ERNEST RUTHERFORD, THE NEW ZEALAND–BORN British physicist who became known as the “father of nuclear physics” after correctly sussing out the structure of the atom in 1911, once commented that “Physics is the only real science. The rest are just stamp collecting.”
The line is frequently trotted out by smug physicists hoping to taunt their colleagues in other scientific disciplines.
Rutherford’s point was that physics is the most fundamental of the sciences, and he believed that made it the only science with any true explanatory power. The rest just amounted to classification schemes, and some other laws that were ultimately derived from physics.
Physics, in essence, is a set of mathematical laws describing how space, time, energy, and elementary particles of matter all behave. And, if you believe Ernest, then from that everything else follows. Physics tells you how atomic nuclei combine with electrons to form atoms. And it says how those atoms interact with one another when they come together.
That’s pretty much what the science of chemistry is all about. When, for example, hydrogen gas burns, that’s a chemical reaction where atoms of hydrogen and oxygen combine, sharing some of their electrons and releasing energy in the process. Yes, this is chemistry but it all comes from the laws of quantum physics, which govern how atoms and electrons go about their daily business. And you can take the chain of reasoning further. The science of biology is really just a subset of chemistry, dealing with the particular group of chemicals, and the structures they form, that maintain and propagate life.
Taking Rutherford at his word, however, things do start to get rather circular. Life (biology) comes from physics. Some life is human life, and some humans are physicists… So, eventually, we reach the inescapable conclusion that physics explains physicists, who explain physics. And what about free will, if that’s even a thing? If everything is predetermined by physics, then how do I at least appear to decide for myself when I’m going to watch TV, eat dinner, or go to the toilet?
Anyway. For now, let’s ignore such philosophical quandaries and concentrate instead on the cool bits of physics, and its close cousin chemistry—those two old favorites from high school science classes, where you’d get to see demonstrations involving things being variously squashed, snapped, burned, blown up, electrocuted, and irradiated.
We should add that there’s often been a kind of cozy, homespun disregard for health and safety in physical science research over the years, as wild-haired yet lovable professors tested their crazy theories with little concern for their own safety, or indeed that of others. Nothing exemplifies this better than when Enrico Fermi built the world’s first nuclear reactor, in an unused squash court at the University of Chicago. The reactor’s safety system consisted of a man with an axe—whose job it was, in the event of a problem, to cut the rope suspending an emergency control rod over the reactor core.
Among the scintillating physics and chemistry stories that we detail here, find out how scientists have detected antimatter inside a thunderstorm. Particles of antimatter are like the mirror image of ordinary matter particles, having their key properties, like electric charge, reversed. When matter and antimatter meet, the result is a powerful release of energy—so you might reasonably have expected the stuff to only crop up inside particle accelerators, or on the event horizon of a black hole. These terrestrial antimatter particles are thought to have been created by the huge energies generated by electric fields within the storm.
We meet the gamers who helped to prove Albert Einstein wrong, participating in a massive worldwide experiment into the nature of quantum theory. Despite his pioneering insights into relativity, Einstein always hated quantum mechanics—developing his own theories to explain some of the weirder goings-on in the particle world. Now, over 100,000 people have taken part in a cleverly engineered online game, the results of which were, basically, Quantum Mechanics 1–Einstein 0.
And we look at the latest designs for the successor to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a new particle accelerator, called the Future Circular Collider, that’s due to be switched on around 2040–2050. It will be four times the size of the LHC and will generate particle collision energies that are 10 times higher.
We’ve also got some fairly awesome chemistry stories for you. Find out how wannabe Willy Wonkas have made a fourth type of chocolate, called “ruby” (in addition to dark, milk, and white)—and, yes, you can buy it on Amazon. Find out how to cook up gold that’s golder than gold itself. And read about the researchers who claim to have invented a working Star Wars “moisture vaporator”—a device that can extract moisture from the air, providing a potentially lifesaving source of water in arid climates.
A word of warning though: Undertaking chemistry on a DIY basis is often asking for trouble, as was demonstrated in 2018 by the well-meaning lady in the town of Nailsea, England, who attempted to unblock a toilet using two bottles of sulfuric acid and several quarts (liters) of bleach, and inadvertently created a toxic cloud of chlorine gas (very nasty, banned by the Geneva Protocol) that proceeded to envelope her street. We know what you’re thinking—where do I get sulfuric acid? Apparently, vinegar works quite well, too.
