Report of the British Association Festival of Science
University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, September 1995
by David N. Barnett
Evening was just approaching as the swearing taxi driver dropped me outside the barrier in front of Castle Leazes hall of residence, which refused to open for him, however many times he pressed the buzzer alongside. After checking in, and being shown the way to the lift (a good five minutes' walk from the reception, through a network of labyrinthine corridors), I was able to drop off my bags in my room before heading off to the registration point, in the Student Union building. What I had not figured on was the fifteen minute walk between the halls and the main campus site. Still, I figured, at the very least, I would get plenty of exercise during the week, with that walk twice a day. Registration consisted of picking up a bag of papers and my name badge (perhaps this could have been left until the following day), and I returned to Castle Leazes. I had not booked one of the dinners (but was amply satisfied by the excellent British Rail pizza I had had some hours previously) and so spent the next hour or so exploring the halls, finding both the T.V. room and the bar. It became apparent that, as yet, there was no-one in either, so I took the opportunity for an early night, in preparation for the lectures which were to begin the following day.
The Monday morning dawned decidedly earlier than any other morning I had experienced that holiday, but this allowed me to sample the cooked breakfast before making my way down to the campus site. Fortunately, a shuttle service was being run between the halls and Union building, so the journey was a little quicker than it would otherwise have been. The opening lecture (in which I found myself sitting next to Dr. Bryson Gore, famed of the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures ('Thank you, Bryson')) was an account of the fullerenes, the newly-discovered allotrope of carbon, by one of their discoverers, Professor Harry Kroto. This lecture was made particularly interesting by the fact that it coincided with the tenth anniversary of the submission of the paper reporting the discovery of the fullerenes. The next, and somewhat more complicated lecture, was about the discovery of a new 'quantum liquid' state of matter, composed of orbiting electrons enclosing quantised amounts of flux in a magnetic field. Following this came the coffee break, including free doughnuts that had cunningly been wangled from a local bakery who 'were sponsoring the coffee breaks'. The lectures resumed at 11 o'clock with the astronomy and particle physics theme. The first of these was about the top quark, the elusive last member of the matter particle families to remain undiscovered. It appears that now the bottom quark's partner has indeed had its presence confirmed, with the number of 'top-like' events observed in particle accelerators around the world far greater than that which would be expected by random 'background' events. The last lecture before lunch addressed, among other things, the sun's 'missing neutrino' problem. One possible explanation is an interchange of the neutrinos ejected from the sun into one or both of the other two forms of neutrino, to which our detectors are not sensitive. The validity or otherwise of this conjecture depends on the masses of the three forms of neutrino, but these, and indeed, whether they even have mass, are still the subject of research.
After a quick break for a sandwich, the lectures continued at 2. The first, entitled 'Hunting the Dragon' considered the virtually unknown centres of many'active galaxies'. So little is known about these regions that they are the sorts of places which would have been marked 'Here be dragons' on old maps -- hence the title of the lecture. Professor Lawrence covered the possibility of super-massive black holes, surrounded by disks of matter accreting onto them, which give off X-rays as the matter swirls into the centre. Following this was a talk about the observation of oscillations in the sun -- effectively standing sound waves set up in the collosal ball of gas, perhaps by collisions of comets and other bodies. Careful study of these motions can reveal a wealth of detail about the intricate internal structure of the sun. The final lecture of the day covered the simple processes which resulted in the formation of the complex structure of the universe visible today, and included the discovery of minute 'ripples' in the background microwave radiation which pervades the universe, which made such big press a few years back. After this was the Physics section cheese and wine party -- the seven flights of stairs ensured that I obtained my daily dose of exercise -- but this had to be cut short to enable me to reach King's Hall in time for the presidential address. This was preceded by an awards ceremony of honorary doctorates, including awards to Jocelyn Bell Burnell, co-discoverer of the pulsar, and to Sir Martin Rees himself, president of the B.A. Following this was a reception in Newcastle's Civic Centre, which included an opportunity to see the exhibits of projects written by young scientists from all over Europe on a variety of subjects as diverse as pollution, prime numbers and the construction of an automatic writing machine! Along with a group of fellow students, I then retired to the Union bar, only to find it inexplicably closed. We therefore returned to Castle Leazes bar, where we spent a short while, before I returned to my room, some of the others vowing to find a pub in town.
