I cannot but briefly go over the three big lies yet again given their currency. Of course there are many others (such as that animal experiments are in any way useful or beneficial) but only last night I saw the notorious RSPCA tv advert. Although a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority was not upheld on what seems to me a technicality, there is an obvious implication, although it is not explicitly mentioned, that their RSCPA Assured Scheme for farms and slaughterhouses actually means something rather than being a cynical complicity for profit. Chris Packham, Caroline Lucas and Brian May all resigned from the organisation over the issue, and of course the immense cruelty persists.
The second big lie is that fox hunting no longer continues. Just a few days ago, on October 16th to be precise, sabs recorded footage from a drone showing the Quorn hunt engaged in cubbing (training the hounds to kill foxes). Dogs and foxes are not natural enemies, but we see a huntsman swinging a fox in front of the hounds, encouraging the kill. This kind of barbarity is not a one-off nor by any means rare. Chris Packham’s reaction says it all: “Another bloody year, another bloodied body, another animal tortured and torn to pieces to gratify the bloodlust of savages. Where is the damned consultation and where is the damned ban?” Burnham seems as willing as his predecessor to kick it into the long grass, as he seems to be doing with so much else, the water companies for example – just get on with it.
The third big lie is the self-justification put forward by the shooting industry. See: Post-mortems suggest five Hen Harrier chicks found dead in nest on grouse moor in northern England had injuries consistent with being stabbed – Raptor Persecution UK The images are hard to absorb, I can barely look at them. This happened a while ago, in June 2024, but has only just come to light. “Natural England has remained silent about it, Durham Constabulary has remained silent about it, and the National Wildlife Crime Unit’s Hen Harrier Task Force has remained silent about it.” The chicks are barely more than embryonic.
Kean (Sam). The Disappearing Spoon and other true tales from the Periodic Table, Black Swan, 2011.
Had I read the section about Röntgen and his discovery of x-rays I would have been able to answer the question on the Lateral podcast: “When Wilhelm could make out his wife’s wedding ring in 1895, the world was never the same again. Why?” He had taken an x-ray, the first one ever, of his wife’s hand and her bones and the blacked-out shape of the ring in the resulting image were the proof of the pudding.
Completely randomly, I have thought of a suitable question myself, although perhaps it is too easy and just exposes my previous ignorance. Which American state, purchased from Russia in 1867 for $7.2 million, is the largest, northernmost, westernmost, and, longitudinally, the easternmost – Alaska. From Wikipedia: “It is among the most irreligious states and one of the first to legalisze recreational marijuana. Alaska has the highest proportion of Native Americans of any U.S. state, at 22 percent.” My perception of the whereabouts, history and geography of the only other non-contiguous state, Hawaii, was way off too.
Kean moves on to the way in which certain elements behave in extreme cold. Tin (Sn) rearranges itself and turns to powder. The three states of matter we learn about in school, solid, liquid and gas, are just three of many. There’s a nice footnote on colloids like jelly, whipped cream and fog which are a blend of two states. “They can be thought of as a highly flexible solid or a very sluggish liquid.” The solid state is really an illusion – atoms are mostly empty. But, mostly at very low temperatures, even the noble gases can become compound-forming solids.
Another nice little detail from an explanation of superconductivity: John Bardeen invented the germanium (Ge) transistor. When he learnt he had won the Nobel Prize for it, he dropped his scrambled eggs on the floor.
Light is neither wholly formed of nor behaves as though it consists of particles (photons) nor waves – it’s both and it depends on how you measure it. Which leads on to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which operates mostly on a nanoscale and is not the same as the phenomenon of observers changing things simply by observing them. I don’t pretend to understand it fully but it seems to boil down to the fact that “if you know a particle’s position very well, you cannot know it’s momentum well at all, and vice versa.”
Or:
“h” is apparently’ Planck’s constant, an inconceivably small number, “about 100 trillion, trillion times smaller than one.”
One state of matter is the Bose-Einstein condensate, “the coldest, gooeyest and most fragile mass the universe has ever known”, achievable at one billionth of a degree above absolute zero (the theoretically lowest possible temperature where no further heat can be extracted).
After a section on bubble science, Rutherford (Rutherfordium (Rf) is named after him) and others’ discovery of radon and the fact that elements could in fact break the rules and move laterally across the periodic table, Kean turns to Rutherford’s work on the age of the Earth. Previous estimates were based on the Bible and measuring lost heat, extrapolating backwards to when every rock on the planet was molten, both were wildly wrong. In certain rocks, uranium (U) atoms “spit out alpha particles and transmutate into thorium, which becomes radium(Ra), which becomes radon (Rn) which becomes polonium (Po), which produces stable lead (Pb). It was the side-effect of the presence of helium bubbles in rocks that led to the estimate of two billion years which was at least half right.
In the chapter on precision, we are told that in spite of all the extraordinary precautions, the standard kilogram, a cylinder made of platinum (Pt) and iridium (Ir), by which all others are calibrated and which resides in Paris at the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures, still manages to lose half a microgram per year – and none know why. The exact length of a metre has been determined in other ways than by a standard rule: it’s 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of red-orange light from a krypton (Kr) atom or the distance any light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.
The rotation of the earth proved too fluid a measure to gauge time, photons emitted by caesium (Cs) electrons are counted in atomic clocks. “Cesium” is an American spelling I missed in a previous post. Then there’s the alpha constant, the strength of the bond between electrons and nucleus. If this turns out to be variable, which it may yet do on a vast timescale, we will have to rethink pretty much everything.
Finally we are led to the fringes of the table. Francium (Fr), the least stable natural element, is so fragile as to be useless, there’s barely enough of it to be directly detected, even rarer is astatine (At). Some elements exist for only tiny amounts of time. Some at the far end of the table have never actually been made. Some are purely hypothetical. As for the table itself – it doesn’t have to be that shape and there are plenty of alternative versions, like a honeycomb and a pyramid. And it may well be that it will prove inadequate as we continue to learn and understand more.
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