrepit. So even though they are twins, they are no longer the same age.

Thus, special relativity provides provisions for misanthropic people who feel out of place in current society and wish to live in the future. If you were so inclined, and had access to a magnificent space ship with unprecedented propulsion technology, you could exploit time dilation so that centuries could pass on Earth while only days pass for you. Provided the thought of everyone you’d ever known or loved being dead doesn’t worry you and you somehow have access to a remarkable spaceship, then the glorious future awaits.

Play School’s take on the Twin Paradox:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmV664VvpW0

Dave Macindoe

Now that Bob Brown has retired from parliament, it’s safe for nuclear energy apologists to come out of their hiding places without fear of being beaten up by a towering Tasmanian senator. Despite the general unpopularity of a pro-nuclear view, a large part of the opposition to harnessing nuclear fission likely comes from a combination of anachronistic fears left over from the Cold War and a lack of information surrounding the process involved in making nuclear energy.

To help dispel the ignorance surrounding this subject, we should first investigate this particular method of producing electricity. At its most basic level, nuclear fission occurs when a large nucleus, the centre of an atom where over 99% of its mass is located, splits into two smaller nuclei and releases a high amount of energy as well as a few sub-atomic particles. In commercial reactors, this is induced by hitting a heavy atom with a neutron which then unstabilise the nucleus, causing it to split. In turn, the released sub-atomic particles from the first reaction are absorbed by nearby atoms which then split, causing a chain reaction that lets off a lot of harvestable energy. In nuclear reactors, the nuclear fuel, for example uranium, is made up in such a way that only a controlled reaction can take place, ruling out any possibility of the sort of rapid chain reaction that is associated with nuclear weapons. This fact also removes the fear that a terrorist organisation could break into one of our reactors and turn it into a bomb.

You may have heard a smelly hippy protest, “but nuclear waste hangs around for millions of years, I know it because Marx’s ghost visited me in a dream last night and told me so!” If we lived in a dystopia where technology stopped advancing in the 1970s, then yes, nuclear waste would be a near unmanageable consequence of nuclear energy. Fortunately, technology has been marching on through the last 40 years at an astonishing rate, so it will perhaps not surprise you that our reactors have improved on the primitive ones that were first used. Originally, reactors harnessed about 0.6% of the nuclear fuel’s potential energy, discarding the rest as waste. Meanwhile, modern reactors are able to use almost all of the available energy and can even use old waste from conventional reactors as fuel.  These technological advancements have turned a mountain into a molehill when it comes to the worry of toxic waste and have even allowed us to clean up much waste from the 20^th century.

But wait, I hear you cry, “what about Fukushima? What about Chernobyl? Don’t they show just how dangerous nuclear energy is?” My response would be that despite both of those events being unqualifiable tragedies; they are in no way representative of how safe nuclear energy would be in Australia. Nuclear energy actually has a phenomenal safety record in the Western world, partly thanks to international bodies who collaborate on improving and maintaining safety standards, such as the World Association of Nuclear Operators. WANO has a rigorous program of reviewing commercial nuclear plants as well as providing technical support to help reactors be as safe as possible. It will probably not surprise you that behind the Iron Curtain, oversight of nuclear power plants such as the one at Chernobyl was far less rigorous. As for Fukushima, without saying anything about the fact that Australia is not prone to tsunamis and earthquakes the likes of which caused this specific catastrophe, we can see that such a disaster would never happen on our shores. Not only has it been revealed that the energy company responsible for Fukushima’s plant, TEPCO, falsified safety records as long ago as 1976, but it has been noted by physicist and environmentalist Amory Lovins that Japan’s “rigid bureaucratic structures, reluctance to send bad news upwards [and] need to save face… contributed to the way the accident unfolded”. With the proper governmental and international oversight, we can be confident that no such releases of radioactive material would ever take place in Australia.

Furthermore, Australia is particularly well placed to enter the nuclear age as we are sitting on 31% of the world’s known uranium reserves and we lay claim to the single largest uranium reserve on Earth. Seeing as so much of this fuel that is over a million times more potent than oil lies beneath us and the fact that it can safely be used without emitting any CO₂ into the atmosphere, it seems ludicrous to recklessly keep using brown coal to power our homes. Perhaps one day, when the baby boomers, who are blinded by their early years spent with the fear of nuclear holocaust over their heads, are no longer in power, Australia can finally move towards the safe and clean alternative of energy production founded on the principles of nuclear physics.

