The Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation undertakes research and development in nuclear science and technology. This has wide application including nuclear medicine, atmospheric monitoring, materials engineering, neutron scattering and climate change research.
ANSTO is also very active in science communication, and one of their major community engagement projects is Fact or Fiction, a 90 minute show where the audience watch clips of
classic sci-fi hits before voting
on whether the technology featured is actual science fact or pure
science fiction. Once the audience voting has been conducted, an ANSTO
scientist critiques the science featured in the film. They have also run a Fact or Fiction Survey, the results of which are illustrative of the general public understanding of science in everyday life. Another effort ANSTO is conducting is Neural Knitworks, where knitted neurons join together to create a textile brain installation.
I spoke with Rod Dowler from ANSTO's Discovery Centre about their science communication efforts, and in particular, Fact or Fiction. Listen to this show here:
In the podcast, we mentioned a song about hoverboards. I would have loved to have put it in the show, but that wouldn't be legal. So if you'd like to hear it, stream it below or buy it from iTunes right here:
James Bond is likely to be impotent, at high risk of liver disease, and the fact he likes his martini "shaken, not stirred" is because of alcohol-induced tremors.
If you weren't already convinced that a real-life James Bond would be a terrible spy - he tells people his actual name for goodness sake - the article Were James Bond’s drinks shaken because of alcohol induced tremor? outlines the likely health issues Britain's most famous fictional spy would be suffering in real life due to his outrageous alcoholism.
The researchers read all 14 James Bond books and noted down each time he had a drink, and how much. They also noted when he was unable to drink - for instance, when incarcerated. Not including the days when he was unable to drink, they found his
weekly alcohol consumption to be 92 units (standard drinks in Australia - 10 ml of pure alcohol), over four times the
recommended amount. His maximum daily consumption was 49.8 units. Out of the 87.5 days he was able to drink, he only had 12.5 alcohol free days.
This type of behaviour is not consistent with his Lothario character, given that his sexual function is likely to be severely impaired by his drinking. It's also not particularly consistent with his ability to shoot straight outside of the bedroom, where sobriety is a necessity to defeat the bad guys. On the other hand, drinking is likely to have decreased his risk aversion, and previous studies have shown that drinking encourages unsafe sex.
But before you become too crushed by the fact that a fictional hero might not actually be scientifically sound, perhaps Bond is smarter than the authors of this report suspect. A 1999 report Shaken, not stirred: bioanalytical study of the antioxidant activities of martinisfound that shaken martinis have superior antioxidant activity and this could have decreased his risk of cataracts and cardiovascular disease. There is hope. I don't feel as bad as I did when I discovered that Santa Claus is a fat, diabetic drunk.
Here's Bond in drinking action in Casino Royale.
And here's a handy infographic:
References: Graham Johnson, Indra Neil Guha & Patrick Davies (2013). Were James Bond’s drinks shaken because of alcohol induced tremor? BMJ DOI: 10.1136/bmj.f7255
Trevithick CC, Chartrand MM, Wahlman J, Rahman F, Hirst M, & Trevithick JR (1999). Shaken, not stirred: bioanalytical study of the antioxidant activities of martinis. BMJ (Clinical research ed.), 319 (7225), 1600-2 PMID: 10600955
In the second of a two part series on zombies, this week we go deeper in the dark world of the undead. In part one we managed, through a combination of drugs, to create zombie-like creatures who were sluggish and largely brain-dead. This week we have a shot at recreating the zombies of films such as I am Legend - creatures created through the transmission of a virus, who are filled with rage and enjoy the taste of brains. Topics covered include:
Mad cow disease and the use of prions to transmit disease,
Chimpanzees who eat brains,
Methamphetamines for the creation of rage,
Mathematical modelling a zombie pandemic and how the zombies could do this sustainably.
Somehow we ended up proposing a "Planet of the zombie apes" movie idea, and a methamphetamine-infused biodome. It might not pass an ethics committee. Tune in to this episode here.
This week we're inhabiting the nexus of science, pop culture and science fiction. The topic of discussion is Time Travel and how it is portrayed in the movies. There's a little bit of philosophy, a little bit of physics, a dash of the paranormal, and a lot of Dr Boob, who is once again the driving force of this podcast!
