It's on the syllabus
    You hear it all the time as a teacher: "why do we need to learn this?"  The stock response from most educators, myself included, is usually the predictable: "it's on the syllabus" or, just as toxic, "because it might be in the exam."  Kids in classrooms often question the relevance of learning something and they are reminded that the point of school is to pass exams in order to get a job...in which you won't actually use the skills you've learned. 
    For example, many jobs in the UK require you to have a C-grade in English and Math.  In order to get those grades you need to do things like manipulate algebra and recite Shakespeare.  Name  one job which requires you to do both.  Apart from being the lead actor in A Math-Summer Night's Dream, a play I just made up, I can't imagine these skills being used in a lot of jobs.
    It's a stupid way of approaching education and many pupils understandably question why they need to know who discovered Radium if they are planning on working in a legal firm or at a daycare centre.  To a certain extent the people who design curricula are to blame, but it's difficult to know how to get around the problem.  Which skills and knowledge should a school prioritise to give everyone a chance of seeking employment? 
    Most people don't need advanced math in their job for instance, but architects obviously do.  Architects spend years learning math, so we need to start training them during their teens.  The problem however is that you don't know which kids are going to become architects, so you solve it by teaching every kid the basics of math.  By the time they all turn 18, the tiny proportion who are actually going to use it in their job are sufficiently prepared. 
    As a result you end up teaching 99% of students a bunch of skills they never use, but what's the alternative?  Stop educating children and wait for them to turn 18 so they only study subjects they care about?  If so, we would have the majority of people in their twenties living with parents, not earning, reducing the workforce and collapsing our economy...I assume, I mean I never studied economics.  Which is kind of my point.
    Maybe we should scrap academic subjects like English, Math and Science altogether.  99% of kids won't become mathematicians, scientists or englishisits, so why train them in these subjects?  The most common jobs in the UK are working in retail, making food, office clerking or nursing.  Wouldn't it make sense to teach kids how to do these jobs? 
    It's also worth pointing out that as society evolves, so does the job market.  Some of the kids I'm teaching today will eventually apply for jobs which haven't been invented yet, so it's foolish to claim I'm preparing them for the future when I don't know what that future looks like.  That's basically what we do with education at the moment though.  We tell kids the point is to help them get a job and then we don't teach them how to actually do that.  Instead we teach them which alkali metal is the most reactive. 
    We teach kids academic skills with the unspoken understanding that this is preparing them for academic-style jobs.  Teach history so a tiny proportion of students can become historians, teach math so a tiny proportion can become engineers and teach Science so a tiny proportion can become Scientists.  Under this model, most of the student popuplation's time is being wasted.  This is madness.

Struggling and Juggling
    I once saw a newspaper cartoon which dealt with this very issue in which a student raises their hand and asks the question "Am I ever going to need this?" to which the teacher responds "You won't, but one of the smart kids might."  Burn. 
    It's indicative of the mindset many seem to have.  The hard subjects are for the smart kids who get mentally-challenging jobs, while the other kids get less engaging jobs and have thus wasted 18 years in compulsory schooling.  But this whole thing is backwards because getting a job isn't the purpose of education at all.  I'll get to why in a moment, but first let's deal with this idea that harder subjects are for "smarter" kids.  It's nonsense.
    When I was 16 I attended a conference which featured a lecture on the mathematics of juggling.  Incidentally, that tells you everything you need to know about me as a teenager.  I was transfixed by the lecture and went home that evening to learn the skill.  One of my friends grasped it in two days while another was able to do it in two weeks.  It took me three months.  I clearly wasn't a natural.  I have lousy hand-eye coordination and was always last picked for the football team; physical skills aren't my forte at all.  But by the time I learned to juggle, my skill was indistinguishable from my friends who had learned it quicker. 
    Why did I spend three months relentlessly practicing something I clearly wasn’t good at?  Actually, I think that's the reason - I enjoy learning something I find difficult.  Over the years I’ve variously taught myself to play the banjo, calculate sine functions in my head and do the moonwalk.  I am not a natural juggler, musician, mathematician or dancer, but when I get the desire to master a skill I tend to kick my own ass until I can do it.  If people call me talented they are mistaken.  I’m just stubborn.  And my road to Science was somewhat similar.
    In a few days I have a friggin' book coming out about Chemistry.  It might therefore surprise people to learn that when I first met the subject I found it incomprehensible.  As a younger man, the periodic table was one of the hardest things I had ever come across but something about it intrigued me so I worked until I became competent at using it.
    I accept that some people have a flare for certain things, just like my friends who learned to juggle in a heartbeat, but I don’t believe people are excluded from becoming good at something they aren't a natural at.  They just have to want it enough. 
    Perhaps being good at something, perhaps even intelligence itself, is more about personality than ability?  Maybe people respond differently to the frustration of finding something difficult and some people stick with the problem while others don’t care.  Maybe that’s why some people underperform in high school.  Little children always seem keen and eager to learn everything, full of questions and enthusiasm.  By the time they hit sixteen many have given up on education and, far worse, themselves.  Maybe the reason for low grades is attitude rather than aptitude.
    I like to think most people can learn most things and Science is therefore no different.  For example, I remember finding the topic of molar calculations tricky when I studied it at A-level, but now I teach it to my own classes and I wonder why I ever found it hard.  I'm not any smarter and the subject hasn't gotten any easier, it's just my approach which has changed.  Back then I had a mindset of "I can't do this" but once I realised I had to, I suddenly found it simple.  Perhaps all people need in order to learn something complicated is the motivation to do so.

Get Out, Get a Job
    After this student correctly pointed out that knowledge of Science was unlikely to help him get a job, I argued that neither did football.  He doesn't play or commentate on professional football and in fact there are less people working in the football industry than those working in Science.  He did concede this point, but argued that his knowledge of football was different because it was a hobby and hobbies aren't supposed to help you get jobs...whereas that is the purpose of school.  That worried me. 
    If we tell people the point of school is to get a job then they are certainly smart enough to recognise how irrelevant many subjects are.  Kids switching off in Science lessons are not necessarily doing it because they aren't clever, it might just be the opposite.  They know Science isn't going to help them get a job so what's the point in learning it in school?  Maybe, just maybe, if we make the emphasis of education learning for learning's sake, kids won't question the point of studying something because they'll already know what it is. 
    We would still need exams because qualifications help those students who want to take a subject further earn their place doing so, but that doesn't mean every lesson should be geared toward a small number of kids who may want to do it at University.  The point of a lesson should be to learn something interesting...because hello, the human brain is built for learning stuff!  We've spent 65 million years of evolution developping brains which are well-crafted to learning and which enjoy doing so.  Isn't that a good enough reason to learn things?  We are made for it???
    Admittedly not every kid wants to learn Science but then again neither did I originally.  I didn't discover I liked Science until I was 14 and when I finally did, I didn't study it to get a decent grade, that just happened as a side-effect.  Learning Science was interesting and rewarding in itself.
    There's still a personality element of course.  Some kids just aren't interested in how the Universe works.  Fair enough.  I don't really care about football.  But I'm willing to bet if we shifted the emphasis of Science education away from "learn to pass exam" and back to "learn because the world is interesting" we'd have more kids engaging with the subject and their grades would take care of themselves.
    School is supposed to prepare you for life and the point of life isn't just to get a job, pay your bills and die.  Life is about finding your place in the Universe.  It's about finding purpose and understanding, which education is absolutely crucial for.  Studying history isn't about becoming a historian, it's about seeing how humans have overcome challenges.  Studying English isn't about becoming a dictionary writer, it's about learning how people communicate and how emotions or ideas can be expressed.  Studying math isn't about becoming a mathematician, it's about finding patterns in reality.  Learning stuff isn't a means to an end, it's an end itself. 
    Facts from school aren't necessarily going to help you get a job I agree, but neither is eating your favourite food, watching your favourite movie, or falling in love, and we certainly enjoy those things.  Your job is what you do to serve others; to contribute to society.  Learning is something you do for yourself.  For the sheer joy of it.  That's the message we should be pushing in school.

Keepin' it Real
    Rosalind Franklin once said "Science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated", which I agree with.  But many people do not see it like that.  What do we make of my student's other objection that Science isn't relevant to everyday life? 
    Football certainly is relevant to many people's lives because it's a big part of our culture.  People talk about it in the street, watch it on television, play it in the park and spend money to attend matches...this doesn't happen in Science.  You don't overhear people on the bus talking about the latest iterations of quantum gravity and you rarely see geology professors signing people's shirts after a successful lecture.  How can we respond to the criticism that knowing Science isn't part of our life?
    I think what we have to remember is that there was once a time when using the internet wasn't considered relevant to everyday life, and here you are reading this blog on your wifi.  There was a time when the ability to drive a car wasn't an important skill to have, nor was the ability to type on a keyboard, use a gas oven or even operate a door-key. 
    In fact, if we go back in human history there would have been a time when even using money was seen as an obscure practice.  Just because something isn't currently relevant to everyday life doesn't mean we should be happy with that status quo.  When people spend their time only learning basic life-skills, society stagnates.  When people start pushing their knowledge of what basic-life skills involve, society progresses. 
    I accept that many people don't make Science relevant to their everyday lives but just imagine a world where they did.  Imagine a world where having Scientific knowledge was considered as commonplace as knowing how to boil an egg.  Think how much we could achieve as a people.
    And to address the earlier point about today's kids having jobs which haven't been invented yet, surely that makes a Scientific education more important.  Politicians come and go, musicians have their fifteen minutes of fame, but the laws of Science are fixed.  Culture shifts with the sands of time but the laws of Science are the one thing we have in common with future generations. 
    People living ten thousand years from now, and people living ten thousand years in the past, occupy the same Universe underpinned by the same laws of Science.  That, to me, makes it one of the most relevant things we could spend our time studying. 
    Science isn't relevant to many people's daily routine but that's not because it has no place, it's because people choose to ignore it.  After all, we don't need to use the internet, mobile phones, cars or gas ovens but doing so improves our quality of life.  You don't need to talk about football all the time for that matter, but it's part of our culture and people's lives are enriched by it. 
    Science is the same.  It could become a part of people's lives and that would make the world a better place.  So yeah, fair enough, Science isn't relevant to many people's day-to-day existence.  But that doesn't mean it should stay that way.  Frankly, I want to live in a world where Scientists are treated like rockstars!

Just the facts ma'am
    In one of the last interviews he gave, Carl Sagan said "We live in a world dependent on Science and technology in which nobody understands Science and technology.  Sooner or later this combustible mixture of power and ignorance is gonna blow up in our faces."  It's a poignant rejoinder to the accusation that Science isn't important but, as sobering as this comment is, my favourite quotation from the interview is the one I have as my banner: "Science is more than a body of knowledge, it's a way of thinking".
    So often Science gets taught in schools as a bunch of facts which must be memorised and regurgitated, which misses half of what Science is.  Science isn't just the facts we have amassed about our Universe, it's the painstaking method by which he have amassed them.  This is why Science is crucial to life as a human. 
    Training your mind to think scientifically is about using reason, evaluating arguments, understanding evidence, making judgements, changing your mind when contrary evidence presents itself and learning how to determine what is real from what isn't.  If we had greater scientific literacy, we wouldn't have as many people duped by snake-oil salesmen be they political, commerical or spiritual.  If everyone was trained in how to assess the truth of claims, people wouldn't need to be taught which facts were true...they'd be able to figure it out for themselves.  So, when are you ever gonna need Science?  Discovering how the world works and what your place in the Universe is.  That's when.

