Dark Horizons for Blue Skies

I read and listened today to David King, Chief Scientific advisor to the British government from 2000-2007 saying that there is no space in scientific funding for so called 'blue skies research'.

Blue skies research is essentially research for curiosity's sake, trying to gain greater understanding of some part of the nature of reality. As such, it generally has no immediate applications at its conception, although it is responsible for the theories that lie as the bedrock supporting applied science, engineering and economics.

One example of blue skies research is into discovering the very nature of physical interaction in the universe, be it on the grand scale of cosmology or the minute scale of particle physics. The Large Hadron Collider which was switched on yesterday at CERN is a good example of the blue sky. David King bemoaned the spending of 500m pounds on the LHC, saying

"It's all very well to demonstrate that we can land a craft on Mars, it's all very well to discover whether or not there is a Higgs boson (a potential mass mechanism); but I would just suggest that we need to pull people towards perhaps the bigger challenges where the outcome for our civilisation is really crucial."

Coming from a leading scientist, this comes across as patently ridiculous and rather confusing. Ok, so I might be a little biased being a pure mathematician (how much more blue sky can you get?) and feeling as if we're getting very little funding already. This application driven point of view seems ridiculously closed minded and incredibly short sighted. Particle physics has so far produced such (presumably useless according to DK) devices as the transistor, the computer display, radiotherapy, x-rays... In fact, most of the major advances that characterise the 20th century are due in no small part to spin-offs of particle physics experiments.

Science in the UK seems hopelessly doomed when Chief scientific advisers can be so incredibly anti-science. Given this, it was incredibly gratifying to see David King (above right) berated by Brian Cox (above left), the poster boy of UK particle physics (and a Professor in the High Energy Physics department at Manchester) on Newsnight last night. He put forward the remark that on the one day in which fundamental scientific research is actually covered in the media, it was ridiculous for the president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science to be pouring cold water on the achievement.

If you're reading this Prof King (haha!), I suggest that you quit your job as chief scientific advisor to UBS and spend all of your time tackling climate change before suggesting that blue sky researchers should change their focus and jeopardise modern science in the process.

Check out:

• 'Climate crisis' needs brain gain, from the BBC including an interview with David King from the Today Programme
• David King's profile on Wikipedia
• Newsnight on iPlayer (apologies non UK readers, hopefully someone will upload some of this to YouTube)

The Blue man of Beijing

Le Fox and I, listening to BBC's wonderful Radio 4 this morning were rather struck by the assertion by someone or other that China had used various technology to make sure that there woud be no rain during the Olympics. Slightly bemused, I decided to check up what this was all about.

It turns out that indeed, the authorities in charge made sure of good weather artificially using the technique known as 'cloud seeding'. The basic idea seems to be to introduce various chemicals into clouds which contain supercooled water to form ice crystals which then cause rain. One such checmical is silver iodide (AgI) which apparently has a structure similar to ice crystals and thereby induces so called heterogeneous nucleation. For your viewing pleasure, here's a demonstration of spontaneous freezing of supercooled (colder than freezing point) water:

It turns out that actually a great numer of countries use this technique to induce precipitation from clouds, either using aeroplanes fitted out with special tanks of silver iodide (or dry ice) or using anti-aircraft guns to fire canisters into the clouds. China spends $90 million per year on cloud seeding, citing an instance in which clouds in Tibet were seeded giving an inch of snow as a major success. Such techniques, as far as I understand are used merely to induce rain to fall from existing clouds rather than to form clouds themselves. In the week preceeding the olympics huge numbers of canons and rockets were used to fire large quantities of silver iodide into clouds abover Beijing. This had the dual consequences that heavy rainfall beforehand meant that the olympics would be rain free and that the ostensible pollution for visitors would be greatly reduced.

It's a rather natural question to wonder about the environmental consequences of such meteorological manipulation. Looking around on the internet, it seems that high levels of silver are relatively harmless to humans. The only symptoms experienced by people with a high exposure to silver in factories is a series of respiratory problems, mostly caused by powdered form of the silver rather than any chemical reaction. One slightly bizarre symptom of long-term exposure to silver is so called argyria, a condition whereby silver is deposited in the skin of the sufferer, giving them a bluish-grey tint. This seems to mostly affect ingesters of so called colloidal silver, which was widely used as a cure-all around the world. Prolonged exposure leads to such cases as Paul Karason featured below. Indeed, although there is no particular danger to his health, his skin will remain blue for the rest of his life. Apologies for the slightly cheezy reporting style.

Rather more significantly, silver plays an important role in the potassium/sodium cycle in fish by inhibiting the action of a regulatory enzyme. Interference with this cycle causes fish to take large amounts of water into their tissues very quickly leading to cardiovascular collapse.

Though the idea of cloud seeding seems fairly cool in many respects, especially in countries where agriculture is heavily dependent on consistent and predictable rainfall, it seems that the environmental cost to aquatic life at least indicates that some tempering of the process ought to be necessary.

For some more info on the whole process check out these links:

• Wikipedia's page on Cloud Seeding
• A Dartmouth College toxicology report on silver
• A Salon.com feature on the use of cloud seeding ahead of the Olympics

Artificial Ball lightning

A few years ago, a friend of mine and I decided to try and create artificial ball lightning in a microwave. All you need is a grape, a microwave and a knife.

WARNING: Attempting this could impair your health and that of your microwave! Approach with EXTREME CAUTION!

1. Cut the grape in half so that there is only small piece of skin attaching the two halves together and they look like a pair of bongo drums.
2. Take the tray out of your microwave.
3. Put the grape in your microwave with the wet faces up.
4. Start the microwave and have your finger on the stop button.

You should see a bright ball and maybe some licks of flame appearing within a second or two. I remember scortching the top of the microwave the last time I tried this so be sure to have a finger on the stop button. I'm not totally sure the physics behind the whole thing. The explanation my friend had was that the microwave sets up a standing wave inside the microwave which has around the right wavelength to create a big potential difference between the two grape surfaces. Eventually, as some of the water in the grapes boils, steam is ejected. In the presence of such a large potential difference, this ionises and forms a plasma for a split second. I'm still not totally convinced that this is actually what's going on, but I have no better explanation.

It turns out that it works even better when you have a flame in your microwave. The gas in the flame ionizes very easily and it's even possible to contain the plasma in a vessel of some sort for some time. Here's a video of someone trying it with a match:

Here's what I think happens:

The microwave keeps giving electrons in the hot gas enough energy to escape their nuclei. When these electrons return, they give off a load of energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation, some of which is the light you see. Presumably different burning materials give different parts of the characteristic spectrum (and so different colours...)

Le Fox, I would guess that if your chimney is struck by lightning when you have a fire in the fireplace, much the same things happens...

I could well be wrong...

See here for a good explanation of a similar grape experiment (with diagrams!).