Chance & Necessity

A personal study of nucleation

I study nucleation, but mainly via modelling on a computer. The guy below, Harley Morenstein, took a more personal approach. Incidentally, if you are bored of the Vine looping just click on it.

Drinks like Diet Coke, lemonade etc, are carbonated, i.e., have carbon dioxide pumped into them under pressure to make them fizzy. If you carefully take the top off and are gentle with then (as opposed to giving them a shake) most of the carbon dioxide remains in the drink. This means that the amount of carbon dioxide dissolved in the water is actually above the solubility of carbon dioxide in water (at atmospheric pressure), and so this carbon dioxide wants out (technically speaking it is thermodynamically ‘downhill’ for the carbon dioxide to leave the water and go into the atmosphere).

The carbon dioxide comes out as bubbles and if the drink is not shaken these bubbles can find it hard to start to form. This initial step when a tiny bubble starts to form is called nucleation. If nucleation is not possible then this traps the carbon dioxide in the Diet Coke or whatever the drink is.

Until something comes along to make nucleation easier, like Mentos. Mentos are an American sweet, and for reasons nobody really understands, carbon dioxide bubbles nucleate like crazy on the surface of Mentos. So when the guy in the Mentos suit drops into the Diet Coke tub, bubbles of carbon dioxide nucleate like crazy, and you saw the result above.

Starve yourself, drink plenty of red wine, take statins, and listen to music, and you’ll never have a cold ever again!

A couple of weeks ago The Telegraph reported that: “Fasting for three days can regenerate entire immune system, study finds“. This sounds a bit like hard work to me, I have to say. I like food. Maybe you agree, if so we are in luck. Because, also according to the Telegraph: “Daily glass of wine boosts the immune system“. I have to say that that sounds a lot more like it to me. But what if you don’t like wine? Well, you are still in luck, because you can try taking statins: “Statins ‘could boost immune system’“. Don’t like drugs? No problem: “Music can boost your immune system“.

Believe first, ask questions later

Naively, you might think then when presented with a statement that is new to us, we start out not believing it, and then decide if we believe it or not. But apparently, it is the other way around. We have an inbuilt tendency to believe everything we are told, and only then afterwards do we check to see if it is true.

Is competition the answer?

Academia has always been pretty competitive. It took me about 2 years of looking to get a job as a academic, including a somewhat bruising and unsuccessful interview at Imperial (the question “Do you consider yourself a loner?” did rather throw me). And if anything 2 years is shorter than average. If you apply for a job as an academic you should accept that maybe 30 to 100 others will be applying for the same job, including some smart, hard working and ambitious people. But despite the pressure and work load, being an academic is still a good job, with a lot more freedom than most other jobs. And, as I tell my tutees “Good jobs are hard to get as the competition is strong, so you need to work on getting a good CV”, so you should expect getting a job as an academic to be competitive.

How to get the right one?

In 1990s new anti-HIV drugs were being rushed into production to fight the then relatively new disease HIV. One of these was Ritonavir. It was approved in 1996. Like most drugs, it was sold as tablets that contain crystals of the drug molecule. All was well.

All models are wrong, unless you have limited data, in which case most models are right

I am very fond of the quote by the statistician George Box: “essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful”. It is true, all our models are wrong if you look carefully enough. For example, Newton’s model of gravity is pretty good for calculating our orbit around the Sun, but if you look carefully enough you will see it is wrong. Careful measurements and general relativity have told us that it is an approximation. The same thing applies to pretty much every model we have.

Fair and balanced

I hope you enjoyed this, I did. If only the BBC, for example, would follow suit and do this for balance, instead of their usual use of one sensible scientist and one fruitcake for “balance”.

300 years is a long time in hi-tech research

Three hundred years ago, an act of parliament created a prize for the solving a then highly pressing technological problem: How a ship at see could work out where on Earth it actually was, in particular what its longitude was. If you are like me and always get longitude and latitude mixed up, longitude is position east-west, while latitude is north-south. As I learnt last week in a IoP South Central general talk by Dr Rebekah Higgitt, the biggest (of several) contributions to solving this was by John Harrison, who made the first clocks that were very accurate at sea.

Paper after paper rejected, yet no front page story for me

Yesterday The Times led with a story that a paper on climate science was rejected by the journal Environmental Research Letters. Sorry, it is behind a paywall so you will have to take my word for it. But the Telegraph and Mail both have articles on it, both of which manage to imply ‘McCarthy’ style persecution of Prof Benngtsson, one of the authors of the paper. I have had many papers rejected from a number of journals. Also as a peer-reviewer I have recommended the rejection of more papers than I care to remember. I am upset. Despite my heroic efforts none of the Times, Mail or Telegraph have ever run articles either lamenting my fate at the hands of McCarthyite persecutors, or when I was the reviewer, making me feel important by claiming that I am part of such a conspiracy.

Penguin waves

Over the weekend I was at workshop in Cornwall. It was mainly people from the Universities of Bristol and Bath, but they were a few people like me from further afield. It was in a very pretty village in Cornwall. During the Saturday lunch break we went for a stroll along a wooded river bank. It is the time of year that blue bells flower, and the fields of blue bells in the wood were beautiful.