If you are interested in Andrew Basiago and Project Pegasus, which is mentioned in this show, you can find more here. If you want to organise your own time traveller convention, or if you can think of a good experiment that BOOB could stand for, let us know.
This is part one of a two part series on time travel and the movies - part two will be out shortly.
Tune in to this episode here.
Science in the movies is a topic we've looked at a few times here on the blog. But this one is for the pure mathematicians. Check out this preview to the upcoming flick "Travelling Salesman".
I love these kinds of films - overly melodramatic acting, a slight misrepresentation of the science behind the plot (which is OK by me as this is a movie), government conspiracies, and mysterious music. The name "Travelling Salesman" comes from the famous mathematical Travelling Salesman Problem in which a salesman needs to visit a numerous destinations and wishes to do it in the shortest time. Whilst this may seem to be a simple problem, it is one of the most studied problems in mathematics. The more destinations involved, the more difficult to solve and in general there is no algorithm that can find the best answer. Brute force methods (that is, computing every possible solution and then finding the best) are computationally difficult, and with too many destinations, impossible. Hence mathematicians often use heuristics which find good, although not necessarily optimal, solutions quickly.
The premise of the movie is that the famous P vs NP problem has been solved. I'm not a pure mathematician, so I'll do my best here... P problems are those whose solutions can be found quickly (in Polynomial time, hence the P). NP problems are those whose solutions can not be found quickly, but if somehow a solution is produced using some extra information, it is easy to check that this solution is the best one (in polynomial time). Solving these problems take Non-deterministic Polynomial time - hence NP. A good example to show this is a jigsaw puzzle - finding a solution may be very difficult (and it's probably most accurate to image a blind person doing the puzzle), but it only takes a quick glance to see if any solution is correct.
The question that mathematicians ask is whether P=NP - which means, are there algorithms out there that solve seemingly NP problems in polynomial time? We haven't found any yet and mathematicians tend to think that P does not equal NP, but there is currently no proof. Proving this one way or the other is one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems selected by the Clay Mathematics Institute and carries a US$ 1,000,000 prize for the first correct solution.
But why do we care? One of the reasons is that modern cryptography is based on the fact that P does not equal NP - this is the premise of the movie. Modern codes start with a pair of large prime numbers p1 and p2 and multiply them together to give m=p1p2. The number m is released to the public, but p1 and p2 are kept secret. To crack the code you have to find
p1 and p2, given the value of m. It turns out that finding the prime factors of large numbers (100+ digits) is exceptionally difficult, although checking an answer is very easy. It is thought to be an NP problem. But if indeed P does equal NP, this suggests that out there somewhere is an algorithm that could solve this problem in quick time, meaning that modern encryption codes are vulnerable.
They don't give too much away in the preview, but I suspect what happens is they prove P=NP, although the example of looking for something hidden in the desert seems like a P problem (you just check out under each grain of sand, which would be easy, although it's a nice illustration of the problem). We stretch the science here a bit - even if you prove P=NP, you still need to find the appropriate algorithm for the problem, which has never been done. But hey, it's a movie, and we don't pull Terminator up on its stretching of science!
There is a very good write up of the P vs NP problem over on Plus - check it out, it does a much more thorough job than I do!
Is teleportation possible in the real world, or only in the world of science fiction?
In this very special episode, Dr Boob takes the reigns and leads
us on a journey through teleportation, whether or not
physics allows it and even if it does, can we technologically achieve
it? What are the implications if we recreate someone in another spot -
what about their soul? Does such a thing exist? And even if you can
technologically achieve this, is it possible to reanimate a copy of
someone? What do you do with their original version, if you have
simply copied them? This could be considered cloning, which brings in ethical
questions.
Perhaps wormholes could be a solution to this
problem, but we haven't found any yet - however they are, as physicists
like to say, theoretically possible.
Tune in to this very entertaining episode (and I can say this without any false modesty as Dr Boob did it all himself) here.
Ever wondered what good Twitter actually does? Personally, I love it, but really, is it anything but noise?
One of the pipe dreams for online social media is the ability to track opinions and interests in real time. In their paper Predicting the Future With Social Media, Sitaram Asur and Bernardo A. Huberman have not only tracked live opinion on movies, but used it to predict their future success.