Image credits
Bored girl: creativitypost
Sparta: iol
Juggling: celebrationofmind
Basketball player: mensjournal
No pushing: pinterest
Brian Cox: thebrainbank

And the fire-breathing?
    This particular aspect of dragon-lore took me a while to figure out because fires don't occur in any known biological system.  Lightning and lava are usually responsible for fires in nature, and when humans achieve it, we do so by striking metals or oxidising chemicals together.  How do we rationalise a fire-breathing animal? 
    In the Christian Bale movie Reign of Fire, dragon breath is explained as dragons producing a natural napalm which they spit out.  That's creative and all, but the problem is that flammable or incendiary chemicals don't catch fire on their own.  They need an ignition source.  
    The more I thought about it, the more frustrated I got.  Fires typically burn at hundreds of degrees celsisus and even birds, the warmest-blooded creatures on Earth, rarely exceed forty.  It didn't seem there was any way of justifying an animal getting things hot enough to start a fire. 
    Until I remembered bombardier beetles....  
   Bombardier beetles possess one of the most chemically remarkable adaptations in nature.  When threatened, two glands in their bodies eject separate streams of hydrogen peroxide and paraquinone which blend together in mid-air.  When mixed, these chemicals form a jet so hot it reaches the boiling point of water, burning any predator away.
    Paraquinone and hydrogen peroxide are also irritant chemicals so it’s a wonderful defence mechanism…if you try to attack a bombardier beetle, it pees boiling poison in your face.  Fun fact, John Cusack repels people the same way.   
    So, here’s what I’m thinking.  Suppose our dragons had similar glands in their throats to bombardier beetles.  They could spit out a chemical cocktail close to 100 degrees Celsius and that might be enough to achieve ignition.  Most substances need to be scraped, scratched or electrocuted to catch fire but there are a few which ignite when you simply warm them.
    Triethyl borane, for example, will catch fire at -21 degrees.  That would do the trick but it's probably not a good idea because the body temperature of the dragon would set fire to it as soon as the gland produced it.   
    White phosophorus catches at body temperature of course, but it’s a solid powder.  Powders take weeks to form inside a body (think of kidney stones) and presumably the dragon will want to use its fire-breath regularly, meaning we want something that a gland can produce at short notice.
    That leaves carbon disulfide, a colourless liquid which catches fire at 90 degrees, roughly the same temperature of a bombardier beetle jet.  Carbon disulfide can cause erectile dysfunction in humans but, to my knowledge, nobody has ever tested this on dragons so there’s no reason to assume it would cause any harm. 
    If we therefore propose that a dragon has three glands in its mouth, one for paraquinone, one for hydrogen peroxide and one for carbon disulfide, when all three squirt together they could theoretically create an honest-to-god biologenic flame-spray on demand! 
    So while dragons might not exist on Earth there's no reason they couldn't exist in nature.  In fact, given the sheer size of the Universe and the number of potentially inhabited planets, there may even be a world on which dragons have actually evolved. 
    And there you have it.  We've entertained a crazy idea, but rather than justifying it by saying "magic did it" or appealing to some other unprovable notion, we've used facts we already know to be true.  And this is how Scientists speculate.  Sticking to the laws of nature doesn't mean you have to abandon extravagant dreams.  In fact, sticking to the laws of nature can sometimes make your dreams possible.

Image credits:
Dragon lady whose name I forget: highfidelitynotes
Dragonlab: aalabor
Sad Vampire: deviantart
Humbaba: wikipedia
Dragon at war: wired
Bombardier Beetle: typseofinsects

I've never heard of it...
    The idea isn't talked about much these days, but I can fill you in fairly quickly.  Life-Force is a 1985 sci-fi horror movie directed by Tobe Hooper about aliens who dehydrate people to death, based on a Colin Wilson novel, The Space Vampires.  And I'm not making this up. 
    Today it's a celebrated cult classic, famous for a young Patrick Stewart cameo and because the main character, played by Mathilda May, spends the whole film needlessly naked as she strolls around killing.  Fun fact: the original poster had to be recalled because it featured May's nipples and the family version (below) had to be issued with lens flares painted over them.  They don’t make sci-fi movies like they used to…perhaps that’s a good thing.
    The movie got its title from an ancient, pre-Scientific idea called "life-force" or "vital essence" - a mysterious property all living things were believed to have.  The assumption was that studying Biology was distinct from Chemistry and Physics, because living things were somehow separate to the crude matter of the inorganic world.  
    Supposedly, it wasn't possible to explain living phenomena without including this soul-subtance, and for centuries Biology was fused with philosophy, mysticism and magical thinking.  Until Science destroyed it.
    There are some hangers-on who still talk about living “energy” or “aura”, but people who trust things like clear definitions or the logic of parsimony have long abandoned the idea of life-force.  Thanks to Science, we now know life isn't the result of some boring, primitive notion like magic.  Life is Physics and Chemistry at their most complicated and beautiful.  Here's how we figured that out in nine experimental steps.

Step 1 - Camera Obscura
    The first hint that life-force might be unnecessary was uncovered by the Muslim scholar Abu Al Hasan.  I’ve mentioned Al-Hasan in another blog because he essentially invented the Scientific method itself.  The thing he's best known for however, is explaining how pin-hole cameras work. 
    If you make a tiny hole in the wall of an otherwise dark room or box, light from outside will project itself onto the far wall, creating a perfect image of the external world.  This effect had been known since ancient times, but Al-Hasan successfully explained it as the geometric behaviour of light-beams moving in straight lines.
    After building a number of pin-hole cameras with lenses to prove his idea, Al-Hasan got hold of a bull’s carcass and extracted its eyeball for comparison.  Following a rather unpleasant dissection, Al-Hasan found that the retina of an eye behaves identically to the back wall of a camera.  The pin-hole (pupil) allows light to enter and light-beams create a retinal image according to his geometric laws.  There was no need of magic.  Apparently you could explain the very nature of visual perception using only a basic appreciation of optics. 

Step 2 - Doctor Death
    Up until the 16th century, medicine was built on the work of the philosopher Hippocrates of Kos.  Hippocrates never got his hands dirty with actual dissection of course, he just used intuition (guessed) and doctors learned their trade by reading his books and watching occasional amputations.  It wasn’t until 1543 that a scientist named Andreas Vesalius decided to carry out genuine human autopsies and record his discoveries. 
    Vesalius began his career as a grave robber, unearthing bodies and dissecting them at his laboratory.  This may sound immoral by today's standards, but if you want to make an omelette you’ve got to dig up a few cadavers. 
    Fortunately when he moved to Italy, he fell into favour with Charles V, who not only patronised Vesalius' research but began scheduling executions to match his lecture schedule so he would always have a fresh supply of corpses.  Doctors of the city would be invited along and Vesalius became a morbid celebrity who would take the freshly killed criminal and cut them open as his assistants created diagrams for medical textbooks. 
    And, astonishingly, Vesalius began to discover that the human anatomy was not particularly different to that of animals.  We had the same stuructre, the same organs and our skeletons differed only by shape and size.  It would appear that ancient wisdom was wrong; humans were another breed of animal rather than a separate classification.  Life-force was still part of the deal, but it was disconcerting to realise we probably shared the same life-force with dogs and cats.
    This idea was heretical of course.  You weren’t supposed to challenge the accepted wisdom of ancient thinkers, so it was assumed that the human body had simply changed form in the years between Hippocrates and Vesalius.  The idea of throwing out an incorrect theory when contrary evidence arose wasn’t a big thing back then. 
    It was also Vesalius' discoveries which stirred up the first notions of ethical vegetarianism.  If humans were made of meat just like every other animal, did we truly have the right to kill and eat other animals?  Was it really that different from eating human meat?     

Step 5 - You are all diseased
    In the 1700s, the British navy was in trouble.  More than 50% of its sailors were dying from scurvy; a horrible condition which causes your teeth to fall out, your skin to split open and you to die.  Nobody could figure out what was going on until 1747 when the physician James Lind carried out the first medical trial in history. 
    Lind decided to run experiments on the crews of various ships, administering different diets to different sailors.  Some were given cider to drink, some were given sulfuric acid, some vinegar, some oranges and (as a control group) some had to drink equal amounts of seawater.  The results were clear: sailors who consumed oranges didn’t get scurvy.
    By 1794 other foods like sauerkraut, lemons and limes were also shown to prevent scurvy and it became standard practice for ships to have a supply of citrus fruits on board (hence British sailors being nicknamed “limeys” by yanks).  Finally, in the 1930s, the active ingredient preventing scurvy was identified by Norman Haworth as Vitamin-C (ascorbic acid).
    It turns out that while most animals produce their own, a small number of species including monkeys, apes and bats do not make Vitamin-C.  As a species, humans suffer from inherent Vitamin-C defficiency, which makes things uncomfortable for the life-force hypothesis.
    If living things are bestowed with magical essence, why was it missing Vitamin-C?  Why would humans and bats be born with a genetic disease while other animals get excused such a handicap?  If life-force existed it was imperfect and incomplete…which sounds more like a natural, random chance thing than an ethereal, magic spirit thing.  Incidentally, one other animal which lacks Vitamin-C?  Guinea Pigs.

Step 9 - Soup's Up!
    By the 1950s Darwin’s theory of natural selection was so well-evidenced, it was accepted that life on Earth originated from a common ancestor billions of years ago.  The only question was how that life got there in the first place.
    It was one thing to say living things are today the result of biochemistry, but the initial spark which gave rise to proteins, enzymes and information chains was still unexplained.  It was sometimes nicknamed “Darwin’s Black Box” because nobody could figure out how to get life from a sterile Earth.  So naturally people plugged life-force into the epistemological gap.
    But then, in 1953, Harold Urey and Stanley Miller decided to replicate the conditions which had birthed Biology.  By stewing all the chemicals known to exist on Earth at the time (easily learned from studying rocks, ice cores and cosmic nebulae), they filled a flask with methane, ammonia, hydrogen, water and began spark-plugging this "primordial soup" to simulate lightning.
    After a week the soup had changed composition entirely.  It was filled with amino acids, the building blocks of proteins and enzymes.  If it was possible for lifeless chemicals to synthesise amino acids in a few days, imagine what could be achieved in a few hundred million years with a churning ocean, lightning, hydrothermal vents, rock pools, ultra-violet rays and so on. 
    (NB: some people have mistakenly criticised the experiment because along the road to making amino acids, the Miller-Urey experiment also made cyanide and formaldehyde, which are obviously poisonous, leading to fallacious rejection of the results.  What's not being understood by these people is that the cyanide and formaldehyde are part of the sterile mixture of chemicals...if you react them long enough they do make amino acids, that's the whole point of the experiment.)
    The final “missing link” between these amino acids and simple proteins has not yet been discovered, however.  We’ve figured out step 1 of the life process, and we know steps 4,5,6,7... etc, but we’re missing a few steps in between.  It is here that the remaining spiritualists and witches set up camp, insisting life-force must exist within those few question marks left in the chain. 
    As a Scientist, I have to concede that they may be right.  However, I think it’s unhealthy to cling to an un-evidenced hypothesis.  Furthermore, the history of Biology has shown that the more we’ve studied it, the smaller life-force’s reach has become. 
    It makes sense that early explanations for living things would favour magic over testable laws of Science...nobody knew any testable laws of Science!  But now that our knowledge has matured, I think we can safely shrug off the cloak of mysticism.  We cannot know with certainty of course, but wisdom suggests that life-force has been truly  sucked dry.

Image credits:
Soul leaving body: YouTube
Life-Force poster: thecultmoviereview
Look into my eye: giphy
Hannibal Lecter: wikipedia
Shameless Plug: shamelessplug7
Guinea Pig 1: imgflip
Guinea Pig 2: angryapps
Dorothy Hodgkin: thefamouspeople
Pain in the ass frog: knowyourmeme
Buchner: wikimedia
Primordial Soup: defendingthebible

3.  You're a person
    I got told a lot during training that “it doesn’t matter if the kids get on with you” and it’s a poisonous lie.  It’s one of the most important things.  There’s a fairly obvious reason too: it’s easier to learn from someone you get on with.
    If your students have a good working relationship with you, not only will they feel respected in your classroom, they are more likely to ask questions.  If they’re afraid of you, they aren’t going to stop you when they don’t understand something.  You won’t be teaching them at that point, you’ll just be talking at them.
    Teaching, at its best, is a two-way street where students explain what you need to teach and what isn't working.  If they think you aren’t human, they’re less likely to have that dynamic with you.  I’ve also found (as I’ve mentioned on another blog) that relaxing and being yourself tends to make for better lessons anyway. Some might argue this is a waste of time because it’s not teaching them anything.  But I disagree because your job isn’t just to teach your subject. 
    Like it or not, you being the “adult” in the room means you’re showing students what an adult looks like.  We notice personality traits of people around us and if teenagers see all their teachers as personality-vacuums, it doesn’t paint a very optimistic picture of being a grown up.  So be yourself.  Be human.

