I do quite a lot of talks based on my book Inflight Science , and one thing that is guaranteed to raise a bit of an argument is when I cover how wings work. If we were taught anything about the reason why wings lift a plane at school, it is likely to be down to the Bernoulli principle. This is great, because it's really easy to demonstrate. Just get yourself a bit of paper (say about 1/4 of a sheet of A4 or Letter), hold it at one end so it droops and blow over the top of it. The droopy bit rises up as it experiences lift. And that's how a wing works, we're told! Only, it isn't. DIY Bernoulli When you blow over the bit of paper you get the air moving over the top of it, thinning it out a little. So there's less pressure on the top than the bottom (where the air isn't moving), and you get lift. That's the Bernoulli effect. A wing is different, of course. The air is moving over the top and the bottom. The explanation usually given is that the wing is ...

One of my best selling books is The God Effect , which describes the truly remarkable phenomenon of quantum entanglement. I do sometimes wonder if some of the sales of the book arise not from an interest in quantum physics, but rather because it sounds like a slightly wacky religious book. That was certainly never my intention, though obviously I wanted it to have an eye-catching title. The name was inspired by Nobel Prize winner Leon Lederman's nickname for the Higgs boson, 'the God particle.' It's possible to look at the mechanism this hypothetical particle is thought to give other particles mass as a kind of entanglement, so it seemed reasonable to call entanglement 'the God effect', especially as entanglement does produce such remarkable outcomes. I really don't think it was hyperbole to subtitle the book 'science's strangest phenomenon.' I now learn from New Scientist that Lederman originally refered to the Higgs boson as 'the god...

A pocket computer Every now and then someone proudly produces a ten-year-old mobile phone and announces that they have no need for modern technology. ‘It makes phone calls and it texts,’ they say. ‘What more do I need?’ But they miss the point. As the organizers of the Mobile World Congress are quick to highlight, mobile technology is far more than just phoning on the move. It’s for books, monitoring health, navigation, making payments and connecting with friends. It might involve a Kindle or an iPad, a GPS device or a widget to give keyless access to your car. For the moment, though, the smartphone is the most significant device – and this is where our smug old technology owner misses the point. A smartphone isn’t a mobile phone that does some other fancy stuff. It’s a genuine, accept no substitutes, pocket computer (as mentioned in the Blondie song – about 2’ 41’’ in the video ) that happens to be a phone as well. At one point most technology pundits would have told you the P...

I saw a TV advert the other day that left me just short of jumping up and down, screaming and throwing things at the television. It took the 'dubious promise' technique to a whole new level. The advert in question was for the quaintly named Arm and Hammer toothpaste. In it, ex-Blue Peter presenter Katy Hill was very enthuasiastic about their whitening toothpaste. She told us it would make your teeth 'up to 3 shades whiter or your money back.' Let's examine that claim. 'Up to' is of course the magnificent marketing weasel words term. 'Up to' is totally meaningless in that it can be anything from zero to the amount specified. So 'Up to 50% off' could mean 'nothing off'. The '3 shades whiter' bit is sort of okay. No normal punter probably knows what three shades whiter looks like, but there is an official definition. But here's the killer. 'Or your money back.' By combining 'Up to' and 'or your money...

This is apparently Joshua Bell - the Brian Cox of the classical music world? I was interested to read on Jen Campbell's blog about a Washington Post experiment where Joshua Bell, who is apparently a world famous violinist (I'm afraid I'd never heard of him), playing a violin 'worth $3.5 million' busking in a subway (admittedly only for 45 minutes - come on Josh, where's your staying power?) raised a mere $32. Apparently 'only 6 people stopped and stayed for a while. About 20 gave him money'. He was playing some Bach, apparently including 'one of the most intricate pieces ever written.' Now the interesting thing about this experiment is that it was supposed to give insights into how we perceive beauty and recognize talent. But what I got out of it was quite different - it seems to me it shows how we over-value a form of entertainment that frankly isn't to most people's tastes. And that often there are more important things in life t...

Roses are red, violets are blue... actually, when you think about it, it's a load of rubbish. Roses are any old colour, and violets are, well, violet. The clue's in the name. But one thing that is, without doubt, red is blood. Its colour is its most dramatic quality. And yet the reason it's red is often given wrongly. 'Ah yes,' someone will wisely observe. 'Blood is red because of the iron in it. Like rust.' Well, yes, red blood cells are mostly haemoglobin, and the key characteristic of that interesting compound is four iron atoms. But as far as the colour goes it's pure coincidence. Find out why - and much more about haemoglobin - in the latest Royal Society of Chemistry podcast on haemoglobin. Click here to listen...

Serious music snobs will wince, but when I'm driving I quite often tune to Classic FM. Okay they sometimes play opera, in which case I have to switch to another station, and they play far too much Mozart, but their 'bitty excerpts' approach is actually more suited to filling in on a 15 minute drive than Radio 3. There are three classes of music they play that I genuinely enjoy: My kinda music - Tudorbethan  church music, Bach, Stravinsky, Vaughan Williams... an eclectic enough taste to hit on occasionally Nostalgia music - My father had very different musical tastes to me. I was brought up on a diet of the standard piano concertos, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky Korsakov, Mendelssohn - the romantic greats that were so popular back then. This isn't music I have on my iPod, but it brings all kinds of memories back Genuine discoveries - I admit it's not very often (okay it has been twice), but occasionally they play something I don't know and really want to know. So far ...