The Tuesday morning lectures began with a pair of lectures concerning ultrafast and ultra-powerful lasers. One of the interesting points raised was the possibility that, were a compact, cheap blue laser discovered, it could be used, in conjunction with the red and green lasers already in existence, to produce a new generation of laser televisions, replacing the modern ones which produce all the colours available with a combination of red, green and blue fluorescent materials on the screen. Following the coffee break, I took the opportunity to visit the computer room, and perhaps take up the invitation to 'surf the net'. After playing around for a short while, I discovered that it was possible to check my E-mail remotely, but unfortunately, no new messages had arrived for me! After making my way to the university refectory for an early lunch, I then decided to check out 'Bubbles, Boomerangs and Beer', a set of impromptu talks organised by the student section of the B.A. given by anyone who felt the urge, on their pet subjects. The three talks that particular lunchtime began with one on a revolutionary new completely biodegradable plastic, made by bacteria. This plastic is completely natural and harmless to the environment, this being demonstrated by the speaker's willingness to (purely for demonstration) consume a (small) quantity of the plastic. A small vial of the substance was then passed around, with the invitation to partake of a small sample, if you so desired. (And delicious it was, too..) The other talks covered the subject of luminescence (a last-minute preparation, as the last two speakers had unwittingly both intended to speak on the same subject) and (more) lasers. These talks finished shortly before 2 o'clock, giving just enough time to reach the next destination for the afternoon lectures.
The mathematics lectures on that day commenced with a talk on nonlinear mathematics, including a demonstration of a novel form of cryptography; if a particular kind of electrical circuit is driven by a signal, it produces an output very much like the white noise given out by an untuned radio. If this is fed into an identical circuit, the original driving signalis regenerated -- Clearly, this can be done remotely from the source, provided the output is transmitted and then received. The clever part is that this process will work even if a small additional signal (the secret message) is added to the 'white noise'. The regenerated signal can then be subtracted from the incoming hiss at the receiving end, to retrieve the original message. This was demonstrated by playing us a recording of the transmitted hiss with the quiet additional message apparently hidden in it, and then playing the 'decoded' message -- apart from a slight crackle, unmistakably the original message we had also been played -- a recording of 'God Save the Queen'. Clearly, this exciting new technique has many interesting applications. The next lecture addressed the use of mathematics in chaotic systems, particularly in predicting the weather, and demonstrated the huge effects of small changes in the initial state of such systems (the so-called 'Butterfly effect'). After a tea break, the lectures concluded with 'Not Quite The Indian Rope Trick' (very popular with the press from the BBC World Service), which showed how it was possible to stand compound pendulums (and even lengths of curtain wire) upside-down, by vibrating the support at specific frequencies, followed by a look at the use of mathematical modelling in studying wound healing and cancer -- If several factors are thought to have an effect in such situations, a mathematical model can enable elucidation of which factors truly are important (by considering the effects of varying these factors), so that treatment strategies can be determined accordingly.
So ended the 'official' activities for the day, but the student section still had a lot planned. The arrangement was to meet in the Union bar at 7, from where the promise was to 'go out into darkest Newcastle to find somewhere to eat'. As it turned out, the thirty of us ended up monopolising Lorenzo's, an excellent Italian restaurant ten minutes' walk away. Undoubtedly the best part was the conversation -- I was fortunate to be sitting opposite someone who could derive immense amusement from almost anything -- waterwheels, Roman lamps and electric hand-driers stick in my mind. On leaving, we decided to sample the delights (and the beer) of 'The Hotspur', until finally the 'Time, please' bell rang, and we made our way back to our various accommodations.
Wednesday began in a light-hearted manner, with a talk on all aspects of soap bubbles, including demonstrations of how 10-foot-long bubbles can be produced (it's all in the glycerine, and not using Fairy liquid), and what the beautiful colours on draining soap films mean. The talk also showed how to produce cubic and other novel bubbles, and covered the fascintaing way in which soap films can be used to plan how to build roads connecting a series of towns, at minimum expense -- The example given considered London, Newcastle, Bristol and 'some foreign towns', north of the border. After the coffee break, the biological sciences department were continuing their talks on 'designer plants'. The first of these considered genetically-engineered plants, created using genes from jellyfish, which produce light when subjected to some sort of stimulus. Current research is going into making this bright enough to be seen by the naked eye, as then the possibilities will be endless. Among those considered by the lecturer were crops, which glow when under fungal attack, so all the farmer has to do to decide wher e fingicide is required is to go out at night, and see which parts of his field are glowing! This then avoids th expense and environmental damage caused by spraying the whole field. Other potential 'uses' are runways bordered by rows of glowing plants to guide the incoming aircraft (!) and a luminous rose which may be placed in a vase on a romantic dinner table -- It produces a gentle light as the diners talk to each other over it, and gradually fades as they go off 'to do other things'! The other talk before lunch was about the work going into trying to reduce the health hazard posed by Cassava, a crop frequently used for food, but which produces cyanide!
