I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That (44 page)
Read I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That Online
Authors: Ben Goldacre
Guardian
, 22 July 2006
So Theodore Gray bought a kilo and a half of pure sodium metal on eBay. At school, you probably dropped a crumb of it into water – or rather, you watched your chemistry teacher do that – and the sodium reacted with the water to produce sodium hydroxide (a nasty alkali) and some hydrogen gas. The reaction gave off lots of heat, which ignited the hydrogen, and so the little lump of sodium fizzed across the water with a nice flame.
Theodore Gray got some friends over, with refreshment, and launched a kilo of sodium into his private lake.
His reasoning was sound: if he tipped in some hydrochloric acid afterwards (‘Muriatic acid at any hardware store’), this would neutralise the sodium hydroxide, and the pond would be a little saltier. There’s no law against making slightly salty water.
That’s not quite how things worked out. After an initial large explosion from the first chunk, a series of secondary explosions occurred, producing one fairly large wedge that began hopping across the lake. It was thrown forty feet up into the air, then flew into the water at high speed, only to be thrown back into the air by the resulting explosion. It only takes a few of these skips to get several hundred feet in a few seconds. The partygoers were two hundred feet away, and ran for cover.
Now, you might be asking: where’s the bad science? Well: Sky’s popular flagship science programme has just started its new series. Last week I accused them of faking content. They tried to make me nervous about it. Now they’ve admitted that they definitely did fake those explosions. And they have also admitted that viewers were not told (or as they said last week: ‘but we always tell our viewers’). And they have admitted that they fake other stuff. In fact, they were so blasé about this that at one point they were even going to give me a list of other examples, but now they’ve changed their mind about that.
Here’s where it gets really elaborate: they don’t tell you explicitly that they fake stuff, but they now say that you are a fool not to assume that they fake their experiments: ‘The clue is in the title of the show, “
Brainiac Science Abuse
”, it’s an entertainment programme, it’s being made for an entertainment channel, it’s to be expected from the show.’
But it’s not. This is a programme that repeatedly tells viewers how reckless and dangerous and science it is – in a way that now feels slightly defensive. Now
Brainiac
claim they actually said ‘This is what happens if you stick rubidium in a bath,’ and then showed ‘a demonstration of what would happen’ (that’s just not true: it was a generic special effects explosion, and they said – repeatedly – that they were doing it for real). ‘We may as well have done it,’ they say: which is an interesting approach to science. But of course, they
did
do it: their scientific adviser dropped these metals into their bath, on camera, and unfortunately the bath didn’t blow up. That’s life. You can’t say that this ‘not exploding’ was somehow ‘wrong’, and that the fake explosions they broadcast were what ‘should’ have happened. What should have happened, when you drop the rubidium in the water, is exactly what did happen: not a lot.
Despite the fakery, of course,
Brainiac
gets massive ratings, and is praised in very high places for popularising science. So to me, this is a lot like the nutritionist question: Is it OK to lie to people about science, if it makes them eat vegetables? But more than that, it’s a question of who do you want to be your friend: the faker, who desperately insists he’s doing dangerous science, while setting off weak, staged, plastic explosions; or Theodore Gray, who buys a kilo and a half of sodium on the internet, and gets some friends over for a party, to chuck it in the lake?
1
Here’s My
… Foreword to the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway Guidebook
20 December 2013
I often tweet about my love for the RH&D
narrow gauge railway
, and this year they asked me to write an introduction for their guidebook. Some of the staff were worried by what I sent. But they were wrong. I love this railway.
The Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway has a strange, dreamlike existence, on the border between fantasy and reality. You leave Toytown in a cute miniature train, surrounded by excited children. But Disney this is not. Suddenly you’re riding through real life: past clothes lines, collapsing breezeblock walls, an abandoned washing machine in a back garden, chuffing along behind a miniature steam train. Finally, you’re ferried across a beautiful, windswept shingle peninsula, spotted with railway-carriage houses and abandoned shipping containers. Then you are delivered to the foot of a nuclear power station.
When I mentioned that huge, monolithic nuclear installation to the editor of this guidebook, he replied: ‘Do you know, I barely notice it these days.’ The two reactors are at least a hundred metres tall, humbling and majestic, on a 225-acre site. Nobody should ever play them down, and it’s fun to explore the perimeter.
This meeting of toy train sets and grim industrial purpose is what makes the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway so perfect. Toytown trains in amusement parks are annoying. Proper narrow-gauge railways have a history. When you stop being a child, and start herding children yourself, you notice the chinks in playtime. Now, when I see kids chasing each other through a carriage – on a rebuilt Welsh mining railway, say – I think: this dragged people to hard jobs, in dark pits, that most people today could barely imagine.
For the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway, the battle between childish fantasies and real life is even denser. It was conceived by two wealthy men, each obsessed with miniature railways, because they wanted their own to play with. Both were racing drivers, and one was a real-life Count. In the war it was used for serious freight work, while the world’s only miniature armoured train trundled up and down the track, monitoring the coast for invasion by the Germans. For the soldiers stationed here, amidst all the terror and uncertainty of war, it must have seemed like a very peculiar dream.