101
CHINA JUST SET A NEW NUCLEAR FUSION RECORD BY REACHING TEMPERATURES OF 180 MILLION DEGREES
by Jonathan O’Callaghan
CHINA SAYS IT HAS PERFORMED A TEST OF A NUCLEAR fusion machine it is developing, reaching temperatures seven times hotter than the center of the Sun.
The test took place at the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) at the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASHIPS). The machine reached temperatures of more than 180 million °F (100 million °C), the temperature at which nuclear fusion takes place. EAST is a tokamak reactor, which is shaped like a doughnut and uses large electric currents to twist the plasma inside, confining it using magnetic fields.
In the past few years, a number of experimental fusion reactors have successfully sustained a plasma for a minute or so. China’s test is particularly significant, though, for the temperature it reached. The interior of our Sun reaches temperatures of “just” 27 million °F (15 million °C). But to kick-start nuclear fusion in a reactor on Earth, temperatures about seven times higher are required.
“If we can achieve that, the payoff would be massive,” ScienceAlert noted. “Unlike nuclear fission—where surplus energy comes from the decay of large atoms into smaller elements—nuclear fusion doesn’t result in anywhere near as much radioactive waste. In fact, the end result of squeezing together isotopes of hydrogen is mostly helium.”
China had previously set a world record of sustaining a plasma for 101.2 seconds last year, and has now turned its attention to raising the temperature inside the machine. The ultimate goal will be to sustain this plasma indefinitely, providing a clean and practically endless source of power.
China is part of an international collaboration known as ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor), along with 34 other countries, to develop an operational fusion power plant. The experiments at EAST go some way toward making that dream a reality.
“EAST, a device independently designed and developed by Chinese scientists to harness the energy of nuclear fusion, is taking a step closer to maintaining a more stable fusion reaction as long as possible and at an even higher temperature,” the Chinese state-owned CGTN news network said.
102
THESE SCIENTISTS SAY THEY’VE INVENTED SOMETHING THAT CAN CREATE WATER OUT OF DESERT AIR
by Katie Spalding
OUR PLANET IS NOTHING IF NOT IRONIC. EARTH IS covered in water—millions of trillions of gallons (liters) of the stuff—and yet only 2 percent of this is drinkable. Of that, 99.5 percent is frozen or buried below the ground. And of what’s left—well, human-made climate change is taking care of that.
One piece of good news, however, is that water we can drink isn’t just confined to places like lakes, rivers, and raindrops. There’s almost 13 trillion tons of delicious H2O hidden in plain sight all around us—in the air. We just have to extract it.
There are a few ways to do this, but most are either too inefficient or prohibitively expensive. However, researchers in Saudi Arabia say they have a solution: a simple device that can harvest and store its own weight in water, and release it when warmed by sunlight.
The key to the prototype is a cheap, stable, eco-friendly, and non-toxic chemical salt known as calcium chloride. This salt is so good at absorbing water that it will literally dissolve if left in fresh air—a property known to chemists as deliquescence.
But calcium chloride turns liquid after absorbing water, which is a problem. To combat this, the team developed a way of storing the calcium chloride as a hydrogel—a special type of polymer that can hold vast amounts of water while remaining solid. And with the addition of some tiny carbon nanotubes to let the water escape, team members were able to use a light source to reclaim almost 100 percent of the water captured by the gel.
In a paper, published in Environmental Science and Technology in 2018, the team described the results of their small, “easy-to-assemble-at-household” prototype. A device incorporating 1.2 ounces (35 grams) of hydrogel absorbed 1.3 ounces, or about 7.5 teaspoons (37 grams), of water when left overnight in air with a relative humidity of 60 percent. And nearly all of this water was later released and collected by the device after 2 ½ hours’ exposure to sunlight.
The researchers say this could be scaled up to provide an adult’s minimum water requirement for a day—6.6 pounds, or 4 ¼ cups (3 kg)—with a daily running cost of just half a cent.
Along with its low cost and high water yield, the device has the advantage of working well even in relatively low humidity—perfect for arid or drought-stricken regions. It also needs no electricity, meaning it can be used even in the remotest parts of the world.
“Water scarcity is one of the most challenging issues that threaten the lives of mankind,” the paper reports. “This technology provides a promising solution for clean water production in arid and land-locked remote regions.”