Image credits
Dead poets society: wsj
Lazy student: ecodesignproject
Nevertoolate: girledworld
Bleak students: gfycat
Teenagemind: helpyourteennow
Teachbot: Shutterstock
Fake percentages: slideshare
Teacher with a gun: abovethelaw
Screaming teacher: theteachersdigest
Mrs Krabapple: Jezebel

I'm getting paid to do this???
    In part 1 of this blog I explained how I got a contract with the Little, Brown Book Group to write my debut book Elemental, released on the 5th of July.  I've recieved lots of enthusiastic and curious responses, with a lot of people asking about the money.  So I might as well talk about this aspect because it's interesting.
    To be abundantly clear, I don't write about Science for the goal of earning fat stacks.  I write about Science because I think it's awesome.  I don’t monetise my YouTube channel (much to the horror of many students) and when people have asked me what I'll spend the money on I haven't had a good answer.   
    But let's be frank.  I’m a human being living in the 21st century who needs to buy food and pay bills.  Money isn't everything but it's useful and if people are willing to pay me for working (the time and effort required to write a book is basically a second job) I might as well say yes to that.
    There are two ways you get paid as an author.  First, you get what’s called an "advance”.  This is a lump-sum which you recieve in thirds from the publisher.  You get the first chunk when they sign you up, the second when you deliver the manuscript and the final one when the book gets published.
    Then you earn royalties on book sales.  However, to make sure publishers secure a profit you don’t start seeing royalties until you’ve broken even on your advance.  Elemental has already been sold for a tidy sum in China and Poland however, so fortunately I’ve paid off my advance already.  That means once the book hits shelves I'll start earning straight away.  Provided people actually purchase it.  (So...buy my book please). 
    Despite a lot of people asking however, I don't think it would be in good taste to divulge how much my advance was or what my percentages are.  Just assume I’ll be eating lobster and gold-plated salads in private jets for the rest of my life.

Writing 101 with tim james and friends
    In February 2016 I signed an 18-page contract which gave me nine months to write a 45,000-word "light-reading guide to Chemistry".  All I had to do was write the damn thing and unfortunately there isn't much I can tell about my writing process. 
    I don’t sit in a log cabin sipping hot-chocolate in front of a typewriter, delicate harp music in the background as a roaring fire pillows thick smoke into the air.  My writing process is to sit in the corner of a dark room and think of good sentences.  That’s about it.  Oh, and I wear my hooded cloak as I do so.  I'm wearing it right now.
    I can definitely tell you the book went through five drafts though.  The first draft was simply getting the ideas down - it wasn’t so much a book at this point as a scrabbly scaffold of interesting Chemistry facts.  Draft two was when I turned this loose assortment of mini-essays into a coherent piece of writing with a structure and draft three was when I tried to make it readable.  Following this, I asked other humans to have a look at it. 
    I needed people to check how good my explanations were, fact-check the information and tell me if the book was any good.  I thus enlisted the help of friends, co-workers, students and Science-editors who I knew would be meticulous, straight-talking and critical.  I wanted them to tear my writing apart. 
    This book wasn’t just me mucking around on the internet, it had to be worthy of people's hard-earned cash!  (Speaking of your hard-earned cash…buy my book please).  So, if you write something and want others to read it, my advice is not to choose people who are going to be complimentary.  Pick people who will give you brutal truths you'd rather not hear.
    And the people I asked were predictably fantastic.  They told me when it was boring, when it made no sense and when I was waffling indulgently.  They pointed out errors I made, lousy phrases I used and even suggested improvements.  This is an important tip for becoming a writer: your ego needs to take a bath.  If you can’t face criticism you aren’t going to write anything good.  Nobody writes a perfect book on the first draft unless they're Sylvia Plath or Robert Heinlein (who allegedly wrote one draft only).  And I'm not them.
    I then spent my Summer battering the book into a version I could submit to the publishers.  This was an arduous process of re-writing, referencing, cross-referencing, finding sources, taking other people’s notes etc. etc. and finally, on 29th August 2017, two months shy of the deadline, I had the fourth draft finished.  Complete with childish humour and godawful illustrations which astonishingly my editors have decided to leave in.  Any of my students reading this will already know how abysmal my drawings are...so there's that to look forward to.

Makeover Time!
    The editing process which ensues after a book gets submitted to publishers is quite long.  First, your text goes to a desk editor.  This is someone who gives feedback on style and decides if what you’ve submitted is what the publishers asked for.
    The next person in line is the copy editor who goes through and cleans up your grammar.  This might seem strange because if you've secured a book deal you probably know how to write.  But the thing is…and brace yourselves for this…grammar is not official.  I know this may come as a shock to people who love correcting others when they misplace a comma or split an infinitive, but there are no officially recognised “laws of grammar”. 
    When you're writing, you can use whatever grammatical structure you please, provided the intent of the sentence is clear.  It’s not like mathematics where there is a right answer - grammar is a matter of taste only. 
    For example, I capitalise the word Science on my website, while the generally accepted approach is that you shouldn’t.  But that’s a preference which I simply don't have.  I like the way the word looks when capitalised and nobody is confused by what I'm talking about.  So I do it anyway.  This is why a copy editor is necessary; writers have their own personalised grammatical style and preference but publishing houses have an agreed "house style" which your book has to match.
    Then there’s a legal team who read through your text and make sure you aren’t plagiarising or writing anything libellous.  There’s someone who goes through and makes sure all the references you’ve used are real.  Then someone makes an index, someone else collates the illustrations and finally you have something ready for print.
    In December 2017 I was sent this fifth draft for minor tweaking and after 274 e-mails between myself, the publishers and my agent Jen, the book was completed and good-to-go on 13th March 2018.

Cover Me
    One thing which has been a huge surprise is how much deliberation goes into deciding the title, subtitle and front cover for a book.  We went through at least fifteen title combinations and seven cover designs before we settled on the one displayed above. 
    Initially I found this peculiar, but it makes perfect sense when you think about it.  A movie trailer is composed of clips from the movie, but books don’t have trailers.  What would it even involve?  A bunch of disconnected sentences strung together for 2 and a half minutes?  We're not writing a James Joyce novel here. 
    The book’s front cover is the advert, so the old adage “never judge a book by its cover” is total nonsense.  It’s really important to get the cover of a book right, but unfortunately I suck at this kind of thing.  I don’t know anything about marketing, so I let my publishing director and agent take the wheel at this point, although I can say with a little pride that the title we eventually chose came from my suggestion.

And here...we...go...
    I started writing in June 2015.  It’s three years later and I’m about to see my first book hit the shelves.  There’s every chance this will be the only thing I ever get to publish because it might flop dreadfully and get hideous reviews.  If that happens I doubt any publisher will touch me again.  But maybe, just maybe, the book will do well and I’ll get to write another. 
    Obviously I want my book to do well because I put a lot of work into it.  I love Science, I love writing about it and all joking aside, I am proud of Elemental.  Have I written the greatest pop-Science book of all time?  Of course not.  But I'm hopeful that I've written something people will find entertaining and educational.  Chemistry is a beautiful subject and I’ve done my best to convey how elegant and downright cool it is, but if I never get the chance to write professionally again then so be it.  I am still grateful to everyone who helped Elemental happen.    

Think only this of me
    When I was 14 years old, a teacher leant me a textbook on quantum chemistry and something inexplicable happened.  A light in my brain, one I didn’t know was there, switched on.  That book was Valency and Molecular Structrure by Edward Cartmell and Gerald Fowles, published in 1956. 
    I read it 54 years after publication so Cartmell and Fowles will never know that their book inspired a lonely, nerdy teenager to dedicate his life to Science.  I have no idea how well Valency and Molecular Structure sold and I’ll probably never find out because it’s now out of print.  But it exists.  Those guys wrote a book and their words went further than they did themselves, switching on lights in people’s heads long after they’d written the final full-stop. 
    I’m a Science teacher because I want to switch on lights.  I want people to find the world interesting, to learn about it, be inspired by it and to help make it a better place.  My book won’t change civilization as we know it but maybe some 14 year old kid somewhere, far into the future, will pick up a copy of Elemental and have a lightbulb moment of their own. 
    That’s why if Elemental doesn’t become the world’s highest-selling Science book I won’t care.  Writing my first book has been a remarkable journey and if it is also my last, then at least I made a small mark on Science literature.  And that is a good feeling. 
    As my launch date gets closer, I’m constantly reminded of interviews you see with actors at the Academy Awards who say things like “I don’t care whether I win.  It’s an honour just to be nominated!” 
    I used to think this was for show because they secretly wanted to win more than anything.  But I have come to realise that they are being sincere…because it’s exactly how I feel.  Naturally an oscar-nominee is hoping to win and naturally I’m hoping my book will do well, but really it’s just an honour to have a book published at all.  If I never get to print another word then I can say I gave it my best shot.  James out.
 
P.S. Buy my book.

Image credits

Front cover:
Money man: howtobeastoic
Batman: imgflip
The Joker: YouTube

    As many of my readers will know, I have a book coming out in a couple of months.  Elemental: How the Periodic Table Can Now Explain (Neary) Everything is a light-hearted guide to Chemistry, and the whole thing is amazing.  I mean the fact I have a book coming out, not the book itself.  Well, yes the book too.  My book is amazing.  Buy my book.  It’s a giddy feeling because I’ve always enjoyed writing about Science so to say “I am a professional Science author,” is extremely gratifying, if a little daunting.
    The way a book creeps into existence is a fascinating process.  I had always assumed an author wrote a book, sent it to a publisher and if the publisher liked it they printed it.  I soon learned this was as naive as the belief that babies are brought by the stork.  Or the belief that a book gets brought by the Amazon delivery truck.  Speaking of which, here’s a link where you can pre-order my book from Amazon: Buy my book. 
    Generally I tend to write about Science on this blog, with occasional forays into life as a teacher and intermitent essays on hermeneutics.  But my recent adventures in publishing are probably worth sharing.  Partly for other aspiring writers, partly because it’s really interesting, and partly because I need to shamelessly promote my book…Buy my book. 

So, you think you’re a writer?
    Cast your mind back to June 2015.  The U.S. Senate had just given metadata responsibility to telephone companies, I Really Like You by Carly Rae Jepsen was in the charts, and St Bennets’ Hall of Oxford University decided to admit female students after 118 years of refusing them.  Seriously.
    It was around this time that I got an idea.  I was watching a video of a comedian complaining about being ill-equipped to answer his children’s Science questions.  “Electricity?  It just comes down the electricity pipe, right?”  As part of my job, I spend a lot of my time answering questions like this, so I know how to answer where electricity comes from. 
    I also know what causes itching, why dogs wag their tails and why you shouldn't put metal in a microwave when the inside is metal anyway.  I figured I might be able to help flummoxed parents with these questions, so I decided to write a bunch of answers as a casual hobby.
    After about a month I had over 100 entries, so I put them into chapter-categories and turned it into a book called What is Fire Made of: Answers to Burning Questions Kids Ask.  I thought it was readable and potentially useful, so I decided to see if anyone would help me get it out there.  And it turns out the very last people you should send a book to are publishers themselves.
   Writing is a very common hobby these days.  No longer is it reserved for sweating melancholics languishing in candlelit dungeons - lots of people write books and lots of them want to get published.  It’s hard to find exact figures, but large publishing houses recieve something like 5,000 submissions a year.  Only 1.5% of these manuscripts get picked up while the other 98.5% never see the light of a printing press. 
    Rejected books might be unmarketable, they might be offensive or, putting it bluntly, they might be badly written.  Although I'm uncomfortable suggesting that last one because it arrogantly implies my book is one of the good ones.  Although it is.  Buy my book. 
    So, if you’ve written something, take my advice and save the price of postage.  Anything submitted to a publisher will probably go straight to shredder, and I'm not talking about the machine there.  I mean it gets fed to Shredder, the arch-villain from Teenage Mutant Ninja Tutrles.  It's a little known fact but after being defeated by the turtles for the dozenth time, Shredder retired from crime and now works for the publishing industry consuming rejected author manuscripts.

