Not a great plan?
    The Avengers movie franchise began in 2008 with Jon Favreau’s Iron Man and has since taken in $17.5 billion for Marvel Studios.  You might be caught up with every installment, but if not (there are 20 of them) I’ll give a brief overview of the story-arc without getting too spoilerish.
    Far away, on the planet Titan, the supervillain Thanos figures out a solution to the Universe’s biggest problem.  With dwindling resources across every galaxy and species proliferating, we are in a state of chaos as every being on every planet fights for survival.  He decides the answer is simple: kill half of everything.  Less living things = less mouths to feed = less need to fight.  
    It’s a bold and utilitarian approach to the problem of overpopulation, but on sheer logic it would technically work.  I feel there’s probably a simpler solution (sharing stuff???) but you’ve got to hand it to him; galactic murder would do the trick.  Many philosophers throughout history have proposed answers to the overpopulation problem, with the most widely-debated being Thomas Maltus’ 1798 suggestion of limiting the number of children permitted per family.  Thanos isn’t interested in something like that however.  He’s a man of extremes who doesn’t do anything by half.  Except for genocide I suppose.
    As supervillain schemes go it’s not the stupidest I’ve ever come across.  That title goes to the time Wonder Woman uncovered a plot by Nazis to buy global milk supplies and sell it to America at an inflated price in order to make it unaffordable for poor children, leading to widespread osteoporosis, allowing Nazis to invade twenty years in the future.  I did not make that up by the way, they really ran that story (Sensation Comics, Issue 7, May 1st 1942).
    Killing half the population of a planet could be achieved with a fat load of bombs, but Thanos wants to wipe out half of all life in the Universe.  Given the sheer size of space (it's pretty big), this is no minor feat.  Visiting every planet and blowing up half of every city would take considerable time, so he opts for a much simpler idea - obtain the six infinity stones.
    In the Marvel Universe these are six mystical gemstones which control six facets of the Universe: time, space, power, reality, mind and soul.  Any being who possesses just one of these items becomes immeasurably powerful, but if Thanos can get his hand on all six he will wield absolute power over the cosmos with a snap of his fingers.  It's a cool idea, so I decided to take a look at the scientific plausibility of Thanos' plan.

Space and Time Stones
    Every event in the Universe takes place in three-dimensional space (potentially higher dimensions if you’re into string theory) but defining everything spatially is not enough to describe the laws of physics.  You need time as well.  
    The simplest way of demonstrating this is to try imagining an object which occupies space but not time i.e. it has size but doesn’t occupy any seconds.  To say an object doesn’t exist for any measure of time is to say the object doesn’t really exist, ergo time has to be thought of as a fourth dimension.  If you leave it out and just have a Universe made of space, you essentially have no Universe.
    It’s a slightly unusual dimension compared to length, breadth and height, because we can only move through it in one direction, but it is part of our Universe’s backdrop.  If you want to control or influence anything you need to talk about things happening in space and time simultaneously.
    The physicist Hermann Minkowski therefore proposed we stop thinking of the Universe as objects in space moving through time, but rather as objects moving through a unified material he called ‘spacetime’.  Einstein figured out the basic rules for how spacetime should behave in his general theory of relativity and it turns out everything checks with experiment.
    If you want to control an event across the entire Universe, you would need some way of controlling space and time simultaneously.  Therefore, Thanos’ need to have the space and time stones makes sense.  So far, so good.

Reality Stone
    It’s never explicitly stated what the reality stone does in the movies, but you can infer it from seeing how people use it.  There’s a scene in Avengers: Infinity War where Thanos uses it to turn pulses of laser-bullets into bubbles and generates cities out of thin air.  I propose that while the space and time stones control the background of the Universe, the reality stone is manipulating the particles within it, telling them how to arrange. 
    There are something like 200 types of particles known in physics (I’ve written a post about them here) and the key message is that every object you come across is made from these particles in one way or another.  If you control every type of particle, you control literally every object.  While there are undoubtedly some types of particle we have not yet discovered, we can assume the reality stone influences them too, even if we don't know about them.   
    So, given the first three infinity stones, Thanos can control every particle in spacetime.  But since he’s wanting to create an event (lots of death) he also needs to control how objects interact with each other.

Power Stone
    Every law of Science involves three principles: particles, the spacetime they inhabit, and the energy involved in the interaction.  Power is the word we use to describe how quickly energy is transferred, so I propose the fourth stone is the one which controls energy and thus interactions.
    Energy is sometimes described as a substance a particle can possess, but this is a tad misleading.  Energy is not really a thing, it’s a way of expressing the concept of cause and effect mathematically.  When you eat food, chemical reactions take place between the food molecules and those in your body, which allow you to move and live.  The food was the cause and your movement was the effect, so we can measure precisely how much ability the food had to cause an effect on your body.  This is what we mean when we describe something "having energy".  
    The food you eat doesn’t contain a glowing fluid-substance called energy; it contains particles.  But those particles have ability to exert an effect on other particles.  The power stone is perhaps the most philosophical therefore, because it allows Thanos to make sure cause and effect are working when he snaps his fingers and kills everyone.  And this might be all he needs.
    Every law of physics we know, and by extension all of chemistry and biology, rests on these three ideas: particles, their interactions and the background in which they live.  Given control over these things, Thanos would have the bare minimum required to bend things to his will.  But there are some scientists who would argue for another stone, since it’s possible something else exists in the Universe.  Something not made of particles at all...

Mind Stone
    It’s clear that your brain is made of particles, meaning the reality and power stones should be more than capable of manipulating it.  It’s also undeniable that we can influence and change the mind’s inner working with the right particles e.g. psychiatric medications, narcotic substances, anesthetics and electromagnetic fields.  But is that all there is to consciousness?  Might there be something more than biochemistry going on?
    The answer is not settled and indeed some hard-nosed and brilliant scientists (including Nobel prize winners like Niels Bohr and Eugene Wigner) have argued that the mind may in fact have an entirely non-particle component to it...maybe.
    I’ve written about it in more detail (here) but it comes down to a phenomenon in quantum mechanics called the measurement problem.  When quantum particles are left to their own devices they behave a certain way.  But when we take measurements in the lab, they behave in a totally different way.  The puzzle comes from the fact that the lab equipment we’re using to take our measurements are made from the same quantum particles, so they shouldn’t have any sort of spooky effect.  Quantum particles interacting with more quantum particles shouldn’t change their behaviour.  And yet they do.
    There are many answers given and one of them is that consciousness itself exerts influence on particles, that our very act of observing the experiment changes it somehow.  I have to be clear that this is a minority view and only one of the many possible solutions to the measurement problem, but we cannot discard it.  There is just enough to the theory to make it worth considering, so let’s go along with it for the sake of the movie.  If the mind genuinely is a separate substance to particles, Thanos would need a fifth stone to be omnipotent.  So what of the sixth?

Soul Stone
    OK, this is a little more controversial and I’m going to have to tread cautiously so as not to upset anyone on either side of the fence.  Physics definitely agrees the Universe is made of particles exchanging energy in spacetime and there is a small group of quantum physicists who suspect the mind may be involved in some way.  The soul is a less well-defined concept however, because it has different meanings to different people.  
    A good way to demonstrate this difficulty is to ask: what, specifically, is the difference between the soul and the mind?  The mind is a collection of a person’s memories, beliefs, ideas, hopes, fears, perceptions of the world and self-awareness.  A person’s identity can be neatly summed up as their mind, so what is missing from the list which requires a soul?  What additional ingredient is needed in defining a person which the mind doesn’t already cover?  
    Some religions teach that while all animals have a mind of some sort (even jellyfish have a central nervous system), when the animal dies their mind perishes as well, but humans continue to exist once their body is done.  The soul is therefore, under some definitions ‘that which keeps the mind preserved once the brain has died’.  In other words, the notion of souls takes us into the realm of an afterlife.
    Science has a lot to say on the topic of the mind and the debate is very exciting, but there is no scientific debate on the soul because there is no clear information one way or the other.  There are all sorts of claims of course, but someone claiming something is not enough to warrant a scientific perspective.  This doesn’t mean the afterlife is not real mind you, absolutely not.  It’s just that the scientific answer to such a question is “hmmm, we have no idea, could go either way.”
    Because we can’t prove or disprove the existence of souls we therefore can’t say much about what the soul stone does.  But, let’s say that the theology of the Marvel Universe is correct and souls are genuine things.  Thanos obviously doesn’t want to destroy half the planets and stars in the Universe…that would defeat his whole plan.  He wants to leave all the planets and resources in their current state but cut the number of living things by 50%.  Therefore he’ll need a way to exert his power on only living organisms and not inanimate objects too.  If we propose that all living things have a 'soul' distinguishing them from non-living objects, then he would logically need a stone for that.