103
World War II Bombing Raids Were Felt Even at the Edge of Space
by Alfredo Carpineti
Bomb blasts during World War II reached the upper atmosphere. That’s according to a team who have matched 1940s observations of Earth’s ionosphere—the layer of atmosphere between 37 and 620 miles (60–1,000 km) up—to the known times of 152 Allied air raids.
104
AMATEUR SCIENTISTS JUST PROVED EINSTEIN WRONG
by Alfredo Carpineti
PROVING ALBERT EINSTEIN WRONG IS SOMETHING THAT only a small number of scientists can claim to have done. But now, more than 100,000 gamers can join that exclusive club and enjoy the smugness that comes with it.
In 2016, scientists from around the world, led by the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona (ICFO), asked people to play a simple game online, and the results were used to disprove one of Einstein’s claims about quantum mechanics, the branch of physics governing atoms and subatomic particles. The results were published in 2018 in the journal Nature.
One of the things Einstein truly disliked about quantum mechanics is how the experimenter plays a role in the results obtained from an experiment. He believed the universe to be independent of our actions and quantum mechanics to be governed by the “principle of local realism.”
This principle tells us that there should be hidden variables in the theory that can explain puzzling effects like entanglement—where two particles are seemingly able to influence one another, regardless of the separation between them—which Einstein dismissed as “spooky action at a distance.”
However, quantum mechanics seems to work fine without local realism and scientists have proved this using the so-called Bell test experiment. Here, two entangled particles are sent to different locations and their properties are measured. The measurements of one particle influence the other in this kind of experiment, which, according to Einstein, suggests there’s some sort of faster-than-light communication going on. But in quantum mechanics, all is fine—entangled particles are a single system that shouldn’t be considered independently, no matter how far they are separated. Time and again, the results of the Bell test experiment have supported quantum mechanics over local realism.
But one limitation of the test has remained—what’s called the “freedom-of-choice loophole,” where it’s been argued that the choice of which specific particle properties to measure might influence the outcome of the experiment. To exclude this possibility, the team needed to randomly determine which measurements to make—using random number generators that were completely independent of the system. And that’s where the general public came in.
The project, ambitiously named the BIG Bell Test, recruited over 100,000 people to play simple games that created long strings of zeros and ones. These “bits” (short for “binary digits”) were then routed to 12 labs across the world where they were used as random numbers. The live results contradicted local realism with 99.7 percent confidence.
“The BIG Bell Test was an incredibly challenging and ambitious project,” Carlos Abellán, a researcher at ICFO and instigator of the project, said in an emailed statement. “It sounded impossibly difficult on day zero, but became a reality through the efforts of dozens of passionate scientists, science communicators, journalists, and media, and especially the tens of thousands of people that contributed to the experiment during November 30, 2016.”
105
RESIDENTS OF UK TOWN FORCED TO EVACUATE AFTER CLEANING ACCIDENT GOES VERY WRONG
by Rosie McCall
RESIDENTS OF NAILSEA, A BRITISH TOWN NEAR BRISTOL, had a somewhat unusual end to 2018 when they were forced to evacuate their homes after a noxious gas cloud erupted on their street.
The good news is that this was not a preplanned chemical attack, targeting the people of Nailsea. Rather, it turned out to be a simple cleaning accident by a woman attempting to unblock a toilet.
Dominique Heath, a mom of three, had the unpleasant task of unclogging a toilet on the day after Boxing Day when one of her children blocked it with a toy or too much paper. In the afternoon, she poured two bottles of a toilet unblocker down the pan and left it to do its job. But at 8 p.m., the toilet was still clogged. And so she added a 0.8-gallon (3-liter) tub of bleach to the mix. For the record, that is a lot of cleaning solution.
Unfortunately for Heath, the chemicals in the toilet unblocker (principally, sulfuric acid) and the bleach (sodium hypochlorite) reacted to form a putrid cloud of chlorine gas, a poisonous substance so toxic it is banned by the Geneva Convention and its use is considered a war crime. Germany deployed it to devastating effect in 1915 at the Second Battle of Ypres during World War I.
In small doses, it can cause skin and eye irritation but too much of it can lead to chemical burns and breathing problems. In the very worst cases, it can result in non-cardiogenic pulmonary edema (buildup of fluid in the lungs), which can be lethal.
Undoubtedly a little concerned about the foul-smelling gas, Heath shut the bathroom door and opened up all the windows in the house, she told Bristol Live.
“I have never experienced fumes like it,” she said. “My throat and eyes feel burned.”