Factotums of the Publishing World
  Publishers do want to find new authors of course, but they don’t have time to read through an endless slew of potential books, this is where literary agents come in.  Literary agents are like talent-scouts who read submissions from authors and pick out those which have a chance.  Publishers rely on literary agents to find books worth taking seriously so the bottom line is: if you don’t have an agent, a publisher won’t look at you.
    Literary agents aren’t just talent scouts though.  They also act like solicitors who represent their authors and make sure they get a fair deal.  Publishing law is complex and most people outside the industry have no idea how it works.  International rights, royalties, distribution agreements, marketing costs etc. are a headache and I honestly can’t tell you much about them.  But I don’t have to because my agent understands it all.  That’s the whole point. 
    Literary agents are also navigators of the publishing landscape; knowing which publisher specialises in what.  This might sound strange because a lot of people don't give thought to who the publisher of a book is.  Can you tell me who Stephen King’s publisher is?  Or John Green’s?  Possibly not, but it's actually of great importance.
    When you go into a bookshop you look for certain genres or authors and might therefore assume that publishing is a free-for-all.  That’s how it works in the movie industry where film studios produce every genre.  But in publishing, things are highly specialised. 
    If you’ve written a children’s cook-book which teaches kids how to navigate the kitchen, publishers who specialise in children’s books or cookery guides will be interested.  If you’ve written a children’s cook-book which is about the best way to cook and eat children themselves, that’s a different kind of publisher altogether.
    You probably don’t know which publishing house specialises in which genre or sub-genre (I certainly don’t) but again, this is where your agent comes in.  Agents know which publishers print what books, which editors to contact and what kinds of things they’re looking for.  They also act as liaisons between you and the publishers, making sure the book is something they want to read and something you want to write.
    Your agent takes a small percentage of the money you make and in return they promote your book to potential buyers.  Not to mention helping you edit your proposals, refine the text itself, give you feedback on style and make you presentable to your readership (my readership includes you incidentally...buy my book). 

Hang on, I need to get this…it’s my agent calling
    Once my book was in a readable state, I began researching literary agents in the UK, particularly those who had an interest in popular Science.  A couple got in touch and wanted to know more about me, as well as ideas for future projects.  For obvious reasons, agents and publishers want to find someone who will write more than one book so they’re really looking for authors, not just the book they've written.   
    I quickly got a good vibe from The Graham Maw Christie literary agency, and in particular Jen Christie who considered my submission.  Jen did a really good job of explaining what she was interested in and what I should be doing to get publisher attention.  The GMC agency had done a few Science titles prior to mine, but were looking to get into it more seriously, so when they offered me a contract (September 2015) I said yes without hesitation.
    It’s a pretty weird feeling to have someone think your writing is worth investing time in, and it’s strange to be one of those people who has an agent.  But also…it’s pretty sweet.  I have genuinely said the words “that’s my agent calling” in the middle of a conversation.  Oh, and here's my page at the GMC website with a hauntingly youthful look on my face. 

Thanks, but no thanks 
    My agent Jen began approaching publishers with What is Fire Made Of? and several expressed interest, although none were biting.  The general response was that they liked my style but they weren’t sure about the book itself. 
    For one thing, there are similar titles out there already and my book would be white noise.  Novels are different because once a genre explodes (vampire-romance for instance), lots of authors join the game.  But non-fiction works differently because you’re in competition with the internet.  In a world where the answer to many questions can be Wikipedia’d people are only going to buy a book if it’s offering them something unique.  This means in non-fiction it’s important to write what nobody else is. 
    The concept of my book also presented a problem.  Was it for children or the parents of children with difficult questions?  It’s hard to write a book for both types of reader and my book was an awkward hybrid.  So although a lot of publishers made nice noises, it got rejected and Jen decided What is Fire Made Of? wasn’t going anywhere.  This is another thing an agent can do: they can tell you when it’s time to stop flogging the dead poet.
    Jen also pointed out something I hadn’t really considered.  First-time authors are approached with caution because they are a risk.  Publishers have to get a feel for you and I was a complete unknown, largely staying out of the limelight.  Was I someone who had a lot to write about?  Would people want to read my writing? Or was I just a one-book guy that nobody would be interested in?
    So Jen suggested I be more proactive with getting my face out there.  I was reluctant at first because I don’t want to promote myself, I want to promote Science (speaking of which, buy my book) but she had a point.  Nobody knew who I was.  Plus, I enjoy teaching Science so why restrict it to my classroom?
    It had never occured to me to put myself on the internet because other people seem to be so good at it already.  But I decided to give it a shot.  I launched this website around January 2016, along with my YouTube channel and instragram.  I soon discovered that I actually had lots of things to talk about and, even stranger, people seemed to like reading it.  If What is Fire Made Of? wasn’t going anywhere that wasn’t a problem.  I had other things to write.
    A lot of my ideas were shot down immediately (I wanted to do a book about the Science of death, dying and corpses for instance) but some of them had promise, so Jen and I worked on proposals for several months.  I wrote outlines and sample chapters for five books, including one novel, and while this period was very frustrating, I learned a lot about writing itself which paid off when we finally got somewhere.

Welcome to the Big Leagues
    In August of 2016, a year after she signed me, Jen began talking to a publishing director at Piatkus, Constable & Robinson - a formerly independent publisher recently bought by the Little, Brown Book Group. 
    Constable & Robinson has won three “Publisher of the year” awards in the last decade and Little, Brown has won four.  Little, Brown published J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy and are also Leonard Susskind’s publishers - one of my favourite Science writers.
    Little, Brown are in turn owned by the Hachette Book Group, one of the five largest publishers in the world (third largest for educational books) and in 2016 they had 44 titles reach #1 on the NYT bestseller list.  These guys are serious players.  So, like a bright-eyed and hopeful Dick Whittington, I headed for London in search of spectacle and good fortune.
    From the outside, Hachette HQ looks like any other office block, but once you go inside it’s a contemporary cathedral.  You walk through polished glass doors into an atrium of echoing surfaces at least six stories tall.  The welcome desk was so big it needed three receptionists and there were security guards to check my bags and issue me with a nifty ID badge saying “author” on it. 
    I met with the publishing director and headed to a private garden/restaurant on the roof, with a tower view overlooking the Thames as we talked about writing and Science.  And, after a few hours, an idea started to emerge. 
    There’s a lot of pop-Science books about Physics and Biology but surprisngly few on Chemistry.  There are academic “introduction to Chemistry” texts and a few books which talk about elements and their uses, but nobody has yet written an informal beginner’s guide to Chemistry and the periodic table.  I began writing that evening. 
    The book hadn’t officially been commissioned (I had to prove I could deliver what had been asked for) but it was a thrilling opportunity and, 357 e-mails later, Jen and I had a decent writing sample.  We suhbmitted and on 6th February 2017 (six months after the pitch meeting) the book was bought for Piatkus, Constable & Robinson > Little, Brown > Hachette.  I was officially a professional author.

Join me in part 2 where I'll talk about the process of how a book goes from initial idea to finished product.  And buy my book.  Please.  If the cute cat didn't motivate you, perhaps I should try the following approach instead.  Buy my book otherwise...

Image credits
Typewriter: failuremag
Cat: myfairdiary
Shredder: BestTechHub
Agents: writeups
Coffins: wikipedia
Borat: filmoholicx
Neeson: giphy

Bits ‘n’ Pieces
    Easter Sunday is, in the Christian calendar, the most important festival of the year, more theologically significant than even Christmas.  In the secular world it isn’t celebrated quite as fervently, but since Western history was dominated by Christianity, Easter Sunday is still a widely observed event.
    For Christians, it symbolises Jesus’ atonement for the sins of mankind and the rebirth of humanity through Godly salvation.  Outside Christianity it’s all about chocolate, eggs and rabbits.  That's a weird combination of stuff though.  Jesus wasn't a rabbit.  Rabbits don't lay eggs (as far as I'm aware, I'm not a Biologist) and chicks don't eat chocolate.  I am confusion. 
    So, I’ve decided to write a blog about Easter and its cultural paraphernalia, largely because the school term has finished and I finally have time on my hands, but also because it's interesting to look at the history and Science behind these traditions.  Oh, and I might as well do the Science of chocolate while I'm at it.   

The Origins of Easter
    Let’s be clear about something first: Jesus of Nazareth absolutely existed and no self-respecting historian would claim otherwise.  Whether you believe Jesus to be a prophet, the Messiah or literally God himself is up to interpretaion.  What isn’t up to interpretation is whether he was real or not.  He was.  Get over it. 
    The influence of Christianity on Western culture over the past two millenia cannot be overstated either.  Even our dating system comes from the life of Jesus.  I mean, I just made reference to "two millenia".  Two millenia since what?  The birth of Jesus...duh.  
    We get our concept of a yearly date from a Romanian monk named Dionysius Exiguus who calculated Jesus’ birth as happening 753 years after the founding of Rome.  This year was obviously the most important in history so it was called year zero.   Anything before then was BC (Before Christ) while everything after became AD (from the Latin Anno Domini…year of the lord). 
    However, Exiguus screwed up.  The gospel of Matthew (Matt 2:1) records that Jesus was born “in the days of Herod the King”.  This is a reference to Herod the first, who died 749 years after the founding of Rome - making the date 4 B.C.  Furthermore, the gospel of Luke (Luke 2:1) tells us Jesus was born “when Quirinius was governor of Syria”.  Quirinius occupied this post from 6 - 4 BC, so if Jesus was born during the lives of both men, he must have been born six to four years before Christ.  Nice going Exiguus.
    The date of Jesus’ execution is a little easier to pin down though.  The gospel of John (John 2: 20) tells us Jesus first visited Jerusalem in the 46th year after the Temple started construction.  We know Herod began this project in 19 BC, so that places the date as 27 AD.  We are then told that three years passed before he was crucified (John 2:13, John 5:1, John 12:12), making the final year of his life 29 AD. 
    The gospel of Luke however refers to Jesus first visiting Jerusalem in “the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Ceasar” (Luke 3:1) which was 29 AD - the year John records him dying.  Fortunately, the three synoptic gospels record the time between Jesus’ visit to Jerusalem and crucifixion as  one week (not three years) so all four gospels agree on the date of death, even if they disagree on the rest of his timeline.
    We are also told the crucifixion took place on “the day of preparation” (Matt 27:63) a reference to the Jewish week.  In Judaism, Saturday or Shabbat is considered the final day of the week (Sunday is the first) and it is a day of rest and religious contemplation.  The day before is the “day of preparation” for Shabbat, meaning the crucifixion took place on a Friday.  Jesus’ resurrection is reported to have happened two days after the crucifixion, making it Sunday morning.  The early Christians decided Sunday was therefore a more appropriate holy day and made Monday the start of their week instead. 
    And in case you’re curious, in 1988 the International Organization of Standardisation decided Monday was officially the first day of the week, going with Christian custom rather than Jewish.  What a fun meeting that must have been. 
    Jesus was in Jerusalem to celebrate passover which, in 29 AD, took place on Monday the 18th of April.  We know he celebrated this passover with his disciples, so the crucifixion must have occured the following Friday, making the date of his resurrection April 25th.  But Easter’s date moves every year!  This year it's happening on April 1st.  Next year it will be April 21st and last year it was April 16th.  Why is Easter, quite literally, a movable feast?