What Are Infinity Stones?
     The answer, I think, can be found nestled in both the theories of quantum cosmology and in a scene from Guardians of the Galaxy…both of which are pretty awesome.  Here’s the scene in question (movie is rated PG-13 in America and 12A in the UK):

    In this scene, during which the power stone is revealed, The Collector explains “before creation itself there were six singularities, then the Universe exploded into existence and the remnants of these systems were forged into concentrated ingots - infinity stones.”
    A singularity is an object whose properties are so extreme we can’t describe them with our current knowledge of physics.  The center of a black hole is considered a singularity for instance, since according to the laws we know, a black-hole’s center has an infinite amount of density and gravitational pull.  Anything which predicts an infinite property cannot possibly be the right answer since the Universe is a finite system, therefore singularities are really a physicist’s word for “objects we can’t figure out yet” and any theory which predicts a singularity is not complete.  
    The origin of the Universe is just such a singularity.  All we know is that 13.8 billion years ago, the entire Universe was condensed into a tiny speck which started expanding.  We have no idea where this speck came from, what it was like, what made it start expanding or if anything came before it (assuming there was a ‘before’ since time may have ‘started’ with the Universe).  We can explain the evolution of the Universe pretty well after a certain point, about a quadrillion quadrillion quadrillionth of a second, but anything before that is a total mystery. 
    According to The Collector, there were actually six singularity objects alongside ours 13.8 billion years ago and when our Universe began expanding, for whatever reason, these six singularity objects got absorbed into ours, rather than expanding themselves.  These objects would therefore be like miniature Universes which somehow avoided the expansion.  They stayed as ‘concentrated ingots’ and contain, it would appear, properties we would normally attribute to an entire universe.
    Since we currently have no idea how the Universe began or how many singularities there were, or how they interacted, or why our Universe’s singularity expanded we can sort of shrug a little bit and say “yeah, OK, why not”.  There was at least one singularity at the beginning which started expanding so why not six others which didn’t?  There are stranger things in nature, like the Lophorina bird (see below).  If that is real, I can swallow infinity stones.  Not literally of course, did you see the video???

With a Snap of his Fingers
    The really scary idea of infinity stones is that once Thanos has all six of them, he can exert his will over everything instantly from one place.  But how could such a thing be possible?  Surely you couldn’t immediately effect every point of the Universe at once?  Well, fortunately for the Marvel universe, there is one possible mechanism by which this could potentially be achieved.
    It’s a phenomenon called quantum entanglement and it’s really strange.  I don’t want to get hung up on technicalities but if you’re curious, the book I’m currently writing (a sequel to Elemental) which will be released in the Summer goes into all the gory details, so look out for that.  The gist is that two particles which interact can become linked together in such a way that doing something to one will instantly affect the other no matter what distance there is between them.
    The mechanism of how entanglement works is one of the biggest mysteries facing physicists today but it’s an undeniable effect.  It genuinely is possible to impact a particle on the other side of the galaxy, or even the Universe, if you entangle it with a particle here on Earth.  There’s all sorts of limitations and caveats on entanglement and there is no obvious way of sending a self-destruct order to half the particles in the Universe, but this is a sci-fi film so let’s just say there’s a way of doing it.
    In order for two particles to entangle, they have to meet each other at an earlier point, so in order to affect the whole Universe simultaneously, you’d need to somehow wind back to a time when all the particles were close together - say when the Universe was small and everything was concentrated - 13.8 billion years should do the trick.  
    If you had an object or a bunch of objects hanging around when the Universe was still a singularity, they could entangle themselves with each other and with the Universe as a whole, so once the Universe expanded, they would stay in direct quantum-contact (quantact anyone?) with everything inside it.  Every particle would be linked together by their entanglements to the six infinity stones and thus, if you manipulated them in the right way, you could genuinely snap your fingers and affect everything everywhere. 
    So if you had a way to control all matter (reality) across spacetime (space and time) assuming quantum consciousness is required (mind) then you can control everything in the Universe.  If you send a pulse out to every particle via the entanglement links established at the beginning of the Universe, you could target all the particles incorporated into living things (soul) and tell them to dissociate from each other (power), dissolving half of all living things.  Hooray??#

mage Credits:
Thanos with his glove: Superherohype
Milkman: Smosh
Minkowski: spacetimesociety
Bubblegun: YouTube
Energy Milk: coopathome
Mind Stone: The Conversation
Soul Music: pinterest
Lophorina Bird: hashem

Books For Smart People
    I’m an adult and I’ve read plenty of great literature.  I’ve read the works of Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Dickens, Austen, Twain, Melville, Eliot, Hemingway, Orwell, Ishiguro etc. but I’m also a fan of comic book writers like Alan Moore, Frank Miller, John Wagner and Stan Lee.  I distinctly remember having a copy of Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy sitting next to Judge Dredd: Total War on my bedside table at one point.  Just because I read comic books doesn't mean I can't also appreciate "classics".
    In fact, every Christmas I tend to read Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and the comic book Batman Noel one after the other in the same day. I enjoy the escapist entertainment and haunting artwork of one and the linguistic brilliance and sentimental wit of the other.  I'm also in the process of writing a book on quantum mechanics due for publication this Summer...I would like to think reading comic books clearly hasn't dulled my critical faculties or stunted my intellectual growth.
    I mean, I agree that you should grow out of childish stories as you get older, but these days there are lots of sophisticated comic books written for adults.  Take Maus by Art Spiegleman, a comic book about the Holocaust which won a Pulitzer prize.  That book made my skin crawl with horror and made me tear up with emotion.  I have also read Schindler’s Ark (the book on which Schindler’s List was based) and found it equally moving.  Is one of them a more adult form of art because it doesn’t contain pictures?  Can't they both be powerful and thought provoking pieces of literature?
    Comic books today have evolved beyond Dennis the Menace and Stan Lee was central to that deveopment because he was one of the first writers to introduce adult issues to his stories.  Before him, every comic book character was a 2D square-jawed hero who saved some damsel in distress from a moustache-twiddling "foreigner".  Lee began creating characters with emotional complexity.  
    His comic books dealt with issues like racism, sexism, drug abuse and political corruption.  He wrote comic books in which women were central characters with complicated emotional lives rather than foils for male heroes to save, and Lee fought hard to include black characters in his works without stereotyping them.  Yes, Stan Lee’s early comic books were written for children, but as the children grew up, so did his writing.
    But, let’s say Maher was right for a moment and that comic books are for children.  In what way does this make them unimportant?  Stan Lee was, according to Maher, an author of children’s literature.  Do we no longer celebrate children's literature in the Maher-niverse?
    I’m wondering if Bill Maher will be as equally disparaging when JK Rowling dies?  Or if he thought it was ridiculous when people got sad over the death of Dr Seuss or Beatrix Potter? I think Stan Lee was plenty important to our society, unless Maher is going to claim children reading isn't important?
    Stan Lee made a lot of kids happy and millions of people have fond memories of reading his stories.  By contrast, Maher's job is making caustic remarks about politicians behind a desk.  That's his role in society.  It's an important one of course, satire is crucial to an informed democracy, but is it more noble a profession than getting young people reading?  I don't think so.
    Besides, Stan Lee did something even more important for pop culture, which I am going to elucidate on now (because you might be wondering why I’m writing about comic books on a Science blog)…he made scientists the good guys.

The Evil Genius
    Typically in movies, comic books and pulp-fiction novels of the day, scientists were depicted as the villains, without fail.  We were always the maniacs who reached too far and accidentally unleashed a deadly plague on the Earth or brought space-vampires from Mars down to eat our livers.  Stan Lee made scientists heroes of his stories instead, and showed how they used their intelligence to outwit common criminals.  He made scientists look awesome!
    Reed Richards of The Fantastic Four, got his powers on a scientific expedition.  T’Challa, The Black Panther was a diplomat and scientist.  Charles Xavier from X-men was a biologist and anthropologist who lectured at Oxford.  Bruce Banner was a nuclear physicist.  Tony Stark was an engineer.  Peter Parker was a high school physics student.  Hank Pym was a particle physicist...I could go on.
    Stan Lee respected the importance of getting kids interested in Science and I would argue that along with Gene Roddenberry (creator of Star Trek) he did more to raise the profile of fictional scientists than anyone else in popular culture. 
    Stan Lee also used scientifically legitimate devices to get stories going and showed his heroes using science to defeat bad guys.  Sometimes Lee’s physics wasn’t quite right (he wasn't a scientist after all) but oftentimes it was gosh-darned impressive.  There’s a Spider-Man story where Electro uses his electrical powers to generate induced magnetic fields inside an iron beam and scale a building to escape via Lenz's law.  Lee is teaching children about electromagnetic fields here.  Rather than having mega-ray death-lasers controlled by evil gnomes, Lee would often ground his fanciful stories with real scientific terminology and make geeks look like heroes for a change.