Dave Macindoe

Carbon, Hydrogen and Oxygen. Three elements that seem fairly harmless (alright so two of them are highly flammable, let me finish), but when arranged correctly they produce the chemical compound called ethanol, more commonly known as alcohol. Alcohol is such an integral part of our culture that during the period between 2010-2011 there were 182 million litres of pure alcohol available for consumption in Australia. That amounts to roughly 2.2 standard drinks per day for every single person over the age of 15 inhabiting our lovely island. Harrowing statistics aside, all it takes for anyone to convince themselves of alcohol’s influence on our nation is to attend any social function,except perhaps for the annual meeting of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.

Now you may have pondered how alcohol is made while you were finishing your last beer bong. Generally, alcohol is the by-product of a chemical process called fermentation. In beer, for example,  yeast uses fermentation to convert sugar into ethanol (a type of alcohol) as well as carbon dioxide. CO2 has the added bonus of putting bubbles in your beer. Yeast is a type of fungus, which may make it sound disgusting, but without this microscopic team-player, we wouldn’t have bread, wine or beer.

As you may have realised, dear reader, consumption of alcohol leads to drunkenness (if you are unconvinced of this, please go have a drink or five in the name of science). This process begins at the stomach and small intestine, where the booze you’ve consumed is absorbed and enters your bloodstream. Your body eliminates alcohol through urination, breathing it out and breaking it down in the liver, however, it can only get rid of about one drink an hour, meaning that if you drink more quickly than this, you will get progressively more inebriated.

As you get drunker, alcohol starts to affect different parts of your brain. Initially, it hits the cerebral cortex, making you more talkative and less reserved. From there it starts to affect the hippocampus, which leads to heightened emotions and memory loss. Once it reaches the cerebellum, you lose balance and coordination. Finally, if you get far too drunk, it will hit your medulla oblongata, and then you’re really in trouble. The medulla oblongata takes care of things you don’t consciously have to think about, like pumping your heart and breathing.

So, whether your night of alcoholic indulgence leads to a spectacular public vomiting or a less climatic headache the following morning, it’s clear we should all treat this particular chemical compound with the respect it deserves.

Dave Macindoe

Ever wanted to come up with a way to simultaneously make yourself an unimaginable amount of wealth as well as solve world poverty in one fell swoop? Would you be even more tempted if I said there’d be a Nobel prize in it for your trouble? Fortunately for the ambitious and philanthropic amongst us, nuclear fusion provides an avenue to become the modern man’s Prometheus (as in the Greek mythical figure, not a film with the dreamy Michael Fassbender in it).

Before you grab your lab coat and set out to make a fusion reactor, it’s worth understanding why someone hasn’t already completed this task and won themselves this particular juicy Nobel prize. Basically, nuclear fusion is the process by which very energetic atoms smash into each other with such force that they join together to make a single, heavier atom. This process results in an output of excess energy in various forms such as light and heat.

A fusion reactor which you would be very familiar with is everyone’s favourite ball of fire in the sky, the Sun. What you may be less familiar with is how the Sun produces all the light and heat which we here on Earth enjoy. It should come as no surprise that the Sun is hot, like really hot, like well over a billion degrees Celsius at its core hot. Thanks to this extreme heat, the hydrogen atoms inside the Sun are so energetic that they smash into other with enough force to join together and make Helium, as well as let off some excess energy.

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Dave Macindoe

You really know you’ve made it once you get a town in the Northern Territory named after you. As Alice Springs’ Wikipedia article doesn’t mention who Alice was, I thought it appropriate to write about Charles Darwin and his revolutionary theory of evolution. While anyone who’s either a religious conservative or a huge fan of the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel might dispute Darwin’s influence on the study of biology, his work is nonetheless very much worth looking into.

Evolution’s appeal lies not only in the fact that it underlies and explains effectively the entire field of biology, but it is also elegant in its simplicity. Evolution by the process of natural selection is based around the simple idea that biological traits, eye colour for example, are passed on from parents to their offspring. It then stipulates that as there is diversity in any given population of a species, for example good-looking people have blue eyes while the less fortunate amongst us have brown ones, over time the traits that are more beneficial to a living thing’s survival and ability to reproduce will be found to be more common.

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Dave Macindoe

With this year’s Olympic games well under way, as well as the Tour de France only just behind us, it seems appropriate to take a look at the darkest method for achieving sporting glory, performance enhancing drugs.