Look to the Moon
    The Babylonians based their yearly calendar on the moon’s phases.  Every twelve lunar cycles was a regeneration of the twelve signs of the Zodiac so the year was split into twelve “moonths” or “months”.  The Egyptians however marked their year after the four seasons giving us a 365 day repetition.  They didn't know about the solar system, but their calendar was inadvertantly based on Earth’s orbit of the Sun. 
    This gave us two rival calendars being used in 1st century Judea; the lunar and the solar, and they do not sync-up.  The Jewish calendar has the feast of Passover fixed on the 15th day of the month of Nisan based on the Moon-calendar and since the Chrisitian church was originally comprised of Jewish and Greek people, their date for Easter was fixed according to the lunar system.  But from the perspective of the Romans (who adopted the Egyptian Sun-calendar) Easter moved back and forth iwith the moon's phase. 
    Since the Roman empire eventually conquered most of the Western world, it was their Sun-calendar which won out and we now mark a year as the time taken for a solar orbit.  By contrast Christmas, a festival introduced centuries later, has a fixed point in the solar year (December 25th) but oscillates from the perspective of the Jewish calendar.
    The name “Easter” arose in 7th Century Germany, from the Goddess Eoster, a deity associated with spring and fertility whose feast was celebrated in April.  The name Eoster seems to come from an even older German word Austro which means “shine”.  This is most likely where we get the word “East” because it's the place where the Sun begins to shine every morning - an obvious symbol of new life.
    Oh, and during the 12th Century, the word good also meant “Holy” so the Friday of Jesus’ crucifixion - originally called Holy Friday - came to be called Good Friday.  Just in case you were wondering why it was a "good" thing Jesus was brutally tortured and executed.

So where do eggs and rabbits come in?
    Easter eggs are, surprisingly, one of the oldest Christian traditions, possibly as old as communion itself.  Eggs have always been a symbol of new life, particularly around the Spring season.  The early Christians began painting eggs red to symbolise the blood of Jesus and as time marched on the decorations became more elaborate until egg-painting became a staple part of Easter fun.  The rabbit connection however gets a bit weird. 
    Rabbits are notoriously hard to tell their sexes apart.  Males and females both have small genitals which look similar, even on close inspection.  For centuries, people believed rabbits were simultaneously male and female meaning they could have sex with themselves and induce “virgin birth” thus becoming associated with the Virgin Mary.

There.  That’s a fact you now know.  

    During the sixth century Chinese artwork also featured a lot of rabbit images (nobody knows why) and it was adopted by the Romans, so when they converted to Christianity they brought rabbits along and at some point, the rabbit became tied specifically to Easter.
    That seems to have begun in 17th century Germany where The Easter Hare served a similar function to Santa Claus - punishing naughty children and rewarding good ones on the night before Easter.  My guess is that Christmas already had a winter-spirit so the rabbit was picked as his spring equivalent.  And since colourful eggs were a big part of Easter already, it made sense for these to be the Easter Hare's gifts. 

Right, now that we’ve done rabbit genitals, let's talk about chocolate.

What is chocolate?
    To get chocolate you start by picking fruit of the Theobroma cacao tree which tends to grow in South America.  When you open the fruit you’ll find white seeds which you have to ferment with a fungus called aspergillus. 
    Once the cacao seeds have been digested, you remove the shells, grind them up and heat the whole thing.  A thick brown paste forms which separates into cocoa powder (a brown solid) and cocoa butter (a white wax).
    People of the Inca and later Aztec empires would often use both ingredients as stock for various drinks, sometimes mixed with chilli powder, giving rise to an early form of what we call hot chocolate.  When the Spanish invaders landed they took the recipe home and began adding sugar, honey and vanilla to soften the bitter taste. 
    Chocolate drinks became very popular throughout Europe over the next hundred years.  So popular in fact that in 1662 Pope Alexander VII sanctioned the consumption of chocolate during lent saying that chocolate did not count as breaking your fast.  Thus, chocolate became associated with Easter.
    It wasn’t until 1847 that the confectioner Joseph Fry perfected a way to solidify the chocolate drink into a bar.  By a careful process of churning and cooling slowly, Fry was able to prevent cocoa crystals forming (which made things brittle) and generated lumps of sweet brown matter with a similar consistency to soap. 
    Fry’s company marketed three types of chocolate bar: milk chocolate which contained cocoa powder, butter and sugar; white chocolate which contained only cocoa butter and sugar; and dark chocolate which contained the cocoa ingredients and no sugar. 
    Then in 1873, Fry decided to capitalise on the significance of eggs during the Easter season and began making chocolate eggs instead of bars.  Originally a solid piece of chocolate, this became the infamous Easter egg.  

    
    Chocolate has since become the most widely consumed confectionary product in the world and, like anything popular, this has led to innumerable myths and pseudofacts.  To finish, let’s take a brief look at some of the more famous chocolate myths and seperate the powder from the butter.

Is chocolate really poisonous to dogs?
    Yes.  Chocolate contains a chemical called theobromine which is poisonous to most animals so it has to get broken down once it’s inside you.  Dogs break it down very slowly however, so theobromine can reach toxic levels for them very quickly.  A big dog eating a small bar should be fine, but a small dog eating a large bar is at serious risk. 
    Technically, theobromine is poisonous to humans as well, we’re just good at breaking it down before it does damage.  You’d have to eat around 40 kilograms of milk chocolate in 24 hours to reach toxic levels.  Bearing in mind a standard bar of chocolate weighs 40 grams, this is a thousand bars in a day.  You're probably safer than your dog.

Is chocolate addictive?
    Yes and no, depending on what you mean by addictive.  When we talk about addiction we usually mean a person doesn’t just like a particular substance...they feel unable to function without it.  The boundary gets a little hazy because you could argue that some people cannot function unless they get the thing they want i.e. they need it.  The debate gets even more complicated because addiction has many causes, most of which are poorly understood. 
    For example, one suspected mechanism is that the body can start using the ingested chemical as a substitute for chemicals it normally produces itself.  Over time the body stops producing its own supply and when you stop taking the drug you find your body lacking something.  Thus, you get withdrawal symptoms.  It’s suspected that opioid addiction works along these lines.
    This kind of addiction is usually termed "physical addiction" because it has a measurable impact on the body's biochemistry.  By contrast, there is the so-called “psychological addiction” where the chemical doesn’t necessarily alter the biology but you find yourself dependent nonetheless.
    What is speculated to happen is that certain chemicals cause a rise in dopamine - a neurotransmitter associated with happiness.  To prevent your body getting overloaded with dopamine (which would lead to schizophrenia), the body increases production of enzymes to break the dopamine down. 
    The more you take the drug, the more efficient your body gets at producing the enzymes and you find the drug becomes less and less effective over time.  This is building up a tolerance.  As a result, you find yourself needing to use more and more to get the desired effects which (unbenknownst to you) leads to an increase in the amount of enzymes as well. 
    When you finally stop taking the drug your body is still producing the enzymes in large amounts, but you’ve stopped boosting your dopamine.  All your naturally-produced dopamine gets destroyed and you get cravings, insecurity and sometimes depression. 
    Chocolate can cause a very small surge in dopamine so it is definitely possible to become psychologically addicted to it.  There are certainly reports of people who become so dependent on chocolate they don’t feel comfortable without eating it...would we therefore say they are unable to function?  
    Harsh critics might say these people need to use willpower to quit whatever they have become dependent on.  While others might point out that addiction to chocolate can be just like addiction to any other chemical.  The terminology is ill-defined but the take-home message is that even when a particular food or drug is described as “non-addictive”, that only means it’s not phsyically addictive.  You can still become addicted to it.  So be careful folks.

Wasn’t there a study which proved chocolate helps you lose weight?
    No.  Although it certainly seemed like it when Johannes Bohannon made global headlines in 2015, claiming to have found a link between chocolate and weight loss.  As interesting as this news story was, things were not as they seemed.  Johannes Bohannon (known by his real name Dr John Bohannon of both Oxford and Harvard University) was actually carrying out a subtle experiment, not on chocolate but on the media.  He wanted to see how carefully newspapers, magazines and websites would check a Scientific study before reporting it, so he decided to perform a deliberately terrible experiment and see how many outlets would pick it up.
    The trick he used was to carry out his experiment on a small number of people (15) and look at dozens of changes to their bodies.  By measuring all sorts of things he was able to find a link purely by coincidence.  A technique called "p-value manipulation".
     Imagine I gave three people a pill and asked them how they feel.  Let’s say by coincidence all three of them have good days at work.  I could then claim “this pill makes you have a good day at work”  Or if, by a different coincidence all three people happened to sneeze a lot, I could claim “this pill makes you sneeze”. 
    If you keep asking people for information you’ll find a pattern eventually and it just so happened that the 15 people in Bohannon’s study all lost a tiny bit of weight, so that was the outcome reported. 
    Bohannan also decided to break with scientific protocol and went straight to the media with his claim, rather than getting other scientists to peer review the article first.  A lot of reporters seized on the story because it sounded amazing and the study exploded.
     Bohannon’s experiment teaches us several things.  First: when a Scientist is doing an experiment they should have a clear view of what result they’re measuring i.e. don’t keep looking for results until you find them (because you always will).  Second: just because the words “a study has shown…” are used in a report doesn’t mean that study was a good one.  And perhaps most importantly, when you hear a headline about a Scientific discovery, check to see what other Scientists think.

Does Chocolate Cause Bad Skin?
    No.  This one’s a very popular factoid but it seems to be completely untrue.  Many studies have been conducted on the impact of chocolate on human skin and none have found a link.  If you have a sudden rash on your skin, there are lots of things which could be causing it, but it's not chocolate.  My guess is that there's something a lot less dramatic going on.
   One thing which is known to cause bad skin is stress and when you’re under a lot of stress the body produces cortisol which gives you bad skin.  People also tend to manage stress by eating high caloric foods e.g. chocolate so I propose that stress causes both overeating chocolate and bad skin, leading to a misattribution of cause and effect.  Any thoughts?

And finally...is chocolate an aphrodisiac?
    No.  Chocolate contains small amounts of tryptophan which the body can turn into serotonin, a chemical often produced when people fall in love.  The claim runs that consuming large amounts of chocolate therefore causes amorous feelings.  But the amounts contained in a bar are vanishingly small; far less than in a leg of turkey or a glass of milk which are not usually associated with hanky-panky behaviour.  I suspect chocolate simply tastes nice so people give it to loved ones on special occasions (eg Valentine’s day) when amorous feelings are already on the table. 
    Is it theoretically possible to consume so much chocolate it becomes a subsitute for romance and sexual thrill though?  I guess technically yes, but you’d have to eat crate-loads of the stuff and as we’ve already seen, that will kill you before you fall in love.  If you want to feel all loved up you’re better off watching Titanic rather than dying.  And if you don’t like Titatnic you’re probably dead inside already.

Happy Easter Folks!