How I Use Comic Books
    As a physics teacher, what you’re usually doing is teaching kids a quick equation or law, which can sometimes be quite dry, especially for an hour.  The best thing to do (the really important thing to do) therefore is show how physics relates to the real world.  But most text-books do this in a very plain fashion.
    Physics textbooks are a world of perfectly spherical balls rolling down frictionless surfaces and John and Jane calculating the mass of a pulley given the acceleration of a cube as it is pulled upwards etc. etc.  How many young people do you think are going to get fired up about physics because of that?  Not many.  But if you can push physical laws to their extremes by relating them to sci-fi stories, you can get debates going.  You can get people to use the equations in a novel way and see how they really work in outrageous scenarios.  Here are some examples of how I have used comic books and comic book movies in my lessons:
    There’s an iconic Spider-Man story where Peter Parker tries to save Gwen Stacy falling off the golden gate bridge, but his webbing catches her and brings her to a halt too fast, potentially snapping her neck.  Peter Parker then has to live with the guilt of maybe killing his girlfriend because he didn’t take into account changes in momentum (yeah, a kid’s story…sure).  I use this comic book scene with my A-level students to calculate the forces involved and answer the question of whether Parker really kills Gwen or not.  It’s a great way of teaching concepts like forces, elasticity and gravitational energy.
    There’s a scene in The Avengers where Hulk stops a crashing alien spacecraft with his fist.  I show this clip and contrast it with the scene in Superman Returns where Kal-El catches an airplane and we use Newtonian mechanics to determine which one of these characters is more powerful.
    In my lesson on velocity, we use panels from comic books to see who would win in a race between The Flash, Superman and Quicksilver.  I’ve used scenes from Ant-Man to talk about quantum mechanics and how object sizes are determined by inter-particle forces.  I use clips from X-Men 2 to illustrate how electromagnetism works and a scene from Spider-Man 2 to teach nuclear physics.
    I’ve used clips from The Dark Knight Rises to calculate the radius of an explosion outside Gotham city.  I’ve used panels from Aquaman to teach the behaviour of waves.  I’ve taught lessons on radioactivity using Spider-Man, The Hulk, Daredevil, Reed Richards and The Phoenix (who all got their powers from radioactivity).
    Even if the kids don’t really care about comic books, they can at least tell I’m trying to have a bit of fun with the topic and show how physics can be applied to novel situations.  So I say thank you to Stan Lee and all the other comic book writers and comic-book movie makers who give me so many cool and over the top moments to showcase to my students and get them thinking.
    I’m not saying a person’s literary diet should consist solely of comic books.  But let me put it this way: if you want to teach a 12 year old about Newton’s second law, which do you think is going to get them more engaged - making them read an excerpt from Principia Mathematica or showing them the scene in The Dark Knight where the Joker flips an articulated lorry in mid-air using helicopter cables?
    Comic books tell stories.  They do it with words and pictures.  Some are written for children, some are written for adults.  The artwork is often remarkably detailed and the dialogue often snappy.  Stan Lee was a key figure in developing an art form and getting real science into his stories, as well as depicting scientists as good guys.  I think that’s pretty important Mr Maher and frankly I think Stan Lee rocked.

Image Credits
Stan Lee Reading: ibtimes
Bill Maher in Iron Man Three: YouTube
Spider-Man: Variety
Stan Lee Rocks: Bleedingcool

Forgotten Beauty
    Ask someone to name a bunch of famous Scientists.  Assuming they don't opt for TV-figures like Brian Cox or Bill Nye, they'll probably pick Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Stephen Hawking or (if they're a maverick) Nikola Tesla.  There's nothing wrong with those titans of course, but it's interesting that they're all physicists.
    If you ask someone to narrow their list to famous biologists, they'll probably go with Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur, Alexander Fleming or potentially Watson & Crick.  Once again, nothing wrong with these luminaries (apart from Watson who's a total jerk) and it's great we can name biologists who shaped our understanding of the world.  But what happens if you ask someone to name a famous chemist?  There's a few obvious fictional ones like Henry Jekyll or Beaker from the muppets, but how many real-life chemists can we actually name?  Unfortunately, this is where the gears of memory jam and it's something I want to change.
    Of the three main Scientific disciplines, chemistry is the one we can actually do stuff with.  You can't tell a quark how to oscillate or a strain of bacteria how to evolve, but chemicals are things we can influence.  We can use chemistry to build the world we want to live in, and I think we need to bump and brag the chemists who put us on the right path.

I got all my sisters and me
   The three Science textbooks we use at my school have pictures of great Scientists on their covers.  Darwin for biology, Hawking for physics and, for some bizarre reason, Marie Curie for chemistry.  Curie was the only person to win Nobel prizes in both chemistry and physics so she is definitely someone to champion...but especially for chemistry?  Her Nobel prize was for discovering the elements radium and polonium; obviously impressive, but no more so than the other 116 on the table.  If we hail Curie as one of the most important chemists of all time we'd have to justify why radium and polonium are more important discoveries than the other 116.  Truthfully they are not. 
    Really, it's her work in physics which revolutionised Science and while her chemistry was outstanding (far better than mine) it wasn't a game-changer for chemistry theory.  Marie Curie was one of the world's greatest physicists...even her chemistry Nobel was awarded largely because of physics experiments she did...and she would absolutely belong on that list.  But there are much bigger and grander chemical discoveries made than discovering two elements which aren't used for much. 
    I sometimes worry people include Marie Curie because they feel obligated to include a woman in the chemical pantheon, but that's insulting to her legacy and reducing her to "token female Science person".  Her achievements in physics are some of the most important in history and she needs to be remembered for that, not as a half-hearted nod to feminism. 
    The problem unfortunately is that without Curie, my list of great chemists becomes ten male names and that's a problem.  It has overtones of the physicist Alessandro Strumia who recently said in a conference that physics was a subject "built by men".  Yikes. 
    It is true most of the names in early Science history are male, but that's because women were not allowed to do Science!!!  Most Universities in Europe refused women admission and even when they were permitted, they were often bullied out of them.  Curie herself had to study in secret as a member of "The Floating University" (not as exciting as it sounds) because patriarchal attitudes were so engrained, the very notion of a woman being good at physics was abhorrent to University administrators.  That's the reason the names are male...it's because men were being total jackasses to the women.  So please remember, the names on my list are all dudes because of historical sexism and not a lack of female talent.
    The trend is gradually starting to change I'm happy to say, and a list of great chemists fifty years from now will hopefully be more balanced.  But I can't fudge historical facts and I'm not going to include less-impactful female people on my list because that would be patronising to them, not to mention insulting to the male Scientists I'd be overlooking.  I'm hoping we can still appreciate the brilliance of these ten great chemists of history and not hold their testicles against them. 

On that note, here's the video I did about why we need to be able to name more female Scientists: Great female scientists
Oh and here's the blog I wrote on why a lack of female representation in Science needs to change: Feminism in Science

1. Hennig Brandt
    Chemistry began in Germany during the 1670s when the alchemist Hennig Brandt decided to  boil his own urine to see if he could extract any gold.  He couldn't.  What he did discover was a waxy white powder which glows in the dark, stinks of garlic and bursts into flame with no provocation.  He had discovered phosphorus, the first element isolated in recorded history.  While some elements had been known since ancient times (e.g. gold and iron) Brandt's discovery showed that the substances around us aren't pure - they are made up of other stuff mixed together somehow.
    Brandt began ordering barrels of excess urine from the German army (spending his wife's money) to extract their phosphorus and carried out numerous experiments to see what it could do.  Although a complete fluke, Brandt's discovery marked a turning point for laboratory practice.  Rather than chucking a bunch of stuff together in a pot and hoping for the best, Brandt stumbled across a whole layer of chemical reality hidden below the surface.  Alchemy became chemistry and four hundred years later we have 118 known elemental substances with which the Universe does her cooking.

2. Antoine Lavoisier
    About a hundred years after Brandt was boiling his own pee, Chemistry began to explode in Europe, both figuratively and literally.  Antoine Lavoisier was the guy who began collecting the information, verifying it in his lab (with the help of his wife Marie-Anne) and categorising the growing list of elements.  He started grouping chemicals together by property and thus gave us our first periodic table - the Chemist's infographic.
    Lavoisier's table wasn't complete of course and he considered things like heat and light to be pure substances, but he gave us the notion that chemical reactions obeyed predictable laws.  In the same way physics had strict principles governing the whole show (discovered by Newton), Lavoisier probed chemistry for its own patterns and showed that reactions didn't happen at random.  Although later Scientists like Dobereiner, Newlands, Mendeleev and Seaborg crafted the periodic table into its current shape, Lavoisier was the one who suggested the idea in the first place. 

3. Jons Berzelius
    Berzelius is the reason a lot of people hated chemistry in school.  Originally a physician in the late 1700s, Berzelius decided that since physics and mathematics had terminology and notation, chemistry ought to have them too, so he set about formalising the language of this burgeoning field.   He's the one who came up with chemical equations and the symbol system we use today with all those little numbers and  arrows.  What an absolute legend. 
    Berzelius also discovered silicon, thorium, cerium and selenium and was the first person to start weighing masses of molecules to figure out how many atoms they contained.  That's pretty good going seeing as the existence of atoms wasn't proven until 150 years later.  Berzelius discovered that when a chemical reaction occurs, all the atoms still exist at the end, even if they've escaped as something like a gas.  This had confused previous chemists because it looked as though stuff could pop into and out of existence at will, but Berzelius showed that matter was a conserved quantity; a principle I take great pleasure in tormenting my students with today. 

