So Theodore Gray bought a kilo and a half of pure sodium metal on eBay. At school, you probably dropped a crumb of it into water – or rather, you watched your chemistry teacher do that – and the sodium reacted with the water to produce sodium hydroxide (a nasty alkali) and some hydrogen gas. The reaction gave off lots of heat, which ignited the hydrogen, and so the little lump of sodium fizzed across the water with a nice flame.
Theodore Gray got some friends over, with refreshment, and launched a kilo of sodium into his private lake.
His reasoning was sound: if he tipped in some hydrochloric acid afterwards (‘Muriatic acid at any hardware store’), this would neutralise the sodium hydroxide, and the pond would be a little saltier. There’s no law against making slightly salty water.
That’s not quite how things worked out. After an initial large explosion from the first chunk, a series of secondary explosions occurred, producing one fairly large wedge that began hopping across the lake. It was thrown forty feet up into the air, then flew into the water at high speed, only to be thrown back into the air by the resulting explosion. It only takes a few of these skips to get several hundred feet in a few seconds. The partygoers were two hundred feet away, and ran for cover.
Now, you might be asking: where’s the bad science? Well: Sky’s popular flagship science programme has just started its new series. Last week I accused them of faking content. They tried to make me nervous about it. Now they’ve admitted that they definitely did fake those explosions. And they have also admitted that viewers were not told (or as they said last week: ‘but we always tell our viewers’). And they have admitted that they fake other stuff. In fact, they were so blasé about this that at one point they were even going to give me a list of other examples, but now they’ve changed their mind about that.
Here’s where it gets really elaborate: they don’t tell you explicitly that they fake stuff, but they now say that you are a fool not to assume that they fake their experiments: ‘The clue is in the title of the show, “Brainiac Science Abuse”, it’s an entertainment programme, it’s being made for an entertainment channel, it’s to be expected from the show.’
But it’s not. This is a programme that repeatedly tells viewers how reckless and dangerous and science it is – in a way that now feels slightly defensive. Now Brainiac claim they actually said ‘This is what happens if you stick rubidium in a bath,’ and then showed ‘a demonstration of what would happen’ (that’s just not true: it was a generic special effects explosion, and they said – repeatedly – that they were doing it for real). ‘We may as well have done it,’ they say: which is an interesting approach to science. But of course, they did do it: their scientific adviser dropped these metals into their bath, on camera, and unfortunately the bath didn’t blow up. That’s life. You can’t say that this ‘not exploding’ was somehow ‘wrong’, and that the fake explosions they broadcast were what ‘should’ have happened. What should have happened, when you drop the rubidium in the water, is exactly what did happen: not a lot.
Despite the fakery, of course, Brainiac gets massive ratings, and is praised in very high places for popularising science. So to me, this is a lot like the nutritionist question: Is it OK to lie to people about science, if it makes them eat vegetables? But more than that, it’s a question of who do you want to be your friend: the faker, who desperately insists he’s doing dangerous science, while setting off weak, staged, plastic explosions; or Theodore Gray, who buys a kilo and a half of sodium on the internet, and gets some friends over for a party, to chuck it in the lake?1