The BAYS lecture that afternoon covered the chemistry of colour, including the use of new pigments in paints to replace those formerly used, now known to be harmful. Also mentioned was the shocking fact that some of these pigments, some containing lead or even mercury, were even used to colour boiled sweets. The talk also included a discussion of pigments which change colour when subjected to heat -- Dr. Campbell explained that he did not like using a Bunsen burner for this demonstration, as they are so old-fashioned, while trying to use instead a hairdrier tat looked as if it pre-dated electricity itself. However, the contraption failed to produce enough heat, and so he was forced to relent. The fascinating lecture to close the afternoon was one on human memory, and illustrated the role of prior knowledge and experience in helping us to remember, illustrated by, amongst other things, a study of convicted burglars, showing that they can recognise changes to photographs of the outsides of houses (e.g. the appearance of a burglar alarm) significantly better than randomly-selected members of the public.
A little later, I found myself wandering through the corridors of Castle Leazes, and wondering how I was going to spend the evening. However, my ponderance was shattered by a guy who stopped me with the words -- 'Thank goodness, a bloke! I don't suppose I could borrow sme shaving cream, could I?' It turned out that he was heading off for the 'River Boat Shuffle', a boat trip along the Tyne, that evening. He seemed to think that there might be some places remaining, so after a quick snack in the bar, I headed back to the Union (oh, that walk again..) to see if any tickets were left. As it transpired, there were, so I ended up spending the evening very enjoyably on the 'Catherine', cruising down to the lighthouse at the mouth of the Tyne, and back. The atmosphere was extremely jovial, and someone even managed to get the pearl 'Excuse me, but where did you get that hat?' into the conversation without sounding too sarcastic. A coach picked us up from the drop-off point, and took us all the way back to Castle Leazes, for which we were most grateful. However, as the journey continued the jokes got worse (and, to be frank, dirtier) -- the response 'It's alright, I didn't understand them' coming from someone who we realised had been able to overhear -- and so it was with a sense of relief that we left the coach, and retired for the night.
The last full day of lectures began with another fascinating talk on cryptography, including some of the ways used to break codes. For instance, in codes where each letter of the alphabet is simply replaced by another, progress can be made by considering the frequency of appearance of each letter -- the most frequently-occurring is likely to be 'E', then 'T', and so on, provided the message is long enough for the sampling to be statistically significant. Other typesof code were covered, including 'shift' codes, where each letter in the alphabet is replaced by the one a certain fixed number of letters after it, alphabetically. One example of where the shifted message also makes a word occurs when the letters in 'WHEEL' are replaced by the letters 19 previously in the alphabet, giving 'DOLLS'. Knowledge of such facts could prevent decoding messages wrongly -- care must be taken if the true message could be more than one possibility. In the past, the lecturer had challenged his audiences to find longer words which are shifts of each other -- the record stood at eight, then nine letters, before someone came up with a 32-letter passage of English which was a shift of another English sentence! (Some people really must have nothing better to do.) This lecture was followed by a talk of 'Seriously Symmetrical Solids' -- there are apparently 43 convex polyhedra which are either facet-regular or vertex-regular (or both), a facet-regular solid, for example, being one on which all facets are indistinguishable. The talk included the complex classification of, and relationships between these solids.
The morning continued with the psychology section lectures. The first of thse considered depression, the basic theory being that we have a number of different states of mine, depression occurring when we become stuck in a negative state. The key to solving depression is therefore 'changing the mind in place' -- the title of the lecture. The next lecture continued in this cheerful vein, addressing the psychology of suicidal behaviour. Current research suggests that those most prone to such behavious are those whose memories are of a more general nature, rather than people who can easily recall specific events in their past. The idea is that those with more generic memories thus have difficulty in imagining specific pleasant events in their futures.