4. Humphry Davy
    Humphry Davy began his life as a poet, but when he turned to Science he became the most accomplished chemist in Britain, sometimes referred to as the British Berzelius.  He holds the record for the most naturally-occuring element discoveries (six) did a lot of work on acid-base properties, invented the first anaesthetic and came up with the electroplating method we still use to protect ships.  However, Davy's biggest contribution to chemistry was cataloguing reactivity itself.
    Because most elements are bonded to others and don't occur in their native state, a lot of chemistry involves mixing the right chemicals together and causing atoms to shift partner.  Chemical reactions are all about breaking one set of particles and rearranging them to a new one.  Davy essentially figured out which chemical combinations would react and which did nothing.  His studying of reactivity cost him his eyesight when a plate of nitrogen trichloride exploded in his face, but studying unreactivity led him to observe the properties of glowing metal in inert gases and thus Davy invented the very first light bulb...in your face Edison.  

5. Svante Aarhenius
    Arrhenius was the founder of the Nobel prize committe (he won it in 1903 of course) and invented what we now call 'physical chemistry'.  It's the result of physics and chemistry getting amorous and concerns itself with things like rate of reaction (the equation for which is his), electrochemistry (for which he won the Nobel prize) equilibrium (a concept he largely invented) acid-base reactions (he was the first person to figure out what they were) and forgetting to wear your lab specs (as shown in the above photograph).  His greatest contribution to Science, and the world however, was establishing the link between chemistry and the environment.
    In the 1890s everyone assumed the natural world was simply too big for humans to have any effect on.  Darwin had shown us to be a tiny a twig on the tree of life, but Arrhenius put us right back in the centre of things when he began taking measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and comparing it to historic levels from ice cores.  Arrhenius learned that chemical reactions humans were carrying out affected chemical reactions in the air around us and was the first person to ring an alarm bell on the most pressing and crucial chemistry challenge we face today: climate change.  The entire ecosystem of the Earth is a giant chemical system and we play a significant role.  How we choose to wield that power is up to us, and Arrhenius showed us we have that power in the first place. 

6. Fritz Haber
    I don't really like the term "evil scientist" because a person's moral code is often a product of their environment.  Fritz Haber essentially invented chemical-weaponry for Germany during WWI by using chlorine gas to suffocate and acidify British troops in trenches.  But from Haber's perspective he was being a patriot, helping his government defeat the invading British who were getting involved in a conflict they had no stake in.  Haber's desire to help his country's war-effort doesn't necessarily make him evil.  However, going on holiday to watch the massacre itself from a protected balcony probably does.  
    The greatest thing Haber did for chemistry was industrialise it.  Prior to him, reactions were carried out in clunky batch processes by small teams prpducing tiny amounts.  Haber figured out a way to manufacture ammonia (a key ingredient in fertilisers and therefore essential to food production) on a factory scale at a permanent output.  The Haber process allows us to set our starting materials and keep them in constant reaction for as long as we need, rather than relying on a dozen lab-coat wearing glassware experts measuring out precise doses.  Prior to his input, the main way to get fertiliser was from bat excrement and I think the Haber process is a better way of maintaining our food-economy than constantly feeding bats laxatives.

7. Gilbert Lewis
    Everyone knew by the mid-twentieth century that atoms were made of protons and neutrons in their nucleus with electrons orbiting in shells.  But nobody could figure out how they stuck together.  Berzelius had been banging on about atoms combining for centuries, but how exactly did they do it?  Lewis was the man who proposed "the chemical bond". 
    A chemical bond is a link between atoms where electrons are shared in a combined region of space, equally attracted halfway between  both nuclei.  Originally Lewis began drawing his atoms as cube-shapes with electrons on corners, but a lot of people misunderstood and thought he was claiming atoms were square.  He wasn't, he was just coming up with a way to keep track of electrons and their shells.  We still use his "dot" method today, except we draw everything in circles fortunately.  Lewis was sadly overlooked for the Nobel prize 40 times, which seems ridiculous to me because chemistry theory without the idea of bonding would be like mathematics without the equals sign.

8. Linus Pauling
    One afternoon, while suffering from a cold and reading sci-fi novels in bed, Linus Pauling decided to start cutting strips of paper out of his newspaper and began drawing atoms on them before folding them at what he calculated to be their correct bond angles.  By doing so, he solved an important protein structure that had been baffling biologists for decades.  This sounds like a kooky way to do chemistry but he wasn't practising origami.  Pauling was basing his paper-angles and shapes on quantum theory, the new branch of physics taking the science world by storm.  By applying quantum mechanics to chemical bonding and chemical bonding to proetin shape, Pauling created a bridge between physics, chemistry and biology, showing all three Sciences were part of the same dance.  He won the Nobel for chemistry, although it just as easily could have been awarded for the other two.
    He was arguably the greatest multi-disciplinary scientist of the twentieth century, writing books and papers in mathematics, physics, chemistry, biochemistry and also did a lot of work persuading governments to de-escalate their nuclear armament programs (for which he won his second Nobel prize).  Toward the end of his life, he went a bit off the deep end and claimed you could cure cancer by taking "mega-doses" of orange juice, but in his prime he was the chemist's Einstein.  Oh, and he came up with the helix structure for DNA before Watson and Crick.  So there.

9. Robert Burns Woodward
    Chemistry is split into four main disciplines.  Physical chemistry is about the mathematics of how chemicals move, flow and react (Arrhenius).  Quantum chemistry is getting down to the nitty gritty of how electrons behave within a molecule (Pauling) and then the study of elements and compounds is split into two branches: organic which is the study of carbon-based molecules, and inorgnaic...the study of everything else.  Inorganic chemistry was arguably invented by Davy and Berzelius, but the indisputed king of carbon was R.B. Woodward.
    Because most of the important molecules in the world are carbon-based, organic chemistry is mostly about analysing their structure - a process called spectroscopy - and then creating them ourselves - a process called synthesis.  Woodward invented both techniques.  Woodward was an architect of molecular dimensions, building such complex structures as quinine, cholesterol, chlorophyll and vitamin B12 from scratch.  Most of the medicines in your bathroom cabinet are only possible thanks to Woodward and his synthetic techniques.  A-level chemists in the UK are required to learn a huge number of synthetic maps charting how we turn one carbon molecule into another.  Woodward is the man who drew the map. 

10. Leo Baekeland
    If Baekeland's life were to have a title it would be How to get rich by doing simple organic chemistry.   Woodward was the master of complicated molecules, but Baekeland was the man who invented the most ubiquitous carbon-based substance in modern civilization.  Historically we classify human eras as the Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age, but the present day will almost certainly be known as the Plastic Age.
    Although a few chemists had accidentally discovered the process of sticking simple carbon-molecules together in chains and tangling them up - notably Eduard Simon and Alexander Parkes - Baekeland was the person who mastered it and gave the world its plastic.  Prior to him, most hard substances were either metal, rock, wood or shellac (a substance made from sticky beetle-egg-glue - ewwwww).  Baekeland envisioned a material we could make on demand, customise to fit a purpose, alter to be hard, soft, flexible, brittle or tough, and would not corrode over time.  The plastics industry, which gives us everything from stationary to furniture to breast implants made him an untold fortune.  Bravo Leo.  And thanks for all the ocean-garbage! 

If you're curious about the story of chemistry and how we developed the whole thing check out my book: Elemental - How the Periodic Table Can Now Explain (Nearly) Everything

Image credits:
Stanley Testube (not real name): bbc
Susan Frontczak (real name): businessinsider
Brandt: spark
Lavoisier: metmuseum
Berzelius: alchetron
Davy: aaccjnls
Arrhenius: thoughtco
Haber: handelsblatt
Lewis: atomicheritage
Pauling: thenewfire
Woodward: sbcs
Baekeland: investors

 Pleased to Eat You
    Yesterday I went to see the new Jason Statham movie The Meg directed by John Turtletaub.  Firstly, I can't say no to a Jason Statham movie and secondly, it's a movie about a giant prehistoric shark terrorising an oceanography lab.  If you don't want to see it, I question your moral values.
    I'll just get it out of the way, so we're clear form the beginning: I thoroughly enjoyed myself from start to finish.  It's not a film which takes itself seriously - the theme song is a Thai version of Oh Mickey You're So Fine - and if you shut your brain off for a couple of hours, you'll have a whale of a time.  Pun absolutely intended.  It's an over-the-top schlockbuster, full of jump scares and cool Statham one-liners so provided you can deactivate your snob-button, you'll find The Meg is dumb, fun and laced with chum.
    The plot is as follows.  A group of researchers are investigating the bottom of the Marianas trench when they discover the ocean floor isn't rock at all but a layer of liquid hydrogen-sulfide, concealing a second ocean beneath it!  While down there they accidentally provoke a megalodon, a thought-to-be-extinct giant shark which makes Jaws look like Nemo.  This is obviously a megaloproblem, so Jason Statham, the world's most skilled deep-sea-rescue-man (that's a job), is brought in to save the day.  Chaos ensues of course when the meg escapes its underwater prison and is released into the Pacific ocean, irritable and hungry.  Water nightmare!
    As I was outlining this premise to a friend, she complained that sharks get demonised too much in movies.  She pointed out that more people die from killer-bee stings than shark attacks and the view of sharks as rampant sea-murderers is a load of nonsense.  I pointed out in return that this is a film where Jason Statham roundhouse kicks a 75-foot dino-shark in the eyeball, so they're obviously not going for accuracy.  Nevertheless it got me thinking...how scientifically accurate is The Meg and can we justify its jawesome premise?  Let's take a look.  Oh, and fun fact: I did once teach a girl who studied oceanography and her name really was Meg.  Coincidence?  I think not.