Image Credits
Easter Egg: Leicestershirediabetes
Easter Bunny Boomerang: deviantart
Christian Bale as Jesus: fanpop
Robert Powell as Jesus: rejesus
Mary Painting: apollo-magazine
Three Hares: Chinesepuzzles
Fry's chocolate: flickr
Willywonka: denofgeek
Scary Easter Bunny: YouTube
Chocolate Cancer: Twitter
Chocolate Skin: nowloss
Titanic: grantland

What are the odds?
    As it says on the above DVD cover for Die Hard 2...Die Harder (sweet mother of mercy) lightning shouldn't strike twice.  It's an expression we use to mean "astonishing events don't occur on repeat".  The odds of something unusual happening are small, so the chances of an unusual thing happening more than once should be even rarer...right?
    Well, not quite.  While a rare occurence is by definition uncommon, if you run your observations for a longer period of time the chances of it happening more than once don't change.  Suppose the odds of you finding a four-leafed clover are 1 in 50.  If you go looking at clover-leafs 50 times you'll probably find a four-leafer.  That's rare.  But if you look at clover leafs another 50 times you'll probably find a second one because now you've made the odds 2/100, which is exactly the same as 1/50.  The chances of a rare event happening don't necessarily diminish, they can actually stay the same.
    There's also the fact that the more people involved in "experiencing events" i.e. living on planet Earth, the more chance you have of one person experiencing several remarkable occurences.  For example, Florida resident James Bozeman won his state lottery two years running in 2012 and 2013.  Harry Black of British Columbia bought two winning lottery tickets in the same lottery also in 2013, and then there's Joan Ginther who won the Texas state lottery four times in 1993, 2006, 2008 and 2010. 
    Ginther's case is fascinating because after winning $5.4 million in 1993, she was still playing the lottery 13 years later.  And her method was remarkable: she just bought tens of thousands of tickets for each lottery, spending her winnings from the previous lottery on winning the next.  That might be more to do with compulsive behaviour than luck admittedly, but it's still pretty interesting.  It also demonstrates that our ability to grasp probability is not intuitive.
    When a rare thing happens to you, you get spooked.  But rare things have got to happen to someone.  I once saw a person dropping a glass of drink onto a hardwood floor.  The glass inverted perfectly, landed over the drink and caught it upside down without spiling a drop.  The drink was now resting on the floor with the liquid trapped inside and no damage to the glass. 
    The odds of that are astonishing, but when you consider the sheer number of people having drinks and knocking them over all over the world for the last few centuries, chances are it probably happened on several occasions.  Even if something is a one in a million chance, if a billion people are involved that means it will happen a thousand times.  One in a million chances are not actually very rare.
    One of my favourite psychological experiments on probability was carried out by Richard Dawkins in his Royal Institution Christmas Lectures (1991).  Dawkins instructed every member of his audience to stand up and told the left half of the room to think "heads" while the right half thought "tails".  He then flipped a coin and half the room sat down because they had failed to predict the outcome.  Then he repeated it with the remaining half, some of them focusing on heads, some on tails. 
    He did this again and again until only one person was left standing; someone who had accurately predicted/psychically influenced the coin a dozen times in a row.  That person was no doubt thinking "what are the odds that every time I visualised a particular outcome it came true?" but Dawkins pointed out something crucial.  By pure chance, a small number of people will always end up beating the odds.  One person genuinely did get 12/12 predictions correct but you have to remember that 200 people in the room didn't get this accuracy. I guess you could call his experiment an example of COIN...cidence.

It shouldn't happen, but it does
    So, what about lightning?  Does it strike twice?  Well, there are certainly people who have been struck on multiple occasions.  The all-time champ is undoubtedly Roy Sullivan (pictured below) who was struck six times during his 80-year lifespan.  He also claims to have been struck once as a child (although this one wasn't documented).  Even Sullivan's wife was hit, presumably because the lightning missed its target. 
    The odds of this happening to one person are slim.  According to Marry Anne Cooper, a lightning-researcher at the University of Illinois (probably the most badass job imaginable), the odds of you getting hit by lightning once in your life are about 1/3000.  Sullivan's numbers seem inexplicable, but then again he was a park ranger in Virginia, a state which gets a lot of lightning, and he spent a lot of his time outdoors looking for people who got lost in storms. 
    So it would appear that lightning can hit a person more than once by pure chance, but can it hit the same location on the Earth's surface?  Is the safest place to be during a thunderstorm right where you saw it strike a few moments ago?  Let's look at the Science.      

What is lightning anyway?
    When two objects rub against each other they can break each other’s atoms, chipping off electrons in the process.  These electrons get transferred from one surface to the other and a precarious charge imbalance has been created.  One of the objects now has an excess of electrons and they will try to escape their unstable surface, usually by tunnelling into the Earth itself. 
    Because Earth is enormous it has room for surplus particles, so electrons sitting unhappily on the surface of an object will zap toward the ground, going through anything that’s in the way, including you.
    That’s what causes the static shock people get after brushing their hair.  Strands of human hair pick up electrons from the brush and as soon as you touch something connected to the ground they jump across, creating a spark in the process.  A lightning bolt is the same thing multiplied millions of times...we think.
    The problem with lightning is that it’s an unpredictable and dangerous phenomenon, which makes it very hard to study.  We know it happens more in warm countries and it tends to occur during rainstorms, but that's all we're certain about.  Please take the remainder of this explanation as speculative.  It's a little more than a hypothesis, but it's not quite strong enough to be called a theory yet and there are plenty of meteorologists who disagree. 
    Lightning is largely thought to be the result of rain and dust blowing around inside a cloud, causing electrons to hop around and accumulate in one region, like they do between strands of hair.  Once a big enough charge build-up has accumulated, things get unstable and rivers of electrical energy start leaking out like tentacles seeking a quick route to gain stability.  These ribbons of charge go darting outward from the cloud and we call them lightning bolts - although you’ve probably never seen one because they're very faint.  What you usually see during a storm is the result of lightning simultaneously coming up from the ground toward the sky.  Strange as that might sound.
    The electrically charged part of a cloud has the ability to ‘sniff out’ a path toward an oppositely charged object, typically the Earth.  This scout party is called a “leader” but for reasons not understood, the Earth begins doing the same; sending a bunch of positive charge upward in its own quest to be neutralised.  These upward-lightning bolts are called “streamers”.
    The two threads of opposite-charge snake through the air and meet like the hand of God touching Adam in the Sistine chapel.  At the instant of connection, a flow of electricity occurs between ground and sky and it’s this linking of leader and streamer your eyes actually see - what's called the "flash".  Fun fact: lightning in a snowstorm appears green and pink.  Nobody knows why. 

This kind of thunder
    Often, lightning flashes occur between two clouds, one creating the leader and the other creating the streamer.  But when this happens between cloud and ground it's referred to as a lightning "strike". 
    Strikes are about 10 kilometres long and while you don’t want to get caught inside one, the effects are rarely lethal.  They can carry up to 30,000 amps (more than enough to kill) but the bolt passes through your body in a fraction of a second so the effects aren’t sustained long enough to be lethal, only to burn horribly, creating intricate injuries called Lichtenberg scars.
    The temperature of a lightning strike is also pretty extreme, around 30,000 degrees Celsius - five times hotter than the surface of the Sun.  It has been known for this temperature to boil the water inside trees and cause them to literally explode, so lightning is far more likely to blow you up than electrocute you. 
    That heat also causes the surrounding air to expand rapidly.  This creates a shockwave in the atmosphere which goes travelling outwards from the lightning like a sonic boom.  This is the thunder you hear shortly after seeing the flash. 
     Although if you are unfortunate enought to get hit, your chances are pretty good.  90% of people struck by lightning survive and although it can cause siezures, chronic fatige and in the worst cases blindness and brain-damage, most people struck by lightning have little memory of it other than seeing a bright flash, falling unconscious and waking with a splitting headache. 

Goodness gracious, great balls of fire!
   One of the most fascinating versions of lightning known to exist is the so-called "ball lightning" ...although its name in German is krugelblitz which is obviously better.  For many centuries, the phenomenon of krugelblitz was thought to be a tall-tale (a ball-tale?  Anyone?  No?), but it turns out to be a genuine occurence. 
    Although shockingly rare and without any explanation whatsoever, lightning can sometimes wrap itself up into a ball and go darting around through the air like a maniacal fairy.  I love krugelblitz because it's one of those things where we have absolutely no clue what's going on.  Just that it happens.  Here's what is believed to be the first photograph of ball-lightning, taken by a lucky bystander in China.

So does it strike the same place twice?
    The answer is emphatically yes.  All the time in fact.  At any given moment there are around 2,000 thunderstorms on Earth with about 100 flashes per second.  It's estimated about half of these are strikes so roughly 50 bolts of lightning will hit the earth during the time it takes you to read this word: krugelblitz.
    Where does it tend to hit?  Well, the charged leaders are trying to reach Earth via the quickest route possible which usually means striking the tallest object around.  Since that doesn’t normally change (unless King Kong is in the neighborhood) most lightning tends to strike the same spots over and over.
    The Empire State Building for instance, is struck by lightning once every two weeks, as are many other tall buildings.  The iron in their shell is an excellent conductor and streamers can easily form from their spires (as in the picture below). 
    Also, while central Africa holds some of the records for most lightning strikes in a single year, the town of Lakeland, Florida gets hit once every three days, holding the record for the most lightning-prone place on Earth.  So actually, if you know a place has been struck by lightning recently, don’t assume that place is safe.  Assume the opposite. 
    We do have to be careful though and address a common lightning myth: that lightning will only strike the tallest object around.  It's more accurate to say lightning has a preference for it.  Well...that's not accurate at all because lightning isn't conscious and doesn't have feelings but you get what I mean.
    Lightning leaders (the ones going from cloud to ground) move in random jumps, each having a maximum range of about 45 meters.  So if a bolt of lightning is about to strike a building and you’re 46 meters away you’re probably safe.  But if you’re within the 45 meter danger zone, there is a chance the lightning might change its mind at the last minute and snap out to get you.  It’s rare to deviate but technically lightning can strike anything it wants.

But where shall I go?  What shall I do?"
    If you're standing in the middle of a thunderstorm and your hair starts pointing upwards I have some bad news for you.  An upward streamer is about to form around you.  Your hair is standing on end because you’re building positive charge and you’re about to get hit.  You need to act quickly.  Firstly and most importantly, finish reading my blog (priorities).  Then you've got to make yourself lightning-invisible. 
    Oh, and don’t waste time putting on rubber-soled shoes.  A bolt of lightning packs around a hundred million volts.  You think an inch of rubber is going to stop it?  Think again.  It’s going to tear through you and your shoes like a bullet through tissue paper.  Your best bet is to surround yourself with metal, usually by getting inside a car or a metal building.  That sounds counter-intuitive but it’s completely logical.
     Electricity wants to get to the ground through the path of least resistance.  The metal bodywork of a car is much easier to travel through than a human body so given the choice, electricity won’t even glance at you and will stay inside the metallic shield you’ve surrounded yourself with.  The bolt will travel through the roof of the car, down the doors, through the rubber wheels (often melting them in the process) and straight into the ground.  In the picture below, from George Westinghouse's 1941 electricity experiments, you can actually see artificial lightning striking the top of a car and  coming out near the front left wheel, leaving the occupant unharmed.

   Although some electrons might briefly tickle their way through the air toward your body, they find it so difficult they usually just go back to the metal and carry on.  So, while the worst place to be during a storm is near a skyscraper (in case it changes course) one of the best places to be is directly inside it.  Same with planes.  In fact, if you've ever been inside an aeroplane, chances are it was struck by lightning at some point during your journey.  Pretty cool, right?

An Urban Legend...which is actually true
    So, in summary, rare events can occur to the same person multiple times, even on the same day.  Lightning is a mysterious phenomenon but we know it can strike the same person twice and often prefers to strike the same location.  The best place to be during a strike is either inside a metal cage or far away from anything tall.  But if it does hit you, you're probably going to be ok. 
    To finish with I can't help but recant a morbid, albeit fascinating story you may have run across.  Have you ever heard the tale of the woman who allegedly got killed by lightning because the electricity conducted through the underwire of her bra and her breasts were so big that all that metal killed her?  I heard that story on the school playground years ago and assumed it was an urban legend.  But it's not.
    It happened on 22nd September 1999 in Hyde Park, London.  The two unfortunate women were named Anuban Bell (24) and Sunnee Whitworth (39).  What's more, the coroner Paul Knapman claims he had seen it happen once before.  Knapman had, at the time, been the coroner on some 50,000 cases making death by underwire bra-lightning a 1 in 25,000 chance.  That does mean  technically, technically, if you have large breasts (and therefore more underwire) you have a slightly higher chance of getting killed by lightning.  Sorry about that.
    Obviously that all seems horrible and a rather grim place to finish the blog.  If only there was a way to cheer people up after reading such horrifying news.  If only a great rock band had recorded a song about lightning to lift people's spirits.  And no, I am not talking about Thunder by Imagine Dragons (no offence to my ID fans out there).  I'm clearly talking about AC/DC.  If only they had recorded a song about thunderstorms.  If only...

Image credits
Die Hard 2: Amazon
Richard Dawkins: TheNextWeb
Roy Sullivan: Wikipedia
Streamer: youtube
Leader: videoblocks
Dinosaur Lightning: Wikipedia
Ball Lightning: io9
Building Streamer: drroyspencer
Empire State: architecuraldigest
Car Test: scienceservices
Airplane: quora

A good question
    In the seventh Century BCE, Thales of Miletus was mystified by the mineral lodestone; capable of attracting iron from a distance and repelling other lodestones depending on orientation.  Three centuries later, Shaggy 2 Dope of Insane Clown Posse highlighted Thales’ quandry in the song Miracles with the inspirational lyrics:

“Water, fire, air and dirt;
F***in magnets, how do they work? 
And I don’t wanna talk to a Scientist,
Y’all motherf****rs lyin’ getting me p***ed.”

