Sep 30, 2010
— read in fullAsk an expert: TV presenter
Jonathan Hare, a scientist and TV presenter for Rough Science, was our resident expert for a month. Below are his answers to questions from mentors and mentees.
What was your most fun experiment in the Rough Science series?
In the Colorado series Mike B and I made glass. Mike cleaned up some sand and added other chemicals to lower the melting point. He also added trace amounts of metal compounds to give the glass some colour, without me seeing. While he was being filmed doing all this, I got going making an electrical furnace using plant pots among other things.
The sand mixture has to be heated for many hours, so when it was time to take the furnace apart and to see how our first experiment had gone it was a nail biting experience! I carefully lifted the lid and was surprised to see two round molten pools of glass of the most gorgeous blue colour – it was magic!
In the Death Valley series Kathy and I made a hot air balloon out of black bin liners. The idea is that you waft air into the balloon using wooden boards and wait till the Sun rises at dawn. The air heats up much quicker in the dark balloon and this expands the air inside, making it take off. That’s the theory anyway. Now Kathy and I spent hours trying to make a balloon that would work and it seemed like we were going to completely fail. Finally we used much thinner bags to make up a large balloon but we ran out of time and so couldn’t test it before the big day.
So we went into the last day, and final test, without ever getting the thing to work. We all got up early and drove out into the desert to film our ‘disaster’ - no one expected it to work. While the crew was setting up and the producers and directors were chatting about the day ahead, out of the corner of my eye I saw the balloon roll around …. start to bounce a bit …. then slowly … ever so slowly take off - all on its own!
Which famous scientist do you think is the most inspirational and why?
Ernest Rutherford discovered the atomic nucleus using what we would nowadays regard as very simple equipment ... it took years of patient observations. He had a lot of determination. Imagine discovering something 1000 to 10,000 times smaller than an atom and in the process revolutionise our understanding of the universe?
When I was working at Sussex University an old gentleman called Sir William McCrea used to come in once a week to go to the astronomy meetings (he helped set up the Sussex astronomy center in the 1960s). I was lucky enough to record a series of interviews and chats I had with him on the days he came in.
Bill was a link to the scientific giants of the past - he worked with Einstein and many other great scientists. He talked about Rutherford and told me that he was a great experimenter but wasn’t particularly good at maths or theory, yet his work was immensely important. That inspired me a lot.
I was wondering how much you've had to develop your communication skills in order to help people to understand you more easily when you're talking about science? Are there any techniques that you depend on especially?
I came from an intelligent and imaginative family but one that did not consider themselves as knowing anything about science (although my dad was good at maths and science at school). My mum and dad were very supportive of my home experiments and so were always asking what I was doing. So I had to think hard about how to explain what I was doing without assuming they knew any science or science words. This got me into a habit of always trying to explain things without science jargon.
You should be able to explain anything in terms that anyone can understand - at least make that your aim. Sometimes people hide behind technical jargon, buzz words and techno-speak when in fact they don’t really understand. It's very easy to think you understand something when you become a bit familiar with it. You have to look again at it from another angle to see if its not just 'assumed understanding' by familiarity rather than real understanding by seeing what is really going on - by observation. Really seeing what is going on - by making your own observations - is hard but always exciting and rewarding. That’s when you really begin to learn how the world works. You need to do this at your own pace. It’s a good way to spend your time!
What is an atomic clock?
Every clock uses an oscillator to provide a pulse to regulate its time keeping. The early clocks used springs and pendulums, modern clocks use a quartz crystal that vibrates at a very high frequency. This can be divided down using electronics to give a pulse every second for example to drive a clock mechanism. Because we live on a planet that has day and night (and seasons) there is a natural warming and cooling everywhere we go. Because everything around us is heated and cooled on a daily basis one of the main problems that shows up when you try to make anything precise is its tendency, at some level, to show a temperature effect.
Now you can divide down the crystal oscillations and this will also in turn divide down the temperature effect but it will still be there. This effect limits the accuracy of a crystal to about one second in a few years at best. Atomic clocks make use of the natural absorption of very high frequency radio waves (microwave) by certain atoms. You can make a microwave generator and stabilize it by adjusting its frequency very, very precisely to these atomic transitions (absorptions in a tube full of the metal vapour). When this is divided down (by a huge number) to get a second, the effects due to temperature changes and other drifts are also greatly reduced. They are much better than the quartz crystal clocks. If I remember correctly atomic clocks can have long term stabilities of better than a second in 100,000 years!
What exactly is a freelance science communicator and how did you get involved in this area?
I have worked for Sussex University, the National Physical Laboratory and British Gas. I am presently self employed as a science communicator so I earn my money doing talks, workshops and a bit of writing. That’s what I meant by 'freelance' science communicator.
After the work on the Buckminsterfullerene molecule, we had a lot of schools and colleges asking for talks about the it. So I got a lot of experience going around the country talking about Buckballs! It was being able to share such an exciting discovery. At first I prepared by running through the talk the day before I went anywhere. Then after about the thirtieth time, I decided to just turn up and see what happened and it went well! Like all things, you get better at giving talks the more you do.
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