Did Megalodons Really Exist?
    Absolutely.  The species Otodus Megalodon was the apex predator of Earth's oceans for at least 17 million years and the largest shark to ever swim the deep.  The surviving fossils largely consist of teeth and jawbones (the word megalodon literally means 'huge tooth') because shark skeletons are not hardened the way ours are, they're more like the cartilage in your ears, so we have to do most of our detective work from teeth and there's a fair amount we can say. 
    Radiometric dating puts the earliest known megalodon at about 20 million years old and the most recent at 2.6 million.  It's hard to say how big they were for definite due to the lack of full skeleton, but if we use the teeth as a guideline it probably grew to about 18 meters in length (60 feet), with 276 teeth in its bite, the longest of which were 18 centimeters long (8 inches).  That's bigger than a T-rex or a Mosasaurus. 
    As for their appearance, we used to picture them as larger Great Whites, but we've recently discovered their evolutionary lineage makes them closer related to modern day Blue Sharks (pictured below).  For a split second this might make them seem less scary, but please remember this was a shark the size of a double-decker bus.  It's maw was bigger than two humans side to side and it could have swallowed you without chewing.  We've found megalodon tooth marks and fragments in the bones of whale fossils from the same era so we know it was a carnivore, feeding on whales and probably smaller sharks.  We've also estimated its bite force to be roughly 180,000 Newtons.  For comparison, a human bite is 1,300 Newtons, so Megalodon was undoubtedly the biggest, baddest thing in the ocean.
    And it seems to have roamed far and wide from what we can tell, with tooth fossils found off the coast of every continent apart from Antarctica.  This tells us megalodons probably preferred warmer temperatures and likely stayed near the surface, moving from one basin to the next, feeding on anything unlucky enough to get in its path.     

Where Did They Go?
    Honestly we don't know what happened.  Around 2.6 million years ago something occured which caused widespread extinction for a lot of Earth's ocean life, an event called the Pliocene-Pleistocene boundary.  We have to remember that by "event" we're talking about something which took place over hundreds of thousands of years, so it wasn't quick and simple.  Nevertheless, during this period a third of the ocean's large animals started dying for some reason.
    All sorts of ideas have been put forward to account for the mass extinction, some pedestrian and some exotic.  For instance, the asteroid Eltanin hit us at this time somewhere off the coast of South America which would have put a lot of water into the atmosphere, potentially disrupting the climate.  The Earth was also entering a natural cooling-phase (one of the many ice ages) which would have chilled the oceans and reduced the territory for larger animals, as well as shrinking their food supply.  Even a supernova in the region of Scorpius-Centaurus has been put forward as a possible cause, releasing a bunch of neutrinos which could have shredded our ozone layer, leading to lots of nasty cancer for animals in the surface ocean.
    Nobody really knows what happened, but something during this period killed off the megalodons.  Hmmmm...how old is Jason Statham, really? 

Could They Still Be Lurking Down There?
    After seeing the movie, I read an interview with a scientist who said the chances of finding a live megalodon today would be like finding a dinosaur.  I dispute that.  Dinosaurs died off 65 million years ago but megalodons were still around 2.6 million!  Also, dinosaurs roamed the land and sooner or later the google-street-view camera would catch one. 
    The ocean is big, dark and largely unmapped.  We don't know a lot about what's going on down there, so if you wanted to hide a giant shark, the ocean's the best place to do so.  Well...obviously it would have to be the ocean.  It's a shark, tim. 
    Would it be possible for megalodons to still exist without us knowing about it.  If we're absolutely honest with ourselves (damn you scientific integrity!) the answer is pretty much no.  The temperatures megalodons enjoyed were warm which means it would have to live near the surface and we'd see them regularly.  I mean...how could you miss one?  If a megalodon wanted to go unnoticed, it would need to live in the extreme deep but there isn't much food down there and a shark, especially an epic one, needs to eat a lot.  Most sea creatures live in the top few hundred meters of the water and anything lower down is stuff like tubeworms and blobfishes, not sharks.
    Also, if I've not stressed this enough already, megalodons were really big.  Big creatures leave traces and we'd be finding whale remains with big bite-marks, not to mention megalodon corpses themselves.  Giant Squid had never been photographed until 2002, but their remains washed up regularly so we knew they existed. 
    I mean we're talking about something which was the apex predator for millions of years.  If it was roaming the waters today it would still be the apex predator and we'd know about it, mostly because the smaller apex predators like Great Whites would go down in number.
    The best reason to believe they're extinct though is the lack of modern teeth.  Sharks  lose and re-grow their whole set of gnashers every two weeks and the average shark sheds 40,000 teeth during its lifetime.  If you stand at the bottom of the ocean with an umbrella, it's basically raining shark-teeth down there, so if megalodons were still around, we'd be gathering their teeth with all the other ones, and we don't. 
    But wait, I hear you exclaim, a few years ago The Discovery Channel ran a series of documentaries with scientists presenting evidence for megalodons still being alive!  Shows entitled Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives (2013), Megalodon: The New Evidence (2014) and, my personal favourite title Shark of Darkness (2014) all claimed there are recent fossils, or footage and photographs of these sharks still around today.  Unfortunately, we have to remember that The Discovery Channel also aired shows called Voodoo Shark and Mermaids: The Body Found.
    Sadly, these "documentaries" were faked.  The scientists and eyewitnesses were actors, the  fossil evidence was discredited decades ago and the footage was doctored and photoshopped.  It's a bit of a shame that Discovery would do something like that, but they did run a disclaimer in small writing at the start of the show explaining it was not a real documentary and the evidence for these giant sharks existing is "controversial" aka "not real."

Could We Somehow Justify Them Being Alive Though?
    Alright, screw it.  Megalodons are awesome, so let's see if we can fudge a way to keep them alive.  I did it with dragons, I can do it with giant sharks too!  Evolution permits creatures to change habitat over time so maybe megalodons got used to cooling waters at a rapid rate (it's a push for natural selection to work this quick, but not completely outside the realm of plausibility).  Perhaps they could have acclimated to cold water and are living down in the dark depths of the abyss. 
    After all, the megamouth shark which grows up to 4 meters (15 feet) wasn't discovered until 1976 and the coelacanth fish which can grow up to 2 meters (6 feet) were thought to have been wiped out with the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, until we caught one in 1938.  Both species live in deep water and spend time in caves so it's clearly possible for large aquatic fauna to go unnoticed for years.  And missing a 15 foot thing is basically the same as missing a 75 foot thing, right??? 
    Besides, weird stuff goes on in the ocean all the time.  My favourite spook-story is the mystery of the 2003 Riggs shark tag.  Dave Riggs put a tag onto the fin of a 3 meter (10 foot) female Great White off the coast of Australia.  Four months later the tag showed up a long way from where he'd tagged it, without the shark.  By looking at the data, Riggs was able to figure out that something strange had happened.  At about 600 meters below the surface, the tag recorded a sudden increase in temperature within a few seconds.  It stayed at that temperature for 8 days, moving between the surface and lower depths, before suddenly going back to normal.  Something swallowed Riggs' shark and digested the tag for a week.
    The obvious conclusion is that the Great White was eaten by a slightly bigger Great White, or at least had a chunk bitten out of it.  Qualified oceanographers have said it was most likely a territorial dispute with another shark.  But I (not a qualified oceanographer) reckon it was either a megalodon or Jason Statham out for a swim and feeling peckish.
    Thing is, it's hard to prove the non-existence of something.  The only way to conclusively prove beyond doubt that megalodons are extinct would be to simultaneously scan every cubic inch of the ocean and see if it was there.  Since we've not done that and probably never will, we can't say for definite what isn't in the ocean.  But by the same logic, I could argue Hogwarts School for Fish-Wizards is down there with its own submerged trainline and you can't prove it's not.  I'm afraid arguing the case for megalodon is pushing biological knowledge a bit.  There's no evidence for them still being alive and a fair amount against.  But what's really cool is that The Meg acknowledges this and comes up with a fanciful way around the problem. 

