A while ago, I met Pete and Jez for breakfast in the Kitchen Garden Cafe in Queen's Moor, where the middle classes go out to play. We had a very amusing few hours. It was one of those happy situations where two of us would have a conversation which would be hilarious to the third.
Suddenly Jez, for some reason I can't remember, decided that I really should understand how the hadron collider works and what it was trying to do.
(Sometimes I think it would be nice to be Jez's child. You could eat lots of fantastic vegetarian food and do interesting things all day. He knows the answers to all sorts of interesting questions. Then I recall that I am incredibly lazy and addicted to chocolate.)
"Well, A," he began in a tone of boundless enthusiasm born out of the conviction that this information is obviously interesting, worth knowing about, possible to understand, and important. He then went into a long and complicated explanation which effortlessly (for him) took in the structure of the atom, and the design and construction of the hadron collider, and what it would achieve for science, with a brief rant deploring the state of scientific reporting in the media. I tried to keep up, briefly delighting him by managing to recall that two particles with the same electronic charge repel. Pete, meanwhile, watched with affectionate amusement, probably in the same way that a kakapo keeper would watch a kakapo jump out of a tree.
I am not used to hearing anyone talk about physics like it's interesting. I hated physics at school. I was one of only four girls in the class, and the other three spent most of the lesson discussing their sex lives. (At least it was an education in social/human biology.) The rest of the class spent their time trying, with some success, to give the teacher a nervous breakdown. (He had, in the previous year, chased one of the most badly-behaved boys out of the class and across the school courtyard to the headmaster's office). In retrospect, I feel really sorry for him.
We were the first year of GCSE, so instead of learning everything from books we were supposed to design experiments. This, which was undoubtedly a good idea in theory, was interpreted in practice as "Well, everyone will make up the results of the practicals anyway, so we'll be covering the same boring stuff that we always have."
One of the experiments I found particularly pointless was the ticker-tape trolley. Take one grooved wooden ramp. Take one trolley with tape coming out of the end. Slide the trolley down the ramp. The tape gets covered in spots which become further apart the faster it goes (or something). Look at the tape. Compare with the picture in the text-book. When they don't match, make up the results. Being a pernickety sort of child, I thought that this wasn't a great demonstration of the scientific method. Surely if you get results that you don't expect, you should do the experiment again, or change it in some way, or question the results in the text-book. Isn't getting results you don't expect to get kind of, well, an interesting scientific challenge? A chance to learn something new?
Not the way we did it.
Now in the arts, you see, or particularly history, if you have a theory, you can go and look at some sources to see if they support your theory or not. You can look at the sources historians used and see how they came to their conclusions. You can suggest that the sources could be used in a different way, or other sources change their arguments. You can use your own intelligence. You have the chance to think for yourself.
This assumes that you can slide the trolley down the ramp at all. I had a terrible time with experiments at school. I couldn't do any of them. It's a lack of ability similar to my inability to know where I'm going or remember where I've been or read maps. It was really frustrating for my science teachers. I think one of my reports said that I could grasp the concepts easily then went on to lament my lack of ability in practicals. I don't know what it is. I am really stupid about logistics, about doing things in a sensible order. When I watched a programme about the 1950s school, I was reassured to see that classes of boys found experiments really interesting and classes of girls just couldn't see the point. Maybe it's a gender thing.
Apparently, the ticker-tape trolley is a really good demonstration of an important principle in physics, which I understood at the time, but have now sadly forgotten. Here's my mangled version of it, which someone who knows something about science can correct if they like: if you can see part of the pathway of an object, you can work out how it behaved in the past.
Oh, I've remembered some more! They're looking for gravity. They're trying to explain how gravity fits with theories about the structure of atoms. There are lots of different kinds of quarks which behave in different ways depending on their charge and they're firing them at a magnetic field at great speed which makes them separate into their different kinds (charmed, strange etc) and they're hoping to find a particle that explains gravity.
I don't know whether this mangled explanation will make the scientifically knowledgeable laugh or cry, but it might amuse, which is always my aim in this blog, if not in life.
Time for Deal or No Deal!
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