After examining the rate of chatter from almost 3 million movie tweets, the researchers constructed a linear regression model for predicting box-office revenues of movies in advance of their release. These results outperformed the Hollywood Stock Exchange, a market in which people can buy and sell virtual shares in actors, directors and individual movies and produces unusually accurate predictions of film popularity.
There is a strong correlation between the amount of tweets concerning a forthcoming film, and its opening weekend box office return. The rate of tweeting about a movie was determined by simply counting the number of tweets containing the movie name. The next step was to predict box office returns beyond the opening weekend, and this was achieved by including "sentiment" as a factor. Sentiment analysis is a fascinating area of linguistic study. Language classifiers were used to label the text associated with the movie tweet as Positive, Negative or Neutral. Adding these as factors into the regression significantly increased the researchers' ability to predict the box office returns beyond the opening weekend.
These results are intuitive - before a movie is released, potential viewers do not know whether they will like the movie and so simply the number of tweets about a movie gives an indicator of movie "buzz" and correlates with the number of people attending the opening weekend. Once a movie is released and people start forming opinions, movie tweets start to contain sentiment. Negative tweets, whilst they have little effect on the opening box office as no one has yet seen the film, have a strong influence on further returns. Likewise for positive tweets.
The question of cause and effect is very interesting. Does a high number of tweets about a movie actually cause a strong box office return, or are they correlated simply because the twitter and movie audience are arguably the same? Another way of asking this question is to ask whether an advertiser could change future box office returns by deliberately tweeting multiple times or with a particular sentiment.
I had a fascinating chat with Sitaram about this work. To listen to our chat, tune in here (or press play below):
References: Sitaram Asur, & Bernardo A. Huberman (2010). Predicting the Future with Social Media arXiv.org arXiv: 1003.5699v1
This video from 1995 aptly portrays why I followed science and I never went into acting. Not the most sciencey post I've put up recently, but a bit of fun. We made this video about the crime fighters Brad and VD when in Year 11. Those involved have ended up being quite creative - director Nick as a digital producer, and actor Scott as a designer. A good look back on the days of analogue tape. We were clearly influenced by Get Smart.
Thanks to Jason for digitising the video - or should I say, digitally remastering it. Would love to see any embarrassing high school videos you might have.
Wolverine is probably the best known of the X-Men. Commonly known as Logan, Wolverine is a mutant who has animal-keen senses, super bodily strength, retracting claws, and the ability to almost instantly heal himself from injury. And thanks to some evil scientists, he has the near indestructible (and fictional) metal alloy adamantium fused to his bones, meaning that his claws and skeleton are almost unbreakable.
In the second episode of our regular series on the science of superheroes, biochemist Dr Chris Pettigrew (aka Dr Boob) and I discuss where in nature Wolverine's powers can be found, and how we might scientifically create Wolverine in the lab. This is the first of a 2-part show on Wolverine - see below for a brief description of some of the science discussed. Our first superheroes episode was on the science of Wolverine's fellow X-man, and sometime love interest, Mystique.
To listen to this show, tune in here (or press play below):
The name Wolverine comes from the Wolverine animal, which lives in isolated northern areas such as the arctic and alpine regions of Alaska. It is a stocky and strong animal that is very strong for its size and has been known to kill prey as large as moose. The wolverine is not actually a bear or a dog, but rather a mustelid, or in common parlance, a weasel.
While many of Wolverine's powers (such as strength and hearing) could come from its namesake mustelid, if we were to attempt to create Wolverine in the lab, we must first turn to the ocean:
Healing ability:
Sea Cucumbers are the champions of organ regrowth. All animals possess some kind of tissue repair mechanism, however the sea cucumber belongs to a group of animals that can regrow lost limbs - salamandas and some starfish also have this ability. The repair process involves cells called morula cells, which move to the point of injury. Although all animals have wound repair processes, not all can regenerate lost body parts. With the sea cucumber, the same processes that repair its injuries also repair limbs and internal organs, and this opens up the possibility that we could one day discover how to repair our own wounds and perhaps how to regenerate body parts. But as Dr Boob says, we are quite some way off from instant healing ability: "The odd bullet to the head won't be able to be dealt with."