Pushing The Boundary
    In The Meg the explanation given for why we aren't seeing megalodons is that they're living below a thick layer of hydrogen sulfide we've previously mistaken for the bottom of the Marianas trench.  To date only three people have been down to the bottom of Marianas and the sonar surveys we've done disagree on exactly how deep it is or what the shape of the bottom really looks like. 
    We also keep discovering new species of snailfish down there (sequel anyone??!?!?!?) so the film suggests there could be an ecosystem hidden below a boundary and that's where megalodon has been hiding all these years...until we came along and ruffled its gills. 
    The thing is, such boundaries really do exist!  Most bodies of water are stratified into layers based on heat and density.  The warmth from sunlight and wave-churning tends to be absorbed in the first few centimeters, and below that a colder layer sits in separation.  Below that, another layer continues several hundred meters down where the thickness and turbulence of water change phase.  It's not a sharp boundary like the one between oil and water, but the sea does have layers.  Different creatures inhabit these layers and animals we find in the lowest water-strata are often isolated from those in the upper ones.
    What's more, in the movie, the boundary between the ocean and "sub-ocean" is made from a layer of hydrogen sulfide and guess what...that's real too!  It's called a chemocline layer (in the film they refer to it as a thermocline for some reason) and it's a real phenomenon.  The Black Sea for example has a chemocline of hydrogen sulfide at certain times of year produced by bacteria on the seabed.  The density of hydrogen sulfide in liquid form is just thick/thin enough to separate an upper and lower layer of water, so it's not out of the question that some parts of the ocean floor are actually hydrogen sulfide clouds hiding tiny pockets of life below.
    I'm actually really impressed the film went to all this trouble of researching how such a boundary could arise...and got it mostly right!  The only problem is that the water below the chemocline would be significantly oxygen-depleted, so a creature living there wouldn't survive above.  If the megalodon truly was hiding under the hydrogen sulfide blanket it would never be able to surface because it would have adapted to an oxygen-starved environment and regular seawater would poison it.  However, it's more accurate Science than I was expecting to find, so bravo The Meg!  Jason Statham's Science ain't too shabby.

Based on the novel???
    The biggest shock to me while watching the credits for The Meg was seeing the words "based on the novel by Steve Alten" follow the screenwriting credits.  This movie was based on a book?  Apparently so.  Not only that, the book has seven sequels, one of which is titled Hell's Aquarium.  Apparently Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror was originally published in 1997 and optioned for movie rights but took twenty years to develop, presumably because they wanted to get their ocean chemistry right.  Hats off to them.  I'd like to imagine that given twenty years, my own recently published book about Chemistry will get a similar adaptation with Jason Statham playing the periodic table.  We've all got dreams.

Image credits
The Meg Poster: joblo
Statham and The Shark: geektyrant
Blue Shark: Naturalhistorymuseum
Baron von Statham: wikia
Beaker and Honeydew: YouTube
Underwater Train: pinterest
Nobel Prizes: criticalhit

The Regularisation Headline
    A few days ago, CBS announced they are finally going to retire their flagship sitcom The Big Bang Theory after 12 seasons.  I was shocked at this news.  I couldn’t believe it’s been going for so long.  It turns out that TBBT is actually the longest running multi-camera sitcom in history and is only approaching an end because Jim Parsons, who plays the show’s golden goose Sheldon Cooper, has finally tired of the role.
    People tend to assume I’m a fan of The Big Bang Theory and are mildly surprised that my feelings toward it are lukewarm at best.  “But you’re a Science a nerd!” they say, to which I reply yes I am, and proud of it.  But TBBT is not really a show for Science nerds, it’s a show about science nerds written by people who clearly aren’t.  
    Full disclosure though, I did quite like the first few seasons.  It was refreshing to see nerds as main characters rather than sidekicks to a hero.  Nerds are usually comic relief characters, so making a show about them as the stars felt different and worth paying attention to.   
    As a Science teacher I was also grateful to the show because it managed to introduce a lot of terms into the general vocabulary which students then asked me about.  It was one of the most watched shows on TV, pulling 15 million viewers per episode, and got people googling things like string theory and quantum mechanics, which is fantastic.  It also made an effort (sometimes at least) to portray Scientists as real people with personalities, and I always like seeing that.
    It was a well-written show too, with snappy dialogue and I'm sure if I ever wrote a sitcom it wouldn't be half as good, so this is not a stab at the show's writers, its cast or the production team.  I just want to express why my personal sensibilities didn't gel with it.  This is - shock and horror - an opinion piece, so take it all with a pinch of bias folks. 
    And no, this has nothing to do with the fact that people keep saying I remind them of "someone off Big Bang Theory".  I think they mean it as a compliment anyway???  Although that's probably a good place to start.

The Characterisation Expansion

Howard Wolowitz
Howard was the creepy sleaze-bag of the group.  The joke was that he objectified and leered after women, using ever-more elaborate ploys to trick them into dating him.  His schemes would always fall through by the end of the episode however and, after licking his wounds, he'd try again next time with a cunning new tactic.  Kind of like if Wile E Coyote was a sex-offender. 
    Howard reminded me of a live-action Glenn Quagmire from Family Guy.  In both cases the humour comes from off-colour shock jokes, which I'm fine with, but Family Guy kept Quagmire as a ludicrous side-character whereas TBBT made this thoroughly unlikable toad one of the heroes.  Personally I found it hard to cheer for someone whose motivations were so sinister.
    He’s played extremely well by Simon Helberg but he wasn’t really someone you could admire.  He epitomsed a certain type of nerd who saw women as characters in video-games to seduce by hitting the right combination of buttons and you could easily imagine him slipping something into someone’s drink and posting about it later on 4chan.  In fact, there were even stories which involved him videotaping women without their consent which, having lived with a guy who actually did that once, I just didn't get it.  Oh and he had an overbearing Jewish mother which I guess you have to be American or Jewish to get the humour in?

Rajesh Koothrappali
Raj was a more interesting character and they managed to mostly bypass the stereotype of him being Indian.  Occasionally they made reference to his heritage and demanding parents, but when you consider how far The Simpsons push racial stereotyping with Apu, Raj seems kind of mild.   
    Played superbly by Kunal Nayyar, the character himself wasn’t a problem for me.  He’s generally the most suave, meterosexual and thoughtful of the four guys and the one with the least hangups.  With one notable exception.  Raj’s main joke is…drumroll…he can’t talk to women unless drunk.  
    Something about that gag just seemed iffy for a prime time sitcom.  For one thing, it’s one of the oldest cliches in the book - nerdy guys can’t talk to women, fused with another cliche - being drunk gives you courage.  Neither of those things are true by the way - I’m a nerdy guy and I can talk to women fine, and the dutch-courage effect of alcohol is a placebo.  Sorry to bust ya bubble there.  
    My issue is that this running gag simply made me uncomfortable. Imagine if the situation were reversed and it was about a woman who could only go on dates with guys when she was inebriated.  We’d question the guys' ethics and consider them predatory.  Likewise, when Raj is taking his drugs and flirting with women, is this an OK joke for a show children watch?  He’s putting on a drug-induced persona and women are potentially taking advantage of that.  I’m not saying it was wrong to joke about it, it just left a bad taste in my mouth is all.

Leonard Hofstadter
Leonard was the most likeable of the four to me.  Certainly the most believable and relatable.  He was highly intelligent but that came at the price of being neurotic.  Smart enough to recognise social situations, just quick to forget them because he had other things on his mind.  A lot of nerds feel like this.  We know exactly what the expected behaviour is, we’ve just got other stuff to think about.
    Leonard was really easy to root for too.  He was a geek but wanted to be normal and settle into a quiet life with a nice girlfriend.  He wanted to be a muggle while holding onto his magical abilities, and that’s something a lot of nerds relate to.  He’s also fairly modest about his intellect, despite being a skilled quantum field theorist.  He wasn’t defined by his IQ or his profession, he just liked Science and sci-fi.  Who doesn’t?  
    Leonard should have been the main character in my eyes.  His constant internal conflict between adolescent obsession and living in the adult world were endearing, relatable and hilarious traits.  But he wasn’t quite the main character.  Sheldon was.

Sheldon Cooper
In his portrayal of Sheldon Cooper, Jim Parsons channels undiagnosed high-functioning autistic spectrum disorder - what used to be called Asberger’s syndrome.  This is typified by being intellectually remarkable often in one specific area, but socially uninterested and happily autonomous, often obsessed with ritual, detail and personal tastes which go beyond hobbies.
    The show never explicitly states Sheldon is autistic in fairness, but it’s assumed by everyone, including Parsons himself.  People on the autistic spectrum often come across a little weird or eccentric, so there's definitely potential for humourous situations there.  But the show makes out that Sheldon's autism is funny to the point of him not quite being human.   
    The joke usually came in two forms.  Either 1) he’s socially inept or 2) he’s intelligent which makes him overconfident.  He’s kind of like an anti-Homer Simpson, the key difference being that Homer’s overconfidence came from rank stupidity.  What also made Homer different to Sheldon, is that Homer is a sweet guy who cares about his wife and kids.  Sheldon is just a jerk.
    To be 100% clear on this, being on the autistic spectrum does not make you act like a callous ass but the implication with Sheldon seems to be that he is so uninterested in people’s social rules he has stopped caring about their feelings as well.  He dislikes anyone who doesn’t do things his way and is unprepared to compromise to the point of conflict.  He looks down on women and considers anybody intellectually inferior as worthy of contempt.  
    There are plenty of TV shows which center around an anti-hero clashing with normal people of course, but it’s hard to empathise with someone who is mean to everyone.  If you compare Sheldon with, say, Rick Sanchez from Rick and Morty or Gregory House from House MD, we again have antisocial geniuses who despise everyone else, but Rick and Morty/House's nihilistic tone made no secret of this.  Rick and House were written to be thoroughly unpleasant, and as we learn more about them, we realise how tortured and alone they are.  These were very dark themes for very dark shows.
    In TBBT they play the outcast-genius thing for laughs and I never found it funny.  I guess the reason is that a lot of Science nerds really are lonely and withdrawn.  A lot of them become bitter and sharp-tongued to keep people at bay, so while everyone was giggling at Sheldon as a pariah, I found myself wondering if he was alright.  
    I’m not saying the show shouldn’t have made fun of him - humour is all about taste and never right nor wrong, but I just didn’t find the joke particularly amusing.  For me, lonely, antisocial characters work fine in dramas or twisted sitcoms but it was always jarring seeing it played for hoots in TBBT.  Also, Sheldon’s favourite Star Trek character was Wesley Crusher.  Nobody likes Wesley.