    If you’ve not come across the horror-core, hip-hop band Insane Clown Posse I can save you a lot of trouble.  This is them:

    This isn’t the first time I’ve made jokes at the expense of ICP on my website and when they released Miracles the internet exploded with derision.  One interviewer handed them a children’s Science book, while Saturday Night Live did a sketch where the Posse ask increasingly dumb and obvious questions.  But, as it happens, I see their point.
    Not only are magnets wierd, when Scientists try to explain them the answers never seem complete or clear.  How does a magnet know when another magnet is close?  How do they know which way the other magnet is facing and why does this alignment cause attraction or repulsion?  How can a magnet “reach out” through empty space, sometimes through other objects, and influence another magnet at a distance? 
    These are good questions and consequently (this is a sentence I never thought I’d type as a self-respecting adult) I understand where Insane Clown Posse are coming from.  How do magnets work and why does it seem like Scientists always lie about them? 
    As a teacher, I can probably explain the phenomenon of magnetism half a dozen ways but I have to be honest, Shaggy 2 Dope is correct: all of the explanations are cheating.  They are pedagogical slight-of-hand tricks which don’t answer the question honestly.  This can be frustrating for anyone wanting to learn and it’s just as frustrating for Science teachers. 
    We aren’t lying though, I promise you that Mr Dope.  The problem with magnets is that there is no satisfactory explanation for how they work and I’m going to explain why.  This question is going to take us right to the heart of what Scientific explanations really are.  It’s going to get quite philosophical but hopefully it will shed some light on the very nature of what Science is capable of.    So, magnets…how do they work?

Fantastic Mr Feynman 
    In a famous interview with Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman, Christopher Sykes asks the magnet question (link at the end).  Feynman answers with a surprisingly bald sentence “What do you wanna know - the magnets repel each other.”  Sykes starts to get frustrated because Feynman is merely stating what everyone already knows, but then Feynman points out that the difference between describing and explaining is often very slim. 
    Thing is, Richard Feynman was not just one of the world's greatest physicists, he was one of the greatest explainers of Science too.  He had a knack for breaking complicated ideas into simpler statements, but on this instance he seems to be telling us very little.  And this is really worth noting.  If Richard Feynman can’t explain magnetism any simpler than stating what happens, can we really expect to do any better? 

Fantastic Mr Faraday’s Fields
    Probably the most important Scientist in the history of magnetic research was the equally legendary Michael Faraday.  A few hundred years before Feynman took centre stage, it was Faraday who was the world’s most renowned Science populariser. 
    Unlike Feynman, Faraday had no formal schooling and didn’t feel comfortable with mathematics, but they shared a desire to understand the world in the simplest terms possible.  They were both from the school of “if you can’t say it simply you don’t understand it” and Faraday had an elegant way of dealing with magnetism - by introducing the concept of a field.
    Magnets clearly have the ability to create environments around them which influence similar environments.  These environments can act through solid objects, so they are not made of magnetic particles and they also aren’t disturbances in the geometry of empty space, because only certain objects are affected. 
    Faraday began visualising these environments of influence as lines spreading from the object, with arrows showing the direction in which the influence pointed.  The shape of a magnet’s influence-environment can be measured precisely and we refer to it as the magnet’s field, illustrated below.
    Fields are typically what Science teachers use to explain magnetism.  We say a magnet creates a field around it with a distinct shape, or sometimes we talk about the Universe having a magnetic field and magnets distorting it.  When two magnets are facing top to tail the lines of the field are pointing in the same direction and they reinforce.  If you flip them, the field arrows are pointing in opposition and the magnets separate.
    This sounds like a solid explanation but it hasn’t told us anything we didn’t already know.  The question “how do magnets influence other magnetic things in the environment” has been answered by saying “magnets create an environment which infleunces other magnetic things.”  We’ve answered the question by re-stating it.   
    Faraday’s field-lines are useful as a description of where the field is but they don't tell us what the field is.  I mean, what’s it made of?  What specificaly is pointing in a certain direction?  Why does having the fields aligned cause attractions and repulsions at all?  In other words…magnets, how do they work?

Down to the wire
    Perhaps a different way of asking the question might get us closer to an answer which feels right: why are some things magnetic but not others?  Only a few substances are magnetic on their own (Iron, Cobalt, Nickel, Gadolinium and Terbium) but any metal can be forced to magnetism by passing a current through it.  What clue does that give us?  Well, what makes these metals special is that their electrons are arranged in specific ways.  Electricity is also about electrons, so maybe electrons themselves are magnetic? 
    It turns out that this is correct; electrons have a tiny magnetic field surrounding them.  When they are stacked up with fields aligned (as they do in metals like Iron or in electric wires) the result is a giant field.  Other metals don’t arrange their electrons the same way so they aren’t magnetic.
    Magnetism seems to come from something electrons are doing and their field-strength has even been pinned down to three properties, related by the following equation:

    This tells us that any particle which has mass, electric charge and some property named S (which stands for something I don’t want to get into) will be magnetic.  When we investigate other particles which have mass, charge and S, we find they are also magnetic so the equation is obviously accurate.  But it hasn’t told us what the magnetic field is.   
    The first problem is charge.  Mass is a very easy property to explain but charge is not.  Electrons repel each other and attract protons, similar to magnetic behaviour, but what makes this happen?  We can describe electrons and protons as having electric-charge fields but this is the same cheat we’ve used before.  It’s just describing what they do, not how they do it. 
    I need to point out that we actually do have a pretty good understanding of what causes an electron to have a charge, but asking how this causes interactions with other particles is the magnetic field question all over again.  (NB: some people might be thinking the answer is to do with photons, but this only rephrases the question into: why do electrons cause photon behaviours around them?  It’s a red herring).
    The other problem is the property S.  We roughly know what charge is, but we don't have a clue what causes a particle to have S.  It’s something quantum mechanical and therefore beyond our  intuition.  The only way we know this property exists is because an experiment was carried out to detect it...which consisted of firing electrons between mangets.  The experiment showed that there is a particle property distinct from electric charge and it has something to do with magnetism but this doesn’t add new information.  It’s saying “magnetic particles have a property which responds to magnetic influence”.  Well…duh. 
    We’re back to square one.  Magnets are magnetic because electrons are magnetic.  They are magnetic because they have properties which cause magnetism.  The above equation and the field lines are describing what the phenomenon is going to be like, which is of great use (every electrical device in the world works because we’ve learned to control magnetic and electric fields) but they are just descriptions of a phenomenon which don't tell us how the phenomenon arises.  Feynman’s answer is still the best.

Still you Shaggy.  Very much still you.

I feel it in my fingers, I feel it in my toes.  Magnets all around me, and so the feeling grows
    While answering Christopher Sykes, Feynman points out that magnetism doesn’t spook us when we experience it in other contexts.  Right now you’re sitting on a chair and think of yourself as being in contact with it.  But you aren’t.  The electrons in you and the electrons in the chair are repelling electrically and magnetically (the two are closely linked, so for simplicity I’m going to describe them as one thing).
    If you were to zoom in, you would see that both sets of electrons have magnetic fields which push against each other and allow the surfaces to repel rather than merge.  The very act of touching an object is basically magnetic repulsion, it’s just that the gap between the particles is too small to see.  Quantum mechanically, particle repulsions happen all the time but we aren't used to seeing quantum behaviour at the everyday level.
    That's what makes magnets hard to understand.  They are a quantum process being studied by classical human brains and when you have a phenomenon which the human brain can’t understand you can only describe it, not explain it.  “What do you wanna know? - the magnets repel each other.”

Be positive and get real
    The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said “at the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so called laws of nature are explanations of natural phenomena.”  He was saying that laws of nature are merely descriptions rather than explanations. 
    On another occasion he said “man has awoken to wonder…Science is a way of sending him to sleep again,” and he also criticised Science for “reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest number of primitive natural laws.”  Wittgenstein was undoubtedly a philosophical genius but I have to be honest, he was a grumpy git.  
    The two positions which arose from his influence on early 20th century philosophy are called realism and positivism.  Realism says that Science explains the world.  Positivism says Science is only keeping track of what happens and has no explanatory power. 
    According to positivists like Wittgenstein and Shaggy 2 Dope, all we are doing as Scientists is saying that a particular thing happens and then saying "the thing which makes it happen is what makes it happen.”  We might give it a name or measure it mathematically but it's not a true explanation. 
    I think this is an unfair criticism and a semantically obscure one.  After all, we could dismiss philosophical statements by saying “the answer to any question is whatever answers it.”  If you decide the answer to every “why?” is simply “because” then you might as well ask what the point in questions is.  The answer is just whatever the answer is.  Science can do something far greater than just describing what we already know.

Hitting Rock Bottom
    I remember asking my Physics and Chemistry teachers why molecules had certain shapes.  The answer was that atoms themselves had the shapes and they dictated the angles.  So I asked why atoms had these shapes.  The answer was that electrons moved in a particular way which arose from their charge being opposite to a proton’s.  So I asked why electrons and protons had opposite charges.  The answer was “that’s the way things are.”  And then I got frustrated. 
    It seemed defeatist.  Although I don’t know what I expected.  If you take any phenomenon and keep asking “why?” you will eventually hit the bottom of the ladder and be faced with “that’s the way things are”. 
    Let’s say we discovered electrons have tiny harpoons firing out of them on one side, creating magnetic attractions in one direction.  That would feel like a proper explanation until someone thought to ask “well why do they have harpoons in the first place?” 
    Every time we uncover a mechanism we are generating a question…why is it like that?  Even if Science arrives at a single theory which explains everything in the Universe we could sill ask “why is that theory true?”  
    In a sense, this means we can never really explain anything because every answer is resting on a deep-down truth that the Universe just is a certain way.  But I think that’s a ludicrously pessimistic approach.  There is every reason to try and answer questions about the world because I think there is a subtle difference between explanation and description.

Describe vs Explain
    Let’s take one of the most common questions I get asked as a teacher: why do we dream?  If we follow it through with the eternal “why” question we eventually get to the limit of ignorance:
 
Q: Why do we dream?
A: Because the outer layers of the brain shut down and the inner layers, full of crazy thoughts, take over. 

Q: Why?
A: Because the brain has to conserve energy. 

Q: Why?
A: Because there is a limited supply of it.

Q: Why?
A: Because food contains a specific amount.

Q: Why?
A: Because food gets its energy from the Sun and the Sun only generates a certain amount.

Q: Why?
A: Because the Sun gets its energy from the limited number of particles inside it.

Q: Why?
A: Because particles smashing together at high speed gives out energy.

Q: Why?
A: Because movement and energy are closely related by Einstein’s theory of special relativity. 

Q: Why?
A: Because that’s just the way it is.
 
    The answers to the above questions are what I think we mean by “explanation”.  As we answer the question we are re-describing accepted knowledge but in a way that adds information.  An explanation is therefore the steps between the original question and the final “that’s the way it is” statement.  So a teacher's job is clear: describe all the steps by adding information until the person asking is satisfied. 
    This is really what makes magnets difficult to explain.  The gap between “how do they work?” and “that’s the way they are,” is very small.  That’s the point Feynman was making.  The magnets repel each other and there is no deeper level, that’s already it.  We’ve hit the boundary of wierd quantum stuff and there isn’t anything we can say to add to the description. 
    As I’ve said, the final question will always be: why is it like that?  But what that question refers to will keep changing.  We start by asking “why is A like that?” and get the answer “because B is true.”  Then we’ll ask “why is B like that?” and get the answer “because C is true” and so on.  The question will always get asked and the answer will always give rise to another question.  Maybe one day we will have an answer to every question but it will be too weird to know what the next question to ask is.  To me this is exciting because it means Science will never run out of things to investigate and it will never know everything. 