These methods for gaining the upper hand in the world of sport have been reported to exist all the way back into antiquity when Ancient Greeks would take herbal remedies to improve their performance in the original Olympics. Nowadays, however, the modern marvel of technology allows for athletes, who aren’t overly burdened by a conscience, to take a more sophisticated approach to their “self-improvement”.

Perhaps the most renowned performance enhancer is that of anabolic steroids. These drugs were first synthesised way back in the 1930s and they help you excel at sports by mimicking the effects of testosterone. Most people would be aware that testosterone is the hormone that is responsible for making teenage boys aggressive and irritable. What they might not know is that testosterone aids muscle growth and repair. Yet, they have some less than ideal effects too. As steroid-taking female swimmers of the Cold War era became abundantly aware, testosterone also causes the growth of masculine traits, such as larger vocal cords, baldness and the appearance of body hair. More long term side-effects include serious liver damage, dangerous changes to the heart’s structure and high blood pressure. Continue Reading

Dave Macindoe

With the recent confirmation of what we at The Bucket correctly predicted months ago – the finding of the Higgs Boson- the public was once again assaulted by the sorry excuse our media provides in lieu of scientific journalism.

Not only was the coverage of this discovery ill informed, it was offensively misleading. Despite the indignation of pretty much the entire physics community, journalists persist in using a sensationalist misnomer for the higgs boson- calling it ‘the God Particle’. This plainly shows that our media would prefer to beat up a good story than provide the public with truthful information. In fact, the name ‘the God Particle’ is a shortening and corruption of a quote by the Nobel laureate, Leon Lederman, who described the higgs boson as ‘that goddamn particle’ because it had been so elusive to detection. Using this moniker may stimulate the imagination and sell papers, but it does the enormous disservice of pushing science out of the reach of the layman and into the minefield that is spirituality and religion.

I was personally made to cringe at one line from The Age’s report on this step forward in particle physics. The Age thought it appropriate to publish, on their front page no less, the ridiculous line that the higgs boson was ‘difficult to track down as it can’t be seen’. Oh really? Is that it? That explains why it was so easy for us to discover the electron back in 1896, because a scientist must have seen one whizzing around…

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by Dave Macindoe

Is naming a type of radiation after yourself a sign of narcissism? Or is it perhaps a warning to your enemies that you’re willing to go all Hiroshima on them if provoked? These speculative questions about Hawking radiation, named after the man who predicted it, Stephen Hawking, lie outside the realm of science. However, what science can do is answer the rather more important question of what is Hawking radiation?

For many, black holes are thought of in a similar way to how those mean boys talk about your mother; that they are these enormous bodies sucking in everything around them with such force that nothing, nor no one, can escape them. As it happens, this is not true (I’m talking about black holes here, as for your mother I’ll choose not to speculate). In fact, black holes emit a type of radiation that is known as Hawking radiation.

For understanding why Hawking radiation is emitted out of the great sink-holes of the cosmos, it is important to understand two things. Firstly, we must consider a quirk of quantum mechanics that allows for this radiation to seemingly come from nothing. One part of quantum theory states that we can’t accurately know everything about a system, especially when it comes to the very small. So, as a result of this, in a vacuum, instead of there just being nothing, there are constantly what we call vacuum fluctuations. These fluctuations are pairs of particles, one regular particle and one anti-particle (effectively the regular particle’s evil twin), which exist for a very short amount of time and then annihilate each other. In normal circumstances, these pairs exist for such a short amount of time that they can be disregarded as only virtual particles, however, around black holes they go from being virtually non-existent to being very real indeed.

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by Dave Macindoe

Not only is the Synchrotron Monash Clayton’s friendly neighbour, providing us with a free and muddy alternative to Blue Permit parking, but it’s also an invaluable piece of equipment for plenty of ground breaking science (obviously I’m using the word ‘invaluable’ pretty loosely here, because if you ask the state government, it’s only invaluable in the sense that it hasn’t got enough value to receive proper funding). In this issue, we’re continuing our series on huge and expensive scientific instruments with everyone’s second favourite Clayton-based centre for academic inquiry.

On a basic level, the Synchrotron produces a beam of light that is a million times more intense than the Sun that it shines onto all manner of materials. This light can give us an insight into the structure of things that are very small. For example, the Synchrotron can be used by virologists investigating the structure of nasty viruses so they can produce drugs capable of fighting that case of glandular fever you picked up over the weekend. Continue Reading