Penny
Rachel from Friends but blonde.

The Feminine Assimilation Hypothesis
    After about four seasons the writers began to realise, I think, that they’d taken the characters as far as they could and the show was at risk of becoming stale.  Character humour is short-lived and after four years, it was probably time to stop.  But rather than doing that, they made the slightly unusual choice for a sitcom of introducing two new protagonists - girlfriends for Howard and Sheldon in the form of Bernadette and Amy.
    The show’s dynamic shifted significantly to watching the frustration of Penny, Bernadette and Amy deal with their nerdy boyfriends, with Raj as a neutral party.  I really respected the writer’s self-awareness in recognising the show could become old, but the execution began to bug me.
    My main problem was that the women were kind of normal.  Amy, played by Mayim Bialik (who actually has a PhD in neuroscience) had her moments of dry awkwardness but she was still written as an emotionally reasonable woman who didn’t “get” the nerd culture of the four men.  Her role was to soften Sheldon around the edges and extract his human side.  She was a nerd but wanted to be normal, so it was as if Sheldon was dating Leonard.  Perhaps they should have gone with that?      
    Bernadette was likewise, written as a calming, taming influence on Howard who brought him around to being a sort-of gentleman.  And so the show’s two most exagerrated characters were made to mellow.  Which takes away their purpose.
    It seems like I’m complaining about it both ways with Howard though.  I didn’t like him when he was an obnoxious sleaze and I found him boring when he became a “nice guy”.  But I think they shot themselves in the foot from day one.  Introducing a shock-character gives you two options over time.  Either keep him as he is (in which case he becomes tiresome) or rewrite him as an ordinary person (in which case he loses comedy value).  
    And as for Sheldon, he just treated Amy badly.  Apparently in later seasons he begins to treat her with kindness, and I’m vaguely aware that they settle and get married?  That’s sweet, but I never made it that far because Sheldon was just horrible to this good-hearted woman and I couldn't watch.  I was annoyed that the women were written as foils for the men.  Why couldn’t they be eccentric nerds too?  Why did the show’s dynamic have to be about women being human and nerds being nerds?  
    Gradually, the show started to lose the one thing which made it different for me.  It stopped being a show about nerd culture and became a show about relationships…like every other sitcom on the air.  The number of science-related subplots died down and it was suddenly all about dating and sex.  Basically it turned into Friends if all the male characters were Ross.  Ewwwww.
    What originally made the show unique got phased out and it became a kind of box-ticking exercise.  “Have we referenced a superhero movie yet this episode?”  Great.  Let’s get back to jokes about how men leave the toilet seat up and women love eating chocolate on their period.  It became indistinguishable from other sitcoms and that’s when I started to get bored.

The Demographic Algorithm
    The very opening scene of episode one of TBBT features Leonard and Sheldon discussing the infamous double-slit experiment with an analysis of the quantum measurement problem.  And it’s accurate.  I remember watching this and getting a warm glow of “hey that’s cool, they actually got it right!” something you don’t normally get watching fiction.  
    Moments later, they managed to spin this dialogue into a neat joke about how bizarre scientists can be and it made me feel hopeful for the series.  A sitcom in which the main characters talk accurately about Science sounded great.  This could be funny, educational and good for scientific exposure and depiction.  
    It was still poking fun at nerds a little of course, but I’ve got a sense of humour about myself - we often are obsessive about sci-fi shows, comic books and get a bit socially awkward sometimes.  That’s fair game.  By all means take your shots.  At least you’re getting the science right for once!
    Over the first few seasons, they managed to keep to this theme of poking fun at nerds while getting the facts right.  The characters would make reference to genuine discoveries, the equations on whiteboards in the background were authentic (I paused often enough to check) and they had debates about Star Trek I remember having myself.  There’s even one episode where a character makes a discovery which, in the real world, is coincidentally named after him.  The writers had clearly done their homework.
    A lot of people claimed this was therefore a show making fun of nerds but also being respectful; laughing at them and with them simultaneously.  And it did feel like that for a while.  Until it began to dawn on me that this wasn’t the spirit of things at all.  The jokes were still at the expense of how nerdy these guys were and how socially poor their behaviour was.  
    At no point does the show mock non-nerds for their scientifically empty lives.  The show doesn’t champion skepticism or reasoned discourse either, nor does it celebrate intellectual achievement and hard work in school.  It was just the same old “haha nerds are weird and don't get invited to the party!” joke most of us had to put up with through our teenage years.  Nerds were the main characters of the show yes, but they were still figures of ridicule.
    I began to suspect the way the show was written was that they wrote a sitcom, then got Science experts to add references and make it sound authentic.  I could imagine scripts looking something like “Sheldon describes a room being as messy as - INSERT SCIENTIFICALLY MESSY THING”.  Which I later found out is pretty much exactly what happens.
    There are Science consultants on the show who make sure the vocabulary is legitimate, but they are brought in long after the jokes are written.  To me this is the writers paying lip-service to nerds to stop them feeling teased…while simultaneously teasing them.  Watching TBBT for more than four seasons felt like unmasking the Scooby-Doo villain and discovering there was nothing magical going on at all.  Just someone trying to squeeze money out you.

The Mixed State Postulation
    The Big Bang Theory was a jumbled bag for me overall.  I like that there was a show about nerds on TV and I like that they did their research.  There were also nice Easter Eggs for sci-fi fans and  a lot of witty exchanges in the dialogue.  But they still went for the easy target of nerds being weird and portrayed us in a less than favourable light sometimes.  It also reinforced the stereotype of the dumb blonde waitress being sexually promiscuous and seemed fine with men talking down to their girlfriends, as long as the women "got the last laugh" in the final moments of the show.    
    Overall, I thought of TBBT as a kind of humane Victorian freak-show.  The freaks are treated well and there’s great information to be learned.  The keepers obviously care deeply about their pet freaks and members of the public are encouraged to get to know them as people.  But it is still, ultimately, a place where people pay to come and gawk at abnormality.
    If you want a show which really is made for nerds, you want Star Trek itself.  That was a show which included accurate Science, mixed with philosophy of Science, as part of the storylines and everyone in the show was a nerd of some sort. Plus it had robots and space battles.  
    In Star Trek there were also two Sheldon-esque characters: Spock in the original series and Data in Next Gen.  But what set these shows apart is that while both characters were socially clueless, they weren’t jerks and they were always respected.  There were misunderstandings and frustrations at times, which was played for both dramatic emphasis and for humour, but Star Trek had a deep respect for scientific curiosity and knowledge.  The nerds were championed and usually vindicated.  
    Sheldon says something super-smart on TBBT and Penny raises an eyebrow at his nerdiness, cue peals of laughter.  Spock says something super-smart on Star Trek and everyone listens to see if they can follow his logic.  That’s the difference between a show about nerds and a show for nerds.  In The Big Bang Theory nerds get pitiful charity-laughs for liking Science.  In Star Trek nerds get to live long and prosper.

Image credits
Cast lineup: eonline
Howard: charactour
Raj: Wikia
Leonard: Wikipedia
Sheldon: wornontv
Penny: Glamour
Roseanne: Federalist
Scooby-Doo: pinterest

Common Knowledge
    It's a well-known joke that men care about the size of a woman's chest and women care about the size of a man's wallet.  You've undoubtedly seen some hideous yet stupidly rich man in his nineties walking around with a 20-something super-model and thought "I know what she's after".  Similarly, you've probably seen guys lining up around the block for a vapid woman with no personality who just happens to be good-looking.  "Men are shallow" we scoff, feeling smug and holy about ourselves.  It seems we judge men for going after beauty and women for going after financial wealth, but is this fair?
    I recently saw a series of cynical YouTube videos in which a woman is approached by a man and asked on a date (harassed, really).  She turns him down but then the twist comes...he is revealed to be extremely wealthy e.g. he gets into a sports car, pulls a ton of notes from his pocket, or reveals himself to be the author of a popular Science book available now from Amazon.   Suddenly the woman reverses her stance and asks if the guy still wants to go on a date.  The man responds by laughing in her face and accusing her of being a "gold-digger".  Classy stuff.
    I can't help but feel it would be easy to do a gender-reversed version.  Some guy is approached by a traditionally homely woman and propositioned for a date, which he turns down.  Then the hilarious gag is revealed "oh that's a shame, because I'm asking for my friend..." cue woman suddenly appearing from behind a tree who is stupendously pretty and the man reverses his mind.  Television networks, I await your call.
    I suppose we could all try not judging other people for their relationship choices and accept that human beings are emotionally complicated, but where's the fun in that?  Everyone loves a gossip, so today I thought I'd look at the question of dating stereotypes and ask whether it's biologically accurate.  What do we look for in a partner and do these couples last? 
    Oh, I should point out that although this is always a family-friendly blog, I will be referencing the fact that humans (spoiler alert) have sex for the purposes of reproduction and fun.  I'm sorry we're like that as a species.  I'll see if I can do something about it!