Retractable Claws:
There is a remarkable analogue found in nature for Wolverine's retractable claws. University of Harvard biologists have determined that some African frogs have the ability to puncture their own skin with sharp bones in their toes. These bones then act as claws to attack predators. The defence mechanism was discovered by David C. Blackburn, James Hanken, and Farish A. Jenkins, Jr. Blackburn said, "It's surprising enough to find a frog with claws. The fact that those claws work by cutting through the skin of the frogs' feet is even more astonishing. These are the only vertebrate claws known to pierce their way to functionality."
Blackburn discovered the frog and its defences when he was conducting fieldwork in Cameroon and one frog he was studying scratched him. He found 11 frog species in the genera Astylosternus, Trichobatracus and Scotobleps who had this peculiar ability. Read more at Project Frog.
Smell, sight, hearing
Whilst there are obvious candidates in nature that have heightened sight, smell and hearing abilities, recent studies suggest that human and dog olfactory receptor genes evolved from a common mammalian ancestor, and as such Dr Boob thinks that mimicking the smelling ability of dogs could be quite "easy." Dogs have an olfactory sense approximately a hundred thousand to a million times more acute than a human's. Scenthounds can smell one- to ten-million times more acutely than a human, and Bloodhounds, ten- to one-hundred-million times more.
To hear more on the science of Wolverine, tune in here (or press play below):
Part 2 of this series on the science of Wolverine will be aired over the next few weeks. The song A Russian Peter was used in the background of this podcast, with permission from Ioda Promonet. Buy the full London Philharmonic OrchestraPeter and the Wolf CD, or download individual songs as mp3s, from Amazon here.
Ever wondered whether it is scientifically possible to become a superhero?
In a new series of podcasts, Dr Christopher Pettigrew (aka Dr Boob*) and I are going to tackle this question. Chris is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Biochemistry in University College Cork, and in these podcast episodes - which we will publish more than a few times a year - we will uncover whether it is possible now to possess the powers of superheroes, and if we can't, whether in the near future we could engineer ourselves to become superheroes.
The first superhero we are tackling is Mystiquefrom X-Men. X-men get their powers from an "X gene" that normal humans do not possess, and Mystique is a shapeshifter who naturally looks blue. Actress Rebecca Romijn portrayed Mystique in the X-Men films - I know I clearly remember the blue body-paint...
Mystique has a number of powers including:
The ability to change skin colour;
The ability to shape-shift - that is, change form;
She can impersonate other voices;
She can rapidly grow her hair.
Within nature, chameleons are able to change their skin colour to match their environment. There are also technologies under current development, such as metamaterials, that can be used to make something look invisible. Through a combination of genetic manipulation to activate melanocytes (and possibly chromatophores), and the use of surface coatings, it is not unforeseeable that we could develop human chameleons. The difficulty here lies in whether we can make a skin colour change a conscious decision - how can you wire up the body such that skin colour responds your thoughts?
The challenge of being able to impersonate another person's voice should be easy enough to conquer in the near future through a combination of electronics and simple mimicry. It is also possible to foresee rapid hair growth - this could be accomplished by rapid protein synthesis, such as in spider webs.
The biggest difficulty comes with the shape-shifting - how can one change their 3D shape?
Tune in to the podcast here (or press play below) to discover what scientific techniques we came up with to tackle the problem of scientifically engineering Mystique:
A few extra notes to explain some of the random comments in the show:
Let us know your thoughts on how we could scientifically engineer Mystique. We rated this a 7.5 out of 10 possibly for the next 200 years - if someone really wanted to, notwithstanding the ethical concerns along the way.
Also let us know which superheroes you would be interested in us tackling.
* From here on in, Chris will be referred to as Dr Boob - this nickname stems from the fact that Chris's PhD and some of his post-doctoral work has been into the study of breast cancer - yes, someone who is actually changing the world!
In 1972, Sagan asked Lomberg to illustrate The Cosmic Connection, after which they worked on NASA's interstellar Voyager Golden Record, a record included in the two 1977 Voyagerspacecraft. It contains sounds and images that portray the various life forms and cultures on Earth. The record is intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life that may find it. It also contains information about our mathematics and science, as well as a way of decoding the record. As aliens may not see colours as we do, if they see at all, a method of decoding the information was included in the spacecraft, as well as an explanation of mathematics from its most simplistic level - one dot means the number one, two dots mean two, etc. From this point you can denote addition, multiplication and so on. The Voyager spacecraft are not heading towards any particular star, and Lomberg thinks that as the craft are unlikely to crash into a planet, if they are spotted, it will be by alien life that has mastered interstellar travel.
