Miller - Its not rocket science

Ben Miller studied physics at Cambridge and was working on his PhD when he left to pursue a career in comedy. He is best known as half of Britains second most popular TV comedy duo, Armstrong & Miller, but has always maintained a passionate interest in science.

Published by Hachette Digital ISBN: 978-0-74812-850-1

Copyright Ben Miller, 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

Hachette Digital

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For my father, who gave me my love of science

Did you know that we are all stars? I dont mean that in a Simon Cowell-type, doing-it-for-my-dead-nan way. I mean that people, real people, are quite literally made from stardust. It sounds like the most ridiculous sort of science fiction but this is the world we live in, seen through the eyes of science.

Let me explain. You, as well as everything around you, are made from atoms. You can think of them as the basic building blocks of nature. There was probably a chart on the wall at school called the Periodic Table that showed them in order of increasing size: the smallest, like hydrogen and helium, up at the top, and the big boys, like lead and uranium, down at the bottom. Youll probably also have a vague recollection that these atoms were themselves made up of even smaller parts; to be precise, there was a small, dense, electrically positive nucleus at the centre, surrounded by a swarm of negatively charged electrons. Well, have you ever wondered how those atoms were made?

The answer, incredible as it may seem, is that they were made inside stars. The reason that the stars shine is that there is an enormous nuclear reaction going on inside them, where smaller nuclei are fused together into bigger nuclei, releasing huge amounts of energy as heat and light. The bigger the star, the bigger the nuclei it can make. And once youve got a nucleus, all you need to do is sprinkle on a few electrons which, frankly, are ten a penny and youve got a beautiful, life-giving, electrically neutral, works-straight-out-of-the-box atom.

A star like our Sun, it turns out, is a little on the small side. This means it can produce only the smaller sorts of atoms, like helium. Bigger stars are capable of producing much bigger atoms, like iron and carbon the sort of stuff that you and I are made of. So how do these bigger atoms get from the inside of a star into our bodies?

The answer is that the life cycle of big stars ends with what Noel Gallagher calls a supernova, a huge explosion that flings debris out across the galaxy. Over billions of years, this debris slowly clumps together due to gravity, sometimes forming new stars, sometimes forming planets. On these planets, if the conditions are right, life can form.

In other words, the atoms that make up our bodies were formed billions of years ago in the centres of real, genuine, 100 per cent stars. Those stars then exploded in ruddy great explosions, the debris became planets, life began on our planet and then, thanks to a particularly slack period in popular music, Simon Cowell evolved. Thats science. Its big, its bold, and according to every experimental test weve been able to make its true. If that is the sort of thing that gets you going, this is the book for you.

Ive always loved the arts as well as the sciences, and Ive always found it strange that the two subjects are separated by some weird sort of educational apartheid. If you were to generalise about where we stand on this issue today and what the heck else is a book like this for? youd say that the arts have an aristocratic, high-church, Royalist air about them, while the sciences seem altogether more egalitarian, plain-speaking and Puritan. We seem to find ourselves on one side or the other of these cultural tracks, centrally cast either as foppish, airy-fairy creative types or unwashed, unapproachable, socially challenged geeks.

Needless to say, this schism is a very modern invention. For a kick-off, no king was ever more loving of the sciences than that lovingly restored fop-to-end-all-fops, Charles II and, conversely, its hard to imagine someone less likely to dissect a frog or launch a weather balloon than Oliver Cromwell. Yet the entire education system seems to buy into the contemporary myth that we are all either artists or scientists from birth. Can it really be that there are two types of human intelligence, one ideally suited to composing haikus and the other perfect for mucking about with a chemistry set? Why does science become such a passion for a few and yet such a mystery for so many?

I think a lot depends on your earliest experiences of science, and I was extremely fortunate in having one of the finest teachers of natural philosophy that anyone could hope for. His name was Mr Bailey, and the things that he taught me and my fellow infants at Willaston County Primary School have stayed with me throughout my entire adult life. If youll let me, Id like to tell you a little bit about how, under his influence, I came to study the sciences.

There is not a lot to say about Willaston, the village where I spent my first few years. There were about half a dozen shops, which all appeared to sell newspapers; a railway level-crossing, which provided the lions share of the local entertainment; some concrete playing fields with generations of childrens broken teeth embedded in the tarmac; and a large housing estate where several hundred young families, of which we were one, clung to the lowest rung of the Cheshire housing ladder.

Willaston County Primary School had been recently built to cater for this sprawl of cookie-cutter housing, and was modern which, in 1971, basically meant that it had a flat roof. If you havent grasped it yet, Im trying to paint a picture of a thoroughly ordinary state school, of the kind that can be found anywhere in the country, unremarkable in every way. Except that, in my opinion, what was going on in the classrooms of Willaston County Primary was anything but ordinary, and that was largely due to our rather unconventional Deputy Headmaster.

Mr Bailey was an unlikely schoolteacher. He cut quite a dash, tall and thin, with pepper-grey hair, a neat moustache and a sartorial mien that hovered just the right side of Basil Brush. He was boundlessly enthusiastic, loved a field trip and practically lived for the opportunity to tell anecdotes. But, of all his many passions, one reigned supreme: maths.

Maths, Mr Bailey said, was just about the most fun you could have next to British Bulldog. Practically the first thing he introduced us to was number bases. The non-mathematicians among you might think you know nothing about number bases but, of course, you do. In fact, you are absolute experts in one of them: base ten. As Mr Bailey explained, the reason we count to ten, and then in multiples of ten, is because we have ten fingers. But why stop there, asked Mr Bailey? For fun, why not count in base eight, as if we were Mickey Mouse and had only eight fingers? Why not count in base sixteen?

The point being that, from our very first encounter with numbers, we were encouraged to see them as things we could play with. In fact, the home-made woodblock number base sets that Mr Bailey provided for our infant school were just as popular as the Lego or the sandpit. To Mr Bailey, numbers were more than just a necessary evil; they were entertainment. And, though he cant have known it at the time, a knowledge of number bases was going to be very useful to a generation of children whose computers would be designed to run on base two, or, as we now call it, digital.