The cloud continued to spread so she turned to a neighbor for help and called the fire department, who immediately told her to evacuate. They then sent fire crews from three separate stations in the Bristol and North Somerset area to attend to the chemical accident and cordon off the end of the street until it was safe to return.
Since the whole affair came to a close, Heath has shared her story on Facebook, saying she wants to use her experience as a warning to anyone else who might be tempted to mix large quantities of potentially lethal chemicals.
“It was really serious,” she said, Bristol Live reports. “We are all okay, but it was the dumbest thing I have ever done—please don’t do this!”
Fortunately, it appears no one was hurt.
106
New Form of Lab-Made Gold Is Better and Golder Than Nature’s Pathetic Version
by Robin Andrews
Gold is known for being ultraresistant to interactions with other chemicals. In 2018 researchers made a kind of gold in the lab that’s even more resistant than usual. They cooked it up by heating gold chloride in a furnace at 428°F (220°C) for half an hour.
107
WHY DOES THE SOUND OF YOUR OWN RECORDED VOICE BOTHER YOU SO MUCH?
by Tom Hale
THERE’S NOT A PERSON ALIVE WHO LIKES TO LISTEN TO A recording of his or her own voice. Even if you sound like honey poured over thunder, the voice you hear played back on a speaker certainly doesn’t sound like the voice you’ve heard coming out of your mouth for all these years.
This strange phenomenon isn’t you being insecure about your vocal inadequacies. No, there’s a logical reason why your voice sounds so different—and god-awful—on recordings.
We hear sounds through vibrations being picked up by our eardrum. The vibrations are sent to three bones in the middle ear and then finally to the cochlea, a snail-shaped organ that turns the vibrations into nerve signals.
We perceive external sounds, like a beeping car or a radio, via sound waves passing through the air into our ear canals, then into our inner ear, and on to the cochlea. When our voice is played back to ourselves on a speaker, we are hearing these air-conducted vibrations.
It’s a bit different, however, if the sound is coming from our own vocal cords. A lot of what we hear when we speak is perceived in the same way as external noise, but we also pick up on vibrations that have come through our jawbone and skull. This is known as inertial bone conduction, an effect you can demonstrate if you bang a tuning fork and place the handle against your skull.
This also alters the quality of the sound you hear. Bone conduction tends to “bring out” the lower-frequency vibrations, making your voice sound deeper and less squeaky than it actually is. In all likelihood, the fact that you don’t like the sound of it is simply because you are not used to it.
You can also try out the opposite effect for yourself by sticking your fingers in your ears, so you filter out air-conducted sound altogether and hear only the bone-conducted vibrations. You’ll notice your voice sounds a lot deeper than normal.
Of course, the depressing reality is that the awful noise you hear when you play back a recording of your voice is actually how your voice sounds to the 7.6 billion other humans on Earth.
Sorry about that, folks.
108
SCIENTISTS SAY THEY’VE CREATED A STRANGE NEW STATE OF MATTER THAT DOESN’T PLAY BY THE RULES
by Jonathan O’Callaghan
Scientists have described an odd new state of matter that doesn’t seem to conform to normal rules.
As reported by New Scientist in October 2018, the state is made from “liquid light” and is classed as being between a solid and a superfluid, a liquid that flows with zero friction.
The truly weird thing about the new substance is that it is completely rigid, meaning it can’t be pushed or stirred. It’s made of “polaritons,” which are hybrid particles composed “of a photon strongly coupled to an electric dipole,” explained Nature.
The team made the fluid by trapping light in another material, using a laser to replace any light photons that leaked out of the experiment. The research was published in Nature Communications, and conducted by scientists at University College London and the University of St Andrews.
109
PEOPLE SECRETLY BELIEVE THAT THE EYES SEND OUT FORCE-CARRYING BEAMS
by Stephen Luntz
OLD IDEAS DIE HARD, INCLUDING THE BELIEF THAT THE eyes send out invisible beams that can affect what we are looking at.
When Professor Michael Graziano of Princeton University asked 724 participants in a study if they believed people could exert forces with their eyes, only 5 percent said yes. After all, philosophers have reasoned for 2,500 years that the eyes must work because of light entering them, not leaving. However, Graziano reports in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that when he tested a subgroup’s subconscious attitudes, the results were quite different.
Graziano showed 157 subjects images of paper tubes of different heights and diameters, and asked them to guess how far they could be tilted without falling over. The images included a photograph of a man referred to as Kevin staring at the tube, but sometimes he was blindfolded.