Lunch was necessarily a quick affair, and so it was hoping that I might avoid the joys of indigestion that I hurried to the next lecture, which began early, at 1:00. This was given by Dr. David Jone, alias 'Daedalus', famous for his plausible, but often outlandish, scientific ideas which are regularly published in Nature and the Guardian. The talk was a reminiscence of some of his more amusing ideas, such as anti-smell cloth, and a procedure for determining the weight of the human soul, and a laugh at sme of the people who were taken in by his more bizarre ideas. Mention was also made of his 'perpetual motion machine', supposedly running in his back room since 1982, but while there was still interest in it, Dr. Jones refused to reveal its secret. The lectures following addressed road safety, and the best ways of teaching children to cross the road. These talks included some alarming statistics, and suggested that perhaps the best way forward might be to begin a programme of community-based schemes, to help introduce to children the dangers associated with roads. Concluding the afternoon was a presentation by Professor David Bellamy, highlighting the environmental problems facing all of us today, asking what we can do about them, and how to go about it. Overcrowding of the planet looked to be an important issue, illustrated by some disturbing figures. One-thirs of the world's population is aged under 25, with a quarter under 15. If each of these next generation of parents have an average of only 1.7 children, the Earth's population will soon top ten billion. The meaning of such numbers was brought to life by pointing out that were this to become the case, merely the toilet roll needed to supply this vast population would stretch to Uranus and back!
The evening began with a talk entitled 'Hello Sunshine' -- a lecture on the benefits of solar power, one of the most important options open to us for the future, as our supplies of fossil fuels begin to run out. The talk included demonstrations of the fascinating properties of light, including fluorescence amd a light-powered electric trian, and was extremely well-presented. After a quick snack back at Castle Leazes, I returned to the Union bar, only to find that most of the people I expected to be there had headed off into town in search of food. However, my patience was eventually rewarded, as we all headed back out to The Hotspur when the rovers returned. My plans to pack that evening, in preparation for returning home the following day, were foiled as, yet again, I found myself still there when the landlord began to kick people out for the night. Still, it was having had an enjoyable evening that I returned to my room, with the realisation that I would have to get up early the next morning to pack.
The Friday morning dawned, and along with it came the Breakfast Egg Race. This year's task was, using only raw spaghetti, raw jelly and a packet of straws, to bridge as large a gap as possible, supporting a hard-boiled egg in the centre. The celebrity team, consisting of David Bellamy, Bryson Gore, Frank Close and someone (even) less well-known were shamed into defeat by a team of delegates, who managed an impressive 1.92 m. The whole event was accompanied by lashings of bucks fizz, served up by means of a curious system involving four one-gallon demijohns and plenty of dry ice (which the members of the student section had a great time playing with) and various croissants, doughnuts and so on.
The first lecture of the morning was on the history of chocolate, the secrets involved in its production, and just why it tastes like it does. There were (apparently) samples on hand for tasting after the lecture, but rather unsurprisingly, the queues were so enormous I decided not to bother. This was followed, after a break, by a talk on carbon, focussing (again) on the fullerenes. This time, the particular point of interest was their potential use in engineering, especially the production of 'nanotubes' and how to control their size and orientation. There were also other tit-bits, such as 'how to shrink-wrap an atom' but best of all, free 'make your own molecule' kits were on offer. I now own a 430,000,000 times scale model of a molecule of Buckminsterfullerene. The closing lecture was Dr. David Jones' account of the trouble he had in trying to design and build a chemical garden experiment to fly on the space shuttle Columbia, and all the bureaucracy and red tape he had to put up with, mostly in the name of safety. Apparently, the experiment did fly in the end, and the results were 'interesting', but no more details were forthcoming.
The festival concluded with the General Assembly in the Curtis Auditorium, a review of the whole week, and a chance for the audience to ask questions about the B.A. in general. The meeting concluded with the installation of the new president of the B.A., following the end of Sir Martin Rees' year holding this post. A quick last lunch at the refectory was in order, before I went to retrieve my bag from reception, where I had been allowed to stash it that morning. However, this was not as easy as I had anticipated -- Reception was now locked up, and although I could quite clearly see my bag behind the counter, the porter was not about to let me retrieve it -- I could have been up to any sort of mischief. However, this most trusting of fellows finally relented and returned to me the bag with my name on it, after this had been okayed by one of his superiors, who eventually arrived following a request for his presence put out over the tanoi system.
The week was highly enjoyable in every respect, and I should like to thank everyone who made it possible for me to attend. My closing thoughts as I boarded the Metro train to return me to Newcastle Central station were that I had been privileged to visit probably the only annual event at which it is possible to encounter somebody wearing a tie which has Maxwell's equations on the front.
David Barnett
21st September 1995