Why couldn't they just say '70'? What is the human lifespan? We still tend to hold on to a magic number from the Bible – “three score years and ten” or seventy years as an idea of the natural length of life, but what has human life expectancy really been like through history? Average life expectancy has grown phenomenally in the last hundred years. From the dawn of history through to the nineteenth century, average life expectancy has been between 25 and 35. Now it is in the high 60s, and higher still outside Third World countries. How, then, did the writers of the Bible come up with the over-inflated but visionary figure of 70? This is because average figures can be very misleading. The historical figures are dragged down by a very high infant mortality rate. Before modern medicine, most children would not make it to adulthood. Similarly, many women died while giving birth, in their twenties or younger. If early deaths are excluded from the average, lifespans in the...

Ever wondered what light is? In 1905, Einstein boldly made the assumption that light came in the form of particles. This caught everyone by surprise, because if there was one thing everyone was certain about, it was that light was a wave. To be fair, Isaac Newton had thought that light was a stream of particles, but by the start of the twentieth century this idea had been discarded. Thomas Young showed in a beautifully simple experiment in 1801 that light could produce interference patterns when it passed through a pair of narrow slits. Young was pretty versatile: he was a medical doctor, brought the concept of elasticity to engineering, produced mortality tables to help insurance companies to set their premiums and made the first partial translation of Egyptian hieroglyphs. The mingled beams from Young's slits threw shadings of light and dark onto a screen, corresponding to the addition and subtraction of the ripples in light waves, just as waves interacted on the surface of...

For a while now I've toyed with getting some sort of TV-internet integrating kind of box. I wavered when technology guru Dave Howkins commented how brilliant the Western Digital WD TV Live box was, but in the end I plumped for an Apple TV - but was this a good move? We'll see. The idea of these boxes is to integrate internet content with your TV to make the UltimateViewingExperience TM . Sounds like the kind of thing that's good in principle, but somehow never quite works. So I forked out the not unreasonable £90 to £99 (depending where you buy it) for an Apple TV. First observation it's tiny. Ridiculously small. I've had power supplies bigger than this box. Still, whap in the cables and let's go (note, btw, it doesn't come with an HDMI cable, you need to buy one). The outcome - I am genuinely pleasantly surprised. I can control the thing with the supplied (also rather small, but beautifully formed) remote, or an app on my iPhone or iPad. The main sc...

We're lucky, living in Swindon having a designer outlet centre on our doorstep, but we thought we'd give the Bicester equivalent a try. What a nightmare. I have never been in such a badly laid out car park. No indication how to get to the upper level, no idea if the lanes were one way (some people clearly thought so from 5 near collisions). The 'village' itself has no maps up, just paper ones. And catering was ludicrous - vastly under supplied. You either queued just to get in or sat outside in the rain. Ok the shops were ok (though I hate the way the staff keep speaking to you - if I want help I'll ask for it), but mostly too small and crowded. Won't be coming here again.

One of the most enjoyable sidelines of having books published is that sometimes you get foreign translations. These tend to disappear into the ether, as there is inevitably a long delay while they get translated and then, with any luck, out of the blue, a copy of the translation drops on my door mat. I say 'with any luck' as I'm still waiting for copies of translations of some business books from around 7 years ago. Sometimes the foreign publisher doesn't bother to send the requisite copies... but usually they do. I've just had two of my popular science books translated into German. The first is Inflight Science, which has appeared with the impressively long title 'Warum Tee im Flugzeug nicht schmeckt und Wolken nicht vom Himmel fallen', which according to my rusty schoolboy German translates as Why tea is tasteless on a plane and clouds don't fall from the sky . Try asking for that in a hurry in Vaterstones. The second one (which I haven't rec...

I frequently give talks in schools, which makes a great break from writing, and is an experience I really enjoy. (If you are a school and want to know more, see the talks page on my website for full details.) It's not just a matter of getting away from a computer, unlike many people I get a real buzz out of public speaking. Doing this has taken me all over the country. But I was a little surprise to get an email asking me to speak to an American school class. Not a bad venue for a school talk (but it was snowier today) My books sell pretty well in the US (one of my two main publishers is the excellent US publisher, St. Martin's Press), so I wasn't totally surprised to hear from someone over there, but I was all prepared to get back to them saying 'Sorry, but it's rather a long way to travel' when I read the email a little more closely. It seemed that the class from the Wakefield Country Day School of Huntly, VA was taking an educational visit to the UK. An...

