Physics 101 for Mitt Romney

Ahead of the Presidential debate tonight, I thought I'd help Willard Mitt Romney out a little. 

He recently said this, after his wife's plane had to make an emergency landing due to smoke in the cabin:

"When you have a fire in an aircraft, there's no place to go, exactly, there's no – and you can't find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft, because the windows don't open. I don't know why they don't do that. It's a real problem. So it's very dangerous.

1. Fires need oxygen. So adding more isn't a great idea.
2. Air in a plane is pressurised. Air outside is very thin. So if you open the window, all the air inside will want to go outside to equalise the pressure. 

Here's a diagram of what happens if Mitt Romney opens the window of his executive jet: click to enlarge. 

Man hands on misery to man…

Two things have happened today which encapsulate the extremes of the human condition.

The first is the theft of the 'Arbeit Macht Frei' ironwork sign spanning the entrance to Auschwitz. Some things are sacred: a camp preserved as a memorial to man's endless capability for cruelty to man is surely on of them (not that it's had much of a restraining effect). What might the motivation be? Plain theft? Surely not, unless the thieves are totally free of all morality and sense of proportion. Memorabilia collection? There is a market for Nazi items, and this must rank high on the list of desirable pieces, but even amongst those freaks, some sense of place must prevail.

The only motivation I can think of is that it's a fascist statement - to desecrate a place where millions died, and which represent the places where more millions died (Jews, communists, trade unionists, Roma, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses and others identified as somehow not fitting into the pure society) is a shocking rejection of morality, history and, ultimately, humanity. The action makes light of what went on behind those gates.

Meanwhile, from the bottom of a mine in Minnesota amongst other places, dark matter appears to have been found. It's a testimony to our (sometimes grudging) commitment to purest research - something now under attack in my education system and country. Dark matter is the substance which makes up 75% of the universe. It's never been detected before, only theorised as filling the spaces in gravitational theories of the universe: from dark matter comes matter, which includes us. Additionally, dark matter may even hold the key to time itself. At this point my brain dribbles out of my lugholes, looking for the nearest pub.

'The more we study, the more we discover our ignorance'

So said Shelley. He wasn't being negative.

I had a good, satisfying rant yesterday, about my institution's desperation to reduce education to the cold, alienated transmission of commodified facts, tailored to suit the demands of capitalism (because that's working really well, isn't it?).

Then yesterday, having finished Greg Bear's rather exciting Darwin's Radio (a gene thriller), I watched Horizon, the BBC documentary strand. This week, it was an hour on Einsteinian Relativity and quantum physics (extra-UK readers: it'll be on Youtube in no time). The fascinating thing is that relativity brilliantly describes the workings of the universe, and so does quantum physics, equally brilliantly. Unfortunately, they're completely incompatible, and this show focused on black holes to explore the dilemma.

The film consisted of arty graphics (it's basically impossible to represent the stuff that's out there, but they did their best) and moodily posed shots of physics boffins doing their stuff.

What was most profound was that they all kept saying, elegantly, 'we don't know what the hell is going on'. The point is - and Vice-Chancellor, I hope you're taking notes - that they all said this with massive, goofy grins on their faces: I couldn't help grinning back, caught up in their love of pure, intellectual pursuit. It's exciting, romantic, fascinating.

The absence of certainty is what drives proper educators. We love throwing ideas around, testing them, discarding them, modifying them. Can you imagine turning up at a local call centre and saying to them 'We'll offer this course to your employees if you give us £50,000. By the end of it, they'll understand that there aren't any right answers, only more questions. It'll totally destabilise their conception of the universe. They'll love it'?

That's what's going to happen. It's going to be boring, short-sighted and culturally damaging. It'll also be economically damaging, because training people to be more obedient drones definitely won't lead to innovation or invention.

I'm off to a meeting with the Ultimate Authorities now. Toodle-pip.

Warped dilithium crystals

This is available on a t-shirt from xkcd.com - the mouseover on the website says 'bonus points if you can identify the science'. Neal took one look, muttered something about blackbody radiation and is now explaining the maths and telling the tragic tale of Boltzmann's Constant, which helps explain why this curve isn't a straight line (his critique of classical physics was vindicated a couple of months after his death - the little k is his constant in this equation). It plots the energy carried by a photon of light by its frequency (though light's a particle too). A blackbody radiator radiates all the heat/light it absorbs.

I shall buy Neal the t-shirt in honour of his superior nerding.