When Kevin’s eyes were open, participants thought the tube could be tilted more strongly toward him than away. For images where he was blindfolded, or when told the tube was made of very heavy material, this bias disappeared. The responses might have been correct if Kevin were producing invisible beams from his eyes, which could support the tube when it tilted toward him, and help push it over when the tilting went the other way.
The difference in responses was small—just 0.64º on average—but highly statistically significant. Graziano and co-authors calculated that the estimates would be right if Kevin’s eyes exerted a force of less than one-hundredth of a Newton, “similar in magnitude to a barely detectable breeze.” Even discounting the seven subjects who openly believed that the eyes exert a force still didn’t change the results.
The authors note that there is an extraordinary persistence across cultures of “the belief the eyes emit an invisible energy,” something that’s also assumed by almost all children. Scientific demonstrations that this isn’t true seem to be fighting against deeply embedded presumptions.
Graziano is known for his original approaches, including performing ventriloquism in lectures using an orangutan puppet, also named Kevin. He uses the way our brains attribute consciousness to puppets as an example of the way humans as social creatures project models of others’ thoughts.
We’re sure we’d have paid more attention in our university classes if they’d been taught anything like that.
110
CHINESE AND RUSSIAN SCIENTISTS HAVE BEEN HEATING HUGE PORTIONS OF THE ATMOSPHERE (ON PURPOSE)
by Katie Spalding
ABOUT NINE HOURS EAST OF MOSCOW, WHERE THE SURA River meets the Volga, there’s an ex-Soviet laboratory pumping high-frequency radio waves into the upper atmosphere.
As the waves reach the ionosphere, they disrupt it in mysterious and unexplained ways, forming artificial plasma ducts and heating the ions and electrons that make up this atmospheric region.
It sounds like the opening to an apocalyptic blockbuster, but experiments like these aren’t unusual. Northeast of Anchorage, Alaska, the US has its own facility, the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP. These days, the research station belongs to the University of Alaska Fairbanks, but for nearly a quarter of a century it was the property of the US Air Force and Navy, bombarding the atmosphere with radio waves in the search for new or improved military applications.
This is because the ionosphere plays an important role in communication. Ionized particles reflect radio waves sent from Earth and can disrupt signals from satellites—control the ionosphere, and you can potentially cut off your enemies’ access to information. It’s no surprise, therefore, that it’s been a priority for military forces—as well as the source of quite a few conspiracy theories—around the world.
So the news that Russian and Chinese scientists have been collaborating on a project to do just that has understandably turned some heads. As reported by the South China Morning Post, five experiments were carried out in the Russian skies over a period of 11 days in June 2018, sending high-frequency waves into the atmosphere with enough power to light a small city.
“We are not playing God,” one researcher promised the Post. “We are not the only country teaming up with the Russians. Other countries have done similar things.”
In a paper published in December 2018 in the journal Earth and Planetary Physics, researchers from the Institute of Earthquake Forecasting in Beijing and the Russian Radiophysical Research Institute described how the in-orbit China Seismo-Electromagnetic Satellite (CSES) was directed to monitor a series of high-frequency radio waves sent into the ionosphere from the Russian Sura research lab.
The paper describes one experiment that increased the temperature in the upper atmosphere by more than 180°F (100°C), while the Post reports that another caused a physical disturbance as large as 49,000 square miles (126,000 km2)—about the size of Mississippi.
Despite the alarming headlines, experts say experiments like these are subject to strict guidelines. “Such studies must strictly follow ethical guidelines,” Gong Shuhong, a military communication technology researcher, explained to the Post. “Whatever they do, it must not cause harm to the people living on this planet.”
And although the unusual level of cooperation between the two governments may have some worried about malicious agents jamming communication signals, the researchers stress that the experiments were carried out in the name of science alone.
“We are just doing pure scientific research,” study author Wang Yalu told the Post. “If there is anything else involved, I am not informed about this.”
So there you have it. Do not adjust your set.
111
Scientists Have Invented a Fourth Type of Chocolate
by Robin Andrews
Pink-colored “ruby chocolate” is manufactured from the ruby cocoa bean. It is the first new variety since white chocolate was introduced to the world 80 years ago, and brings the number of varieties to four. Ruby chocolate was launched in 2017 by Barry Callebaut, a Zürich-based company, after 13 years of development. And yes, it’s available on Amazon.