Lomberg also designed the original cover art for Sagan's novel Contact, and the opening sequence for the Contact film. Lomberg gave a talk at the Ultimo Science Festival and I was lucky enough to grab him for a chat afterwards. Listen to this podcast here:
For some more information on Jon, check out his website and have a read of the 10daysofscience story of his recent meeting with 1999 Young Australian of the Year, astronomer Professor Bryan Gaensler. This is a lovely story - Gaensler just happened to be sitting next to Lomberg at the Eureka Awards, and also had a tutorial scheduled for the next day on the challenges of portraying science and astronomy in film, using Contact as his primary example. Naturally, Gaensler asked Lomberg, “What are you doing at noon tomorrow?” See the 10daysofscience story for more information and videos from the tutorial.
To get you in the mood, here is the opening sequence for the movie Contact (on youtube here if you can't see the embed). It takes the journey of a spacecraft starting at Earth and hearing the sounds that Earth is currently pumping out into the Universe in the form of radio waves. As we pan out from Earth and journey further and further away, we hear older and older sounds to represent the idea that the sounds broadcast by the first radios are still travelling through the Universe - the further away we go, the older the music sounds, until we have left the solar system, and then the galaxy.
A friend of mine recently pointed me in the direction of an article in signonsandiego.com called With Obama election comes the return of the vampire. This article puts forward the theory that more vampire movies come out when Democrats are elected to the US Presidency, and more zombie movies come out when the Republicans are in office.
Recent evidence of this is the new Twilight vampire flick - coinciding with the election of Democrat Obama - and the spate of zombie films during George W. Bush's presidency - for example 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later and Dawn of the Dead. The original article looks back in time at various presidencies and it makes compelling reading.
What is the reason behind this (if there really is one)? One argument put forward is that the movies depict what we fear at the time. Democrats, who believe in redistributing wealth among the people, fear the Wall Street vampires who bleed the nation dry. Vampires, such as Dracula, represent the aristocracy. Republicans fear a revolt of the poor and disenfranchised, and as such fear zombies.
But, is there any truth to this argument? Let's turn to the data. The easiest way to determine the number of vampire and zombie films which have come out over the last 50 years is to look at The Internet Movie Database. Using its power search, I was able to find the number of movies (not TV-movies , TV-shows or direct-to-video movies, but only big screen movies - imagine trying to quantify every TV-show ever made, not even imdb is that complete) made each year in the US since 1953 (a seemingly good point to start this analysis as there is plenty of data about the movies made in this time - it's also the presidency of Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower), as well as the number of movies tagged "vampire" and "zombie". You can see this data in the following table, where the year is the starting year of the presidency:
We've plotted the number of zombie and vampire films produced as a percentage of all films produced that presidential term in the US: A stand out result is the large number of zombie films made in the 1980s under Reagan. It seems clear that zombie films peak in Republican years, but it is less clear whether vampire films have similar peaks under Democrats.
Indeed, the average percentage of movies that are zombie-themed produced during a Democratic presidency is 0.372%, whilst under the Republicans it is 0.571% - this is a large difference. The average percentage of movies that are vampire-themed produced during a Democratic presidency is 0.544%, whilst under the Republicans it is 0.491% - the percentage moves in the direction of our theory, but not by much.
Using a single-tailed Student's t-test (named after its inventor William Sealy Gosset, whose nom de plume was Student - I thought at school that it was named this because it was used by students, anyway...) to test between the null-hypothesis that the governing party makes no difference to the types of movies made and the theories that zombie movies go up under Republicans and vampire movies under Democrats, we find the t-statistic for the zombie case to be -1.69 which gives a p-value 5.7%. What this means is that there is a 5.7% chance that there is no significant difference between the zombie results under Democrats and Republicans. This is very close to the 5% level most statisticians accept for significance, and as such is a very intriguing result.
For the vampire case, our p-value is 33% and so there is little chance of significance. Both tests could be improved with more data (what every statistician needs!)
