2 minute read
Science Christmas Lecture
Science Christmas Lecture 2018
This year the Science Christmas Lecture was entitled Quite Interesting Science. We used the format of the well-known BBC TV programme QI to link together bits of science where we felt there were quite a few misconceptions out there and tried to correct them.
As ever, the overarching format worked to some degree but the lecture degenerated into tenuous links about things that we thought would be quite fun to do anyway. I was particularly proud of our link between the Coriolis Effect (it’s not a force and it’s not why water swirls down your plug hole a particular way!) and vortices, purely so that we could create a fire tornado and produce smoke rings which flew out towards the audience. Oh and that one of us could muck about on a rotating platform.
In the tradition of the TV programme we had a panel of “experts” comprised of pupils who sportingly read out scripted answers even though they knew they were wrong. Crazy buzzer sounds were from the sound of what happens to a glass container when caesium is added to water, Brian Cox saying “million billion billion billion” and a donkey sounding like an opera singer. We also tried to re-create some of the demonstrations that were shown on the TV programme: in addition to the fire tornado we demonstrated and talked through the science regarding non-Newtonian fluids, a selfpouring liquid and hydrophobic sand. Along the way we learned:
Octopi do not have eight legs and that they are rather good at escaping through really small holes. The animal that has survived the longest in space is the tardigrade – these little creatures survived the vacuum and radiation of outer space for 10 days, were revived and then were still able to lay eggs which successfully hatched!
Planes do not really use the Bernouilli effect for lift (again really an excuse to pretend we were the Ghost Busters and for us to use leaf blowers to fire toilet roll at the audience) .
Mount Everest isn’t really the highest mountain.
A brief diversion of the format entitled “…est” talked through the largest and smallest animals on the land, in the sea and in the air, where we almost showed the size of a Patagotitan mayorum, the largest known dinosaur and the weight of 10 elephants, by using a tape measure in the Memorial Hall, although the final few feet would have been out of the window. We also broke one of the QI rules which says “The answer is never the Blue Whale” as one of our answers was. The outcome was a fact and fun-filled hour with lots of demonstrations and audience participation with a bit of learning along the way.
My huge thanks go to Amanda, Alice, Alex, Rebecca, David, Toby,
Charlotte, James and Grace who buzzed their buzzers wonderfully and gave the wrong answers quite interestingly; to Alfie our roving cameraman; to all our wonderful support staff and science colleagues who gave the lectures and in particular Trevor, Barry and Mark our amazing technicians who really are the people that made it all possible.