I’ve often fantasised about the same thing myself – combining grim reality and a very big train set – by moving to Dungeness. I could handle the travel time, five days a week, if the commute made adult life seem like a huge, silly game: through the fog, past the nuclear power station, waiting at a miniature station for my tiny train, then up to the mainline and on to meetings. All the while I’d know that my home, come nightfall, was a converted railway carriage, on a pile of shingle, by a nuclear power station, at the end of Toytown. Welcome to this very peculiar, working paradise.
If you like nerdy day trips, you should visit
www.nerdydaytrips.com
, a crowd-sourced website I built with friends, filled with thousands of weird days out from all over the world (although it’s recently been infested with normal days out too, after someone posted it on a museum curators’ mailing list). It’s great for planning a comprehensive nerd itinerary into any journey. For example, when you visit Dungeness for the RH&D Railway, it is compulsory to grow a WWII moustache and stop in at the
sound mirrors
, just one mile away. As you can see, when I did this, I found it all extremely exciting.
Guardian
, 1 February 2006
For the past week I’ve been tracking my girlfriend through her mobile phone. I can see exactly where she is, at any time of day or night, within 150 yards, as long as her phone is on. It’s been very interesting to find out about her day. Now I’m going to tell you how I did it.
But first: my girlfriend is a journalist, I had her permission (‘In principle …’), and this was all in the name of science. You have nothing to worry about, at least not from me.
First I had to get hold of her phone. This wasn’t difficult. We live together and she has no reason not to trust me, so she often leaves it lying around. I needed it for five minutes, to register it on a website I’d been told about. It looks as if this service is mainly for tracking stock and staff movements: I’ve shown the
Guardian
staff that it works, but they won’t let me tell you the name of the site (I agree). I ticked the website’s terms and conditions without reading them, put in my debit card details, and bought twenty-five GSM credits for £5 plus VAT.
My girlfriend’s phone vibrated with a new text message: ‘Ben Goldacre has requested to add you to their Buddy List! To accept, simply reply to this message with “LOCATE”.’ I sent the reply. The phone vibrated again. A second text arrived: ‘WARNING: [This service] allows other people to know where you are. For your own safety make sure that you know who is locating you.’ I deleted both these text messages, and put the phone back in my girlfriend’s bag.
On the website, I see the familiar number in my list of ‘GSM devices’, and click ‘Locate’. A map appears of the area where we live, with a person-shaped blob in the middle, roughly a hundred yards from our home. The phone doesn’t make a sound. It gives no sign of what I’m doing.
I can’t quite believe my eyes. I knew the police could do this, and phone companies, but not any creepy boyfriend with five minutes’ access. There is nothing on my partner’s phone that could possibly let her know that I’m tracking her location. I set the website to record her location at regular intervals, and plot her path on the map, so I can view it at my leisure. Even with her permission, it felt very wrong.
By the time she got home, I was over-excited, and the secret lasted less than a minute. To my disappointment, she wasn’t freaked out. But then, I already knew that she hadn’t gone to her ex’s flat, and she’d only really been at work all day, apart from one trip to the bank. It felt strangely protective, looking down on her, following her silently. If there’s anyone who might want to track you, and they’ve had access to your phone, call your phone company, create havoc, and make them find out if there’s a trace on your phone.
Staying Beautiful
Is Easy to Do
Guardian
, 1 May 2003
It’s been a great week for Bad Science spotters. Bob Conklin writes in about Seasilver nutrient potion. Kirlian photography of your aura will demonstrate an ‘increase in energy’ after taking it, and just one capful will deliver ‘EVERY [sic] vitamin, macro mineral, trace mineral, amino acid, enzyme, and bio-element known to man’ straight to your system. As Bob says: ‘I’m not sure I want every enzyme and bio-element known to man in my mouth.’
Dr Victoria Kaziewicz sends us even more preposterous pseudo-science: ‘In a book called
How to be Beautiful
, by Kathleen Baird Murray, you can read that beauty products containing natural ingredients are preferable because naturally occurring substances are irregularly shaped like the substances making up your own body, while manufactured chemicals are perfect spheres.’
Dr Cicely Marston writes about an easier way to stay beautiful. A team from Harvard School of Public Health took six years to find that watching television for an extra two hours a day increased the rate of obesity by 25 per cent in 50,000 women. Magnificently obvious – but possibly less obvious is why they were only looking at women.
Picky Bad Science Spotter of the Week Award goes to Jennifer Leech, who has been bothered for decades by an issue in
Lord of the Flies
. ‘In the book it says that Piggy has myopia. So,’ she continues, ‘how can the children marooned on that island have used his glasses to start a fire?’
There’s hope on the horizon for the so-called Sars epidemic (as opposed to malaria, which kills a million people a year, and tuberculosis, which kills three million). Richard Spacek sent us a full-page ad from Canada’s
Saturday National Post
from the Dr Rath Health Foundation: ‘It is a scientific fact that all viruses that have been scientifically investigated can be blocked by specific natural essential nutrients.’ The fact that life-saving information ‘is being withheld from the people of the world is irresponsible and must be stopped immediately’. Never let it be said that I am part of any global conspiracy to suppress this vital information.