In summary, there just might be something in this (for the zombies anyway.) There is an almost significant difference between the percentage of zombie movies made under Democrats and Republicans. To predict the next election, it could well be worth looking at how many zombie movies are planned for the inauguration year and the 3 years after it. As most movies are planned more than a year ahead of time, this could be an interesting election predictor.
I guess we now know where George W. Bush's brains went! Brains.....
Bird flu, or more specifically Influenza A virus subtype H5N1, is considered a significant pandemic threat. It is passed between birds in their saliva, nasal secretions and faeces, and past outbreaks in humans have started in crowded conditions, where humans and chickens live in close quarters. In these conditions the virus is more likely to mutate into a form that can infect humans. It is thought that some of the humans who have died from bird flu were cock fighters who sucked the mucus from the bird's beak before a fight. There are some suspected cases of human-to-human transfer.
Keeping this in mind, check out what the Swedish Chef is doing to this poor turkey. He is not only kissing it, but prodding it rather inappropriately with his skewer and exposing himself to the turkey's body fluids...
Swine flu is a new strain of Influenza A virus subtype H1N1. H1N1 is the most common cause of influenza (flu) in humans. The new strain seems to be a new mix of the genetic material of the human influenza, swine influenza and avian influenza viruses. One of the reasons why this new flu is considered a significant threat is that it is now being spread human to human. This contrasts bird flu which was almost entirely animal to human. As the strain is new, we have no natural immunity, nor are we vaccinated against it, so there is a considerable threat of a pandemic. Currently we are not sure if the virus originated in pigs, humans or birds. Check out this video of Miss Piggy, she does sneeze and spread her flu around a lot - I think she might have been the source!
So essentially the major flu outbreaks of the 20th Century are due to The Muppets. Not to mention the rats they have running all over the place, I'm sure they had something to do with the Plague...
It's funny being on holiday, removing yourself from everything and deliberately avoiding the news, and then returning home to find things largely the same as they were. Sorry for the lack of posts and podcasts, I have been travelling back to Australia through Japan and Korea - stay tuned for a podcast from the trip.
One of the things that has not changed is our own Russell Crowe. He may have played a maths genius in A Beautiful Mind, but his maths skills don't say much for his Aussie education.
We all have our theories on what is causing the current financial meltdown - my theory is it's the Australian cricket team (see this story for why).
His thinking was that a $300 million outlay would only be a fraction of the $US700 billion bailout package that President Bush proposed (read that carefully and you will spot the mistake).
Crowe told Jay Leno, "So, here's the thing: They're looking for $700 billion, right? Which is a good chunk of change... But I was thinking if they wanna stimulate the economy, get people spending, let people look after their ... mortgage. I think you take the first 300 million Americans, if that's the population at this point in time, give everyone a million bucks.''
The problem is that the Crowe Plan actually only gives $1 to each American, not $1 million, and if the Crowe Plan to instantly make each American a millionaire went ahead, it would cost $300 trillion - more than the US annual gross domestic product. The Iraq War only cost $3 trillion.
Edit: Funnily enough, he could be correct if he was using the Long scale where one billion is actually one million million (not one thousand million). Most of the English speaking world uses the short scale, but much of the world uses the long scale - so perhaps we can forgive him. Even NASA has mucked up unit conversions, loosing a Mars orbiter in 1999.
Remember movie star Kevin Bacon, who fought so bravely for our right to dance in Footloose?
His dance activism aside, Bacon is probably best known for spawning the trivia game Six degrees of Kevin Bacon. The game is based upon the assumption that all actors can be linked to Bacon through their film roles in six steps. For example, Brad Pitt starred with Bacon in Sleepers, so he is connected by one film and has what is known as a "Bacon number" of one. In Top Gun, Val Kilmer starred with Tom Cruise, who starred with Bacon in A Few Good Men, so he has a Bacon number of two.
This theory that every actor can be connected to Bacon within six steps concerns the mathematical field of small world phenomena. Stanley Milgram first suggested that everyone on Earth is connected by a surprisingly small number of people when working at Harvard University in 1967. He sent packages to 160 random people in Omaha, US and asked them to forward the package to a friend or acquaintance who they thought would bring the package closer to a set final individual, a Boston stockbroker. The letter stated, “If you do not know the target person on a personal basis, do not try to contact him directly. Instead, mail this folder to a personal acquaintance who is more likely than you to know the target person.”