Something I try to get in books and talks that an awful lot of people presenting science skim over is that science isn't about absolute fact. All science can ever be is our best guess given the current data. Tomorrow new data may emerge that totally overthrows our current thinking. This has happened repeatedly in the past. Something like Newton's laws of motion can seem set in stone (hence the 'laws' label, which I don't think is a good idea). And then along comes Einstein and shows they are wrong. Not wrong enough to throw them away - they still work well in many circumstances - but wrong nonetheless. This is why I get a bit irritated when popular science presenters and writers make sweeping statements like 'the universe began 13.7 billion years ago in the big bang.' What they should be saying is 'according to our best supported current theory, which fits the data well (though it's not entirely surprising as bits of it have been changed to do so...

I get plenty of unsolicited emails because my email address is publically available on a website. I don't mind too much because just occasionally amongst the dross I get an email that gives me so much pleasure that it's worth the drudgery of sweeping away the rubbish. And one came today. The image to the right is the opening of the email. In it we learn that William O'Connor (I presume that is he in the photo): boasts over 30 years in active mediumship and psychic consultations with a wide array of achievements including TV and Radio. William has been active in the spiritualist movement in Scotland for many years not to mention psychic floor shows in front of large audiences. What's more: William and his psychics will be at the Body & Soul Fair at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on 25th and 26th February. Our psychics will be available to provide private readings, 20 minutes for £30. Demand is sure to be high so book your reading now, for a time which suits you! Ju...

Every now and then, when I've nothing better to do, I examine the backs of cosmetic bottles and other gubbins that are found lying around the house. (Yes, this is the kind of exciting life a science writer has.) What I see on the back of some of those bottles is a mystery to me. Actually, a number of mysteries. Mystery #1 is why some products have a contents list and some don't. The fact that some don't seems to imply it isn't required. So why do it at all? (It could be it's specific products, or it's on the cardboard box instead. Dunno.) Mystery #2 is who do they think they are fooling with 'aqua'? Pretty well all cosmetic bottle contents have water as their number one ingredient, but the manufacturer seems to think that they can make it sound more impressive by calling it 'aqua'. Only they also seem obliged to give the game away as it is, in fact, always called 'aqua (water)'. So why bother with the 'aqua'? It just makes y...

Occasionally someone will come up with a web app that hasn't got any real benefit in life, the universe and everything, but that's great fun. And surely this is not a bad thing. Thanks to @thecreativepenn for pointing out Yasiv.com . Put in a product listed on Amazon.com and you will see a diagram of related purchases. The developer sees this as being a good way to think 'if other people bought this as well, then perhaps I should look at these too.' But also if you happen to have produced a product that's sold on Amazon, then it is rather fun to take a look at these 'related' products and what other things people bought. It doesn't just apply to books - you can do it with anything on Amazon.com (though not at the moment .co.uk - I emailed the developer to ask, and it's on his to-do list). Give it a try... Quick update as of 8 February - I'm pleased to say you can now select the Amazon of your choice from the list at the bottom of the scre...

I had a lovely time on Wednesday evening giving a talk based on How to Build a Time Machine at Pewsey Library. I don't know what it is about Pewsey, but this is the second time I've spoken there, and again we had some brilliant questions, which tend to range over all of physics. A couple were on gravity, which is rather nice as it's the subject of my next St Martin's Press book, due out later this year. And one was particularly timely. Someone asked, given that both electricity and magnetism have positive and negative aspects, was there anything that repelled gravitationally, rather than attracting. It's timely because an experiment is underway to try to determine whether antimatter is gravitationally attracted by matter or repelled by it. I had always assumed antimatter was just like ordinary matter, behaving exactly the same way in everything except its electrical charge. So I was quite surprised when reading a book by George Gamow on gravity that he suggest...

I'm in the editing process on a book at the moment, and had mentioned the idea of the left brain/right brain split in terms of creativity. There are two concepts involved here. One is that you effectively have two brains. The left and right halves are pretty well separate, joined only at the corpus collosum, the big bundle of nerves at the back. The second is that the we have two distinct modes of operation, one is 'left brain' thinking that deals with the logical, sequential, verbal, rational, analytic, linear style of thinking. The other, 'right brain' thinking deals with the overview, spatial thinking, colour, art, imagery and the like. The assertion is that for creativity it is good to have both sides of the brain active, but when we settle down in a meeting (say) we tend to plug solidly into left brain mode. Now my editor pointed out that there as been some doubt cast on the left brain/right brain split in this regard. (And, to be fair, I had actually said th...

If you've been around here recently you would have heard that the UK edition of How to Build a Time Machine , which is confusingly called Build Your Own Time Machine over here, is out and about with a rather smart retro cover. I've recently discovered a wonderful coincidence concerning the cover. One chapter of the book is dedicated to Ronald Mallett, an American physics professor who has spent his life working on the general relativity and its applications to time travel. He was inspired to do this because his father died when he was a boy, and when he came across the concept of a time machine he realised that he wanted to make one of these to go back and see his dad again. The initial idea came to young Ron while reading a comic book version of the H. G. Wells classic, The Time Machine . And here's the wonderful coincidence (thanks to tbrosz on Litopia for pointing this out). The UK cover isn't just a pastiche of the old science fiction style, it is based on a s...