What does the research say?
    Psychology research is always a minefield.  There are so many variables in human behaviour and social interactions that refuting a hypothesis is difficult.  Psychology is an invaluable branch of Science but its data is often more open to interpretation than physics, chemistry or biology.  Nobody ever debates that F = ma or that Helium has two electrons, but psychological studies are more broad.  This is a good thing in my view however, because the human mind is complex and context is everything.  We need to keep our understanding loosey-goosey otherwise we end up sticking to ideas that are precarious.
    One of the most famous studies carried out on human pairing was the 1978/1982 Clark & Hatfield study.  The experimental setup was simple.  At Florida State University, strangers were approached by members of the opposite sex and propostioned for a date or for sex. 
    The words used by each propositioning party were: "I've noticed you around, I find you very attractive, would you go to bed with me/go on a date with me?" A few years later these words from the research paper were remixed into the jazz-punk song Would You by Touch and Go, making it the only pop song to get its lyrics from a scientific journal.  I'm trying to persuade the other three members of my rock band to do a similar song with lyrics taken from this paper on quantum cosmology.  Fingers crossed.
    Clark and Hatfield found that both sexes were equally willing to go on a date (about 50% of both groups) but when it came to sex, the picture looked very different.  About 75% of the men immediately said yes to sex, while 0% of the women were up for it.  This would appear to confirm the breeding-selection hypothesis. 
    Obviously we've made the assumption that the people being approached were heterosexual.  That's unlikely to have been true but statistically, heterosexual behaviour is more common among humans, so the results shouldn't be skewed too much.  It looks like that's fairly cut and dried then: men are more willing to mate with a female after meeting them.  But what of the status preferences of women?
    One of the most shocking (to me, as a man) studies I ever came across is unfortunately one I can no longer find.  I remember Professor Robert Winston making reference to it in a documentary but I cannot find the original paper...anyone out there able to help?  The study carried out a simple experiment.  A group of women were positioned outside a restaurant and told to rank men for attractiveness as they pulled up in their cars.
    The twist was that on multiple occasions the same man walked past but with a different social status.  On the first attempt he drove up in a shabby, bruised car and got out in scruffy clothes and was ranked as a bad choice.  The same man, a few hours later, drove up in a swish sports car, an affluent suit and was ranked as an ideal choice by the women.  It's the exact same guy, yet different status made him literally unrecognisable. 
    As a man I found this result shocking, but that's because men tend to focus more on looks, and it's unlikely I would mis-recognise the same woman in different clothes.  Women I've spoken to about this study aren't shocked however.  A man's status really does change his attraction factor.
    So does that settle it?  Well...not so fast.  In 2015 Andreas Baranowski and Heiko Hecht updated the Clark/Hatfield study.  Initially they replicated the results on a modern campus and nightclub, finding it to be the same today as back then.  But in the second phase of the experiment they decided to do it in private.  Women and men were invited into a "dating agency" and asked to select partners for dating or sex, being reassured that the people's profiles had been vetted by the agency.  Each subject was shown ten pictures and asked to select who they would have sex with.
    Men on average selected just over three.  Women on average selected just under.  There is a slight difference to be sure, which perhaps confirms the hypothesis, but both men and women had closer behavioural patterns than Clark/Hatfield suggested.  It would appear that when men and women are asked about sex and it's done in private, with reassurance of safety, they're about even. 
    Perhaps one of the reasons women turn men down regularly is related to the fact that 45% of women have experienced some sort of sexual violence, coercion or intimidation from a man during their adult lives.  Maybe it's also because society condemns women for having sex, so accepting a proposal in public is a shameful thing? 
    I've sometimes heard men justify their sexual confidence (harassing of women) by saying it's  biology and everyone should accept it.  But this may not be true.  It looks like women and men are just as interested in sex, but the reason the discord arises is because women are treated worse than men, both by society and by men themselves.  More women are raped than men.  More women are shamed by their families/friends/colleagues/religious groups for having sex and so on.  It's possible the stereotype of women refusing sex is actually men's doing so they should stop complaining about women being so cautious?
    Maybe, just maybe, men need to stop harassing women or sexually intimidating them and defending their behaviour by saying "it's guys being guys."  Maybe if men treated women better on average, women wouldn't feel sexually intimidated and everyone would actually have more sex and society would be happier as a whole?  Just a thought.

What about love?
    What these studies look at is sexual attraction and the desire for breeding.  But where does emotional connection come in?  This is where things get not only optimistic, but surprisingly touching. 
    A 2014 study conducted by Elizabeth McClintock reviewed 1,507 couples and assessed where they were in terms of attraction to one another, relationship stability and how long the relationship lasted.  What she found, overwhelmingly, was that pairings based solely on attraction (physical or status) did not last.  What a shock.
    The model of men going for beautiful and women going for rich is definitely there and it can lead to a lot of relationships starting...but not surviving.  McClintock found that relationships which actually work best (happiest couples) and survived the longest were when people go for what she calls matching.  Simply put, nice guys pair with nice women.  Hot women pair with hot men.  Wealthy men pair with wealthy women and so on.
    A relationship where a rich man propositions an attractive woman and the two "hit it off" is definitely a common occurrence, because the woman gets security for raising kids and the man gets a beautiful partner, but such relationships are, statistically, unlikely to last or be happy.  It's a short term strategy only. 
    People should instead look for matches in personality...which sort of confirms another long-held truism.  Relationships built on attraction or convenience rarely work.  Personal connection wins out.  How about that?  Science actually confirms that loving relationships work better. 

Is Evolution Really That Sentimental?
     Arguably the world's leading expert on the evolutionary development of love, attraction and human relationships is David Buss of Austin University (much of whose ideas I used in this blog).  Buss has spent over thirty years studying differences between sexes and in one of his most famous studies (1986 with Michael Barnes) Buss asked hundreds of men and women to decide what features of a partner were most important to them. 
    Buss and Barnes found there was certainly a tendency for men to go for physical appearance and for women to seek wealth.  Men were slightly drawn to younger women and women to older men, but what they found was that the number-one thing both sexes looked for is simple...someone who treats you nicely.  Not someone who provides for you or someone who looks good for you - someone who is nice to you.
    Short-term attraction strategies are all about sizing someone up and that's when physical attraction or social status come into play.  But long-term success is about something so obvious it seems ridiculous we needed Scientists to research it.  But there you have it.  You might be a super wealthy man who owns a flashy sports car and a business; that will probably help you get women for short term sex.  And you might be a gorgeous woman with a voluptuous figure and flowing hair that will draw men's attention.  But if you want to build a relationship with someone you have to do something else.  Be kind to each other.
    But why did we develop this desire for connection over attraction?  As far as we can tell, while many animals exhibit sexual desire or social loyalty, deep feelings of love seem to be unique to humans.  Does it have an evolutionary advantage or is it simply an accident?  Poets, musicians, painters, authors, film-makers, scientists and philosophers have been grappling with that question for a long time and I don't think I can offer an answer.  Love does seem like an anomaly.
    After all, there is an alternative route which guarantees equal reproduction for all.  It’s the one chosen by bacteria...bypass sex altogether.  Bacteria reproduce autonomously, so they have no need to develop competition strategies which makes them more efficient breeders.  However, because there is no need to find a partner, there is also no need to develop the emotions which encourage it to happen.  Bacteria don’t feel companionship, they don’t feel love and they don’t feel empathy.  Personally, I think those features are worth hanging onto, accidental or otherwise.
    Love may indeed be a Darwinian screw-up.  But even if it is, it's one of the most important driving forces in our emotional lives.  Feelings of love, be they romantic, family-oriented or whatever, are the reason we're good to one another.  I might even go so far as to say that's why kindness is more important in a relationship than anything else.  A person who is attracted to you wants you as a possession - a person who feels compassion for you is going to treat you well and that is what makes you want to stay with them.
    I say on my home page and at the end of my book "Science will save our species".  It's become one of my catchphrases and I stand by it as a mantra.  But I think something else might be even more important.  Science is the tool we need to save our species, but a desire to be kind to each other tells us how to use that tool.  I think it's possible that kindness and love, more than Science, are the things which will save us from extinction.  They are perhaps the reason we will save not just ourselves, but each other as well.

Image credits
Rich man hot woman cartoon: nairobiwire
Censored: Rockcellarmagazine
Mystery: singledudetravel
Einstein and his cousin: fromthegrapevine
Men not equal to women: inclusivebusiness
Thoughtful statue: mikebonem
Heart in a box: tpenguinltg

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