Milgram’s theory was that everyone is connected by on average six people – that is, even the Prime Minister is connected to rickshaw drivers in Thailand by six people. Whilst this may seem astounding, think about how many people you come across during your lifetime. Whilst I have never met the Prime Minister, I have met my local member of parliament which means I am only two steps from Rudd. Imagine that my local member has a son who travelled the world and visited Thailand – now the rickshaw driver is connected to the PM in only three steps. You only need to meet one well-connected person to be connected to almost everyone!
The concept of the Bacon number sprung from a similar idea surrounding the mathematician Paul Erdos. Erdos was an immensely prolific Hungarian mathematician who worked on a variety of problems from number theory to probability. He collaborated with so many other scientists that mathematicians invented the "Erdos number". You have an Erdos number of one if you directly collaborated with Erdos on a paper, an Erdos number of two if you worked on a paper with someone who collaborated with Erdos, etc.
The amusing consequence of all this is the "Erdos–Bacon number" which is the sum of your Erdos number and Bacon number. You would think that these two numbers would be completely separate – not many Hollywood stars have authored mathematical papers. However, thanks to a few movie and TV cameos, astronomer Carl Sagan has an Erdős–Bacon number of nine, whilst theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking’s is seven. And most interestingly, thanks to her authorship of psychology papers during her Harvard degree, actress Natalie Portman also has an Erdos–Bacon number of seven!
There are probably a few ways I could track back my Erdos number, but the easiest way is through Plus which I co-edit with Marianne Freiberger, who has an Erdos number of 4, making mine 5. There is probably another route back to Erdos through my chemistry work, but that is hard to track.
Therefore, my Erdos-Bacon number is 9. See if yours is lower. Here are some links to help:
Much of my recent work has been involved with understanding the maths used in movie production and in how mathematics and mathematicians are portrayed on film.
I am also running a video conference on the topic with the Motivate program. Motivate runs real-time video-conferences for schools, providing maths, science and cross-curricular information and linked projects for students of all ages (5-19) both in the UK and internationally. In my session, we are investigating some of the maths we find in movies such as A Beautiful Mind and Pi, and also some of the maths used to create movies, such as in Lord of the Rings and Shrek. This involves such things as coordinate and vector geometry and complex numbers. If you are a student or teacher and are interested in getting involved with this, see the program’s website.
This week's podcast is a sneak peak at some of this maths / movies content. In this show, I interview the director of the Edinburgh maths film festival, Madeleine Shepherd, over a couple of drinks after the screening of the film Pi - listen to this podcast here.
The season of mathematical movies was created by the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences and Filmhouse Cinema to showcase three very different independent films. Each film is based around a mathematical concept, but also provides an element of social commentary.
The season opened with the UK premiere of the highly acclaimed animation, Flatland the Film. Based on the 1889 novel by Edwin A. Abbot, the film tackles issues revolving around race, gender, religion and globalisation. Mr A. Square is an average middle-class Flatlander until enlightenment allows him to see his world from a different dimension. He discovers that Flatland is threatened by forces it cannot possibly recognise. Will he be able to save his family and his world?
Pi explores the life and experiences of Max, a gifted mathematician who believes that everything in the Universe can be expressed mathematically. He becomes obsessed with finding the underlying pattern behind the stock market, but religious and commercial groups try to exploit his research. Can he pass through this philosophical maelstrom and survive unscathed?
The final film, Cube investigates the relationships between six apparently unconnected individuals who wake up inside a three-dimensional maze of interlocking cubes. Developing mutual trust is the key to survival as they are forced to collaborate on cracking the code behind the Cube's mechanism. How many will escape to discover the bigger mystery that lies outside their existentialist prison?
You can read more about maths in the movies in the Plus and Mr Science articles:
Hurt told the BBC World Service that: "I think there is something that has brought maths to the fore. I think probably because we live in a world with so many lies, and so much lack of truth, that it has become quite sexy to think of the one thing we have which is the only language that is truthful. There's no way of disproving that two plus two equals four, and therefore, take that to the ultimate, much more complicated areas, and you're dealing with something which is truthful."