So what’s the point?
    Explanations are just descriptions with extra information and right at the bottom of every explanation we have a big fat question mark.  Science can’t answer the fundmanetal “why is the world like that?” so Wittgenstein would query what the point of Science is full stop.  I think the answer should be obvious.
    Earlier, when we answered where dreams come from we ended up at special relativity, but there are many other questions which would take us to the same point.  If you asked me why light moves the way it does (nothing to do with dreams) we would end up at special relativity.  If you asked me how a nuclear bomb works, we would end up at special relativity.  And so on.
    Special relativity is a "law of nature" which means it is a fact we use to explain other things, not the other way around.  It's one of the axioms we have to accept until someone goes a level deeper.  This is what scientific discovery is about, trying to go as far down the ladder as possible until we have a bunch of statements which we can't add information to - we just say what they are. 
    When Isaac Newton discovered gravity, he was recognising that the descriptions we use for planets and stars can be used for objects moving on Earth.  He unified two separate realms with a single principle.  Michael Faraday discovered that the descriptions we use for electric properties can be used for magnetism too.  Steven Weinberg, Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow were then able to unite Faraday’s electromagnetic laws with radioactivity and it keeps going.
    When we uncover a Scientific “law” we are describing a link between apparently separate events or processes.  It’s phrasing one thing in terms of something else and this is what Wittgenstein hated.  Generalisations were to be avoided in his world view because there was no reason to assume separate events were linked by anything other than coincidence.
    Perhaps tomorrow half the electrons in the Universe will decide to flip charge for no reason.  Maybe gravity will vanish altogether.  I can't prove this won't happen.  But we don't live our lives assuming the Universe is illogical and generalisaitons work by accident.  We assume we live on the inside wall of a logically bound Universe and go from there.  When you wake up, you don't know for certain that the floor will be there when you put your foot down, but you do it anyway.

The tree metaphor
    I imagine special relativity like a branch on a tree with observable phenomena being the twigs and twiglets which sprout off it.  When we ask a question about the world we’re starting at some point on the outside of the tree and every successive question works inward toward bigger and more general answers. 
    At the moment, Science is built on a few main boughs of this imaginary tree and we haven’t yet unified them into a single trunk.  But when we have done so, that trunk will extend down as far as we can go, maybe even connecting to other Universes with different laws.
    Magnetism is one branch on this tree of knowledge.  We can observe its effects and we want a deeper explantion but that’s because we’re used to starting out on the twigs.  Magnetism is already one of the principles which explains other things, not the other way around.  We may discover a magnetic mechanism one day and that would be fantastic, but the next generation of hip-hop clown rappers would simply ask “the magnetic mechanism - how does that work?”
    The point is that the more links we discover, the more we can make a difference to the world.  You’re reading this on a computer screen based on laws of electricity which…deep down…are based on mystery.  You wear clothes and live in buildings made from chemicals that are based on laws which...deep down…are based on mystery. 
    The medicines you take, the books you read and everything else that makes life grand are all based on things we can't comprehend, but that doesn't mean we should stop asking questions about things we can comprehend.  We’ve tasted fruit from the tree of knowledge and it has undoubtedly made the world a better place.  I see no reason to stop eating. 
    I have now, hopefully, explained how magnets work, why the question is difficult to answer, what the philosophy of scientific explanation is, what the job of teaching is and managed to quote Richard Feynman, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Insane Clown Posse in one blog.  And now, I'll leave you with the master... 

Image Credits
Magneto: comicbook
Insane Clown Posse: contactmusic
Pennywise: StephenKingWikia
Complicated path: Oursideofsuicide
Magnetic Fields: physbot
Shaggy 2 Dope and a Giraffe: ohnotheydidnt
Richard Feynman: warosu
Ludwig Wittgenstein: gayinfluence
Boxing: Chicagotribune
Backstreet Boys gif: myinstants

Holy Smokes
    You may not have come across Gloria Copeland if you live in the UK but some of my American readers will certainly know the name.  Along with her husband Kenneth, she oversees the Texas-based Kenneth Copeland Ministries, a Christian televangelist organisation which preaches to people all over America through TV, books and the internet.
    It’s hard to know how many people are members of their church exactly, but the Copelands are worth an estimated $760 million, so it's obviously a large following.  They are also reported to sit on Trump’s Evangelical Adivosry Board (source) so it would seem that when the Copelands speak, many people listen, including the president. 
    Which is why I was alarmed earlier this week to come across a video of Gloria denouncing the benefits of the flu vaccine.  I don’t know if the video will be taken down due to the vitriolic backlash she has recieved, but here is a transcript of her words just in case:
 
“We don’t have a flu season.  And don’t recieve it when somebody threatens you with ‘Everybody’s getting the flu.’  We’ve already had our shot, he [Jesus] bore our sicknesses and our diseases.  That’s what we stand on.  And by his stripes we were healed.  If you’ve already got the flu I’m going to pray for you right now.  Jesus himself gave us the flu shot.  He redeemed us from the curse of flu.  And we recieve it and we take it and we are healed by his stripes.  Amen.  You know the Bible says he himself bore our sicknesses and carried our diseases and by his stripes we were healed.  When we were healed we are healed so get on the word, stay on the word and if you say ‘well I don’t have any symptoms of the flu’, well great that’s the way it’s supposed to be.  Just keep saying it ‘I’ll never have the flu, I’ll never have the flu,’ put words...innoculate yourself with the word of God.”
 
    The repetitive phrasing and half-sentences give the impression this was not a prepared statement, rather, something she made up as she went along.  That might explain why her words don't match what it says on her website (Here) where the advice is to “seek appropriate medical attention from a professional” if you get sick.  But oh well.  Maybe I just don't understand the theological contradiction.  I'm not the Pope after all.

Covering yourself
    Technically, Gloria Copeland never says the flu shot is harmful, but she does imply it's unnecessary if you are a Christian.  Phrases like “we’ve already had our shot” and "innoculate yourself with the word of God" strongly suggest that Copeland considers Christian belief an adequate shelter from viral infection. 
    I have to be honest: I’m not clear why she is against the vaccine in the first place.  Is it because admitting you need a flu vaccine is admitting the virus mutates...which implies a species can adapt over time...which implies evolution?  I’m not really sure but she’s the pastor not me.
    Now, I’ve written before about the nuanced relationship between Science and religion and how the two are not necessarily enemies (here), so this isn’t a religion vs Science thing.  I also never discuss my own religious beliefs publicly for various reasons (explained here) but I do think it’s important to address what she's saying from a critical point of view. 
    I'm not wanting to slander Copeland herself of course (I don't want to get sued on the offchance she reads this) but I find her statements to be scientifically inaccurate, ethically dangerous and at odds with Christian theology.  I think people on either side of the religious or scientific border would back me up there.

So, what is she actually saying?
    Fairly obviously, the Bible doesn’t say much about vaccination.  Copeland’s statements are contemporary interpretations of ancient writings, so we need to decipher what she means carefully.  This turns out to be difficult.  Other than spirited declarations of faith and sincere repetition of the same phrases, her statements are vague and broad.  But, as far as I can tell, she is making three points:
 
1) We do not have a flu season
2) Jesus gave humanity the flu shot
3) Jesus’ actions led to Christians being immune to flu (and possibly all disease)
 
  The first two claims are easy to refute.  Flu season definitely exists and it ought to be taken seriously.  In 2014, only 300 cases of Influenza-A H3N2 had been reported (source) while this year in the US, 22.7 out of every 100,000 hospital admissions are down to the same virus. (source)  It also tends to hit the worst in February (source) which sounds pretty seasonal to me.  And while young and old people are most suscpetible, anyone can get infected. 
    The CDC esitmates that as many as 56,000 deaths per year can be caused by influenza, with 710,000 hospitalisations (source) and getting the vaccine can lower your chances of infection by 60% (source).  So the flu virus is dangerous, it can spread, vaccination works and it is defintely seasonal.  Any advice to the contrary is not only inaccurate but potentially harmful to people who are at risk.
    Copeland’s claim that “Jesus himself gave us the flu shot” is also patently false.  Vaccination was invented in 1798 by Edward Jenner.  The influenza virus was isolated in 1901 by E Centanni and the vaccine against it was developed in the 1930s by Jonas Salk, MacFarlane Burnet and Thomas Francis.  I’m not criticising Jesus you understand, but Jesus no more invented the flu vaccine than he gave the Gettysburg address.

Out with the Old, in with the Flu
    Copeland's third claim is the central thrust of her speech, but it's hard to pin it down precisely because she uses ambiguous and poetic language.  For instance, when she says “he bore our sicknesses and our diseases” she can't mean Jesus literally contracted the modern flu because it didn't exist back then.  She must be talking figuratively, which means it's impossible to know what she is claiming.  Maybe that's the point???
    I do know where she’s getting her words from however.  She is quoting Matthew 8:16-17 “When evening came, many who were demon-possessed were brought to him, and he drove out the spirits with a word and healed all the sick.  This was to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah: ‘He took up our infirmities and bore our diseases.’”
    This passage refers to Jesus curing sick people, but in very a specific time and place.  It does not say Jesus will prevent all illnesses of every future Christian.  Furthermore, the author of Matthew is quoting Isaiah 53:4 which talks about the nation of Israel suffering, not a specific individual.   
    The phrase “by his stripes we were healed”, which Copeland repeats three times, comes from 1 Peter 2:24, itself quoting Isaiah 53:5.  “By his stripes” is originally the Hebrew uba-habu-ratu, which is better translated as “because of his wounds”.  Again, it's referring to the nation of Israel and how suffering led to healing.  It isn’t referring to Jesus and it certainly isn’t claiming all illnesses are immediately powerless if you’re a Christian.   

Muddling the Theology
    What Copeland may be referring to is the belief that when Jesus was crucified, it was an act of vicarious atonement.  That is: Jesus’ death absolved humanity of its sin, thus saving them from transworld damnation.  As Christian beliefs go, that one is fairly robust because it has unambiguous scriptural backing.  1 Corinthians 15:3, Ephesians 1:7, Matthew 26:28, Hebrews 2:14 and 9:28 all say that Jesus's death was linked to the forgiveness of sin.
    But at no point in any of the New Testament is crucifixion linked to physical illness.  What the New Testament does say about illness (aside from the healing miraceles of Jesus) is fairly clear though.  Christians are not immune from illness.  In Galatians 4:13-14, Paul describes being ill himself and in 1 Timothy 5:23 Paul instructs Timothy to “stop drinking only water, and use a little wine because of your stomach and your frequent illnesses.”
    Whatever you think of Paul’s medical advice here is beside the point.  What’s important is that he is acknowledging Timothy gets sick and is prescribing what he considers to be a cure.  He is not saying “that's impossible, Christians are immune from illness”.  He is saying the opposite.  Christians can get ill, frequently. 
    The only bit of Christian doctrine which is even remotely close to what Copeland is saying is James 5:14-15: “Is anyone among you sick?  Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord.  And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well.”
    Paul is claiming that prayer and faith will cure illness…not prevent it!  Whether or not this claim is accurate is a debate for another time, for now we can say that according to the Bible, Christians will absolutely get sick.  So if you do get the flu, praying about it with church elders while anointed with oil will apparently sort you out (unambigrously the claim of Christianity) but you aren't exempt from it in the first place. 
    If you, dear reader, happen to be one of Copeland’s followers, then I promise you don’t have to give up your trust in Copeland or in Jesus or in God.  But you should get vaccinated.  Think of it like crossing the street.  If you get injured, you can hope that prayer will cure you...but you wouldn't assume God will protect you from cars.  Christians don't cross the street without looking, because that wouldn't be an act of faith it would be an act of idiocy.
    If you really aren't sure what the Bible says about good health and keeping your body in check, I advise you to consider 1 Corinthians 6:19.  "Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit".  And to finish, here's a quotation both religious and scientific from Galileo Galilei:

"I do not believe that the God who endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forego their use"

Image credits
Copeland: charismanews
The Pope: christianobserver
Dawkins: strangenotions
Lincoln: r29static
Prime: goodsmile
Galilei: wikimedia