We’ve all watched films and thought, "that’s impossible" or "that’s unbelievable". Sometimes movies take liberties with science, allowing things to happen that in real life are impossible, or at least unknown. Today we are going to have a look at three of my favourite science fiction films and see whether or not some of the astounding things that happen in them have any scientific basis.
The Matrix: One of the most popular science fiction films of recent years is The Matrix, in which Keanu Reeves discovers that artificial intelligence has trapped human kind in a virtual world and is using it as a power source. There are so many interesting and baffling scientific and ethical questions raised in this film that there are thousands of Internet pages and chatrooms devoted to the topic.
One of the scientific problems with the film is the notion that the machines are using humans as a power source. Morpheus says to Neo that the human race is enslaved in a power station, where it is used as a source of bioelectricity. This is, unfortunately, rubbish as it violates the law of conservation of energy. This is because humans need to eat to stay alive, and the conservation of energy law states that the amount of energy that comes out from the humans can not be greater than what is taken in, making the power station ludicrously inefficient. Also, in Morpheus’s speech to Neo, he states that the machines have discovered a new form of nuclear fusion – obviously their actual source of energy, and not the humans. However, this in itself provides hope for those who believe in the Matrix universe. Controlling the fusion reaction is a difficult process that requires computer control. One theory suggests that hooking up millions of human brains creates an outstanding parallel computing system that can act as an immense distributed processor for controlling the nuclear reactions.
Contact: The movie Contact sees Dr Ellie Arrow, played by Jodie Foster, searching the heavens for electromagnetic signs of extraterrestrial life using radio telescopes, eventually finding a signal and using that signal to build an immense machine that transports her, through a worm-hole, to the Vega star system where she speaks with an alien and then comes home. The movie is based on the novel by Dr Carl Sagan, an American astronomer, astrobiologist, and highly successful science communicator. There are many people in the world today doing as Dr Arrow did in the film and search the sky for signs of intelligent life – where the movie takes a leap is that in real life, we have yet to find any. You can even sign up to SETI at home and donate some of your computing power to analysing signals that come in from radio telescopes around the world.
Sagan wanted to make his novel as close to scientifically accurate as possible – obviously difficult to do when dealing with such mind-blowing topics – so he contacted the world’s foremost black hole expert, Kip Thorne of Caltech. Thorne and associates were able to postulate a theoretical set-up for a transversable wormhole using “exotic matter.” To be stable, wormholes need lots of what’s called negative energy. Quantum mechanics suggests that it exists, but we haven’t found it yet, and we don't know whether the laws of quantum mechanics allow enough negative energy to be concentrated to allow wormholes to exist. One possible location for wormholes is at the centre of black holes. Travelling through one of these might prove extremely difficult however, since the wormhole would be so unstable that it would collapse as soon as a spaceship (or even a ray of light) entered it. This is because there would not be enough negative energy to hold it open.
Jurassic Park: In Jurassic Park, Richard Attenborough and researchers find fossilised mosquitos that had bitten living dinosaurs. Soon after, these insects were caught in oozing tree sap that fossilised into amber. The scientists extracted the dinosaur blood from the fossilised insects and used the DNA in the blood to recreate dinosaurs.
Does amber old enough exist? Not from the Dominican Republic, where the sap in the film is from. The amber from this island is between twenty and forty million years old, far too young for the last dinosaur who existed sixty five million years ago. There are however, a number of sites around the world where amber old enough can be found. But even if it exists, can we extract DNA from an insect trapped inside? Unfortunately it appears to be virtually impossible to extract sufficient DNA to recreate a dinosaur genome. Research has shown that the DNA of dead organisms begins to fragment very rapidly unless it has been preserved under unique conditions. If a piece of amber were found containing an insect full of dinosaur blood, the blood cells would have to be separated from the insect’s cells, difficult in itself. Next, scientists could use a technique called polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to replicate the DNA enough times to work with it. But since DNA deteriorates over time, very little of the complete genome would be left. The genome of a dinosaur is made up of billions of nucleic acids, and we may be only able to string together two or three hundred of them, or less than one millionth of the genome. This gives us no clue as to the rest of the genome or how it all goes together.
But don’t give up on movie science just yet. I’m interested in seeing how the new Spiderman movie deals with Spiderman’s special new powers that he gets from the moon, and how the villains get their powers.
