TEDxHull – “How Do You Kill a Theory?” Video

After coming back from yesterday’s #TEDxImperialCollege, I finally plucked up the courage to watch the TEDx talk I gave at February’s #TEDxHull. All ten videos from Hull’s first (and, I must say, perfectly executed) TEDx event were released online last week. My talk, which opened the day’s proceedings, is embedded below:

 

However, I really would recommend watching all of them. I thought that one of the best things about the day was how the theme of “Beyond Limits” threaded through each of the speakers‘ chosen topics, even with such a wide variety of subjects on offer. I think that’s a testament to the organisers’ shrewd selection process, and their incredibly helpful and constructive feedback in the weeks leading up to the event. The #TEDxHull team did a fantastic job, and if they captured the spirit of Hull in the same way that #TEDxImperialCollege so successfully embodied everything I’ve come to appreciate about my employer, they really have done Hull very proud indeed. It was an honour and a pleasure to take part.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the talk. It’s very much a supersymmetric extension of my FameLab winning talk**. There’s plenty of Large Hadron Collider, all-permeating supercustard, and the very nature of science itself, but (mainly thanks to @jellybabyfizzer‘s influence) there’s even a shout-out for Thomas Kuhn***. Huge thanks to Gareth Moulton of CurvedLight for editing the videos together.

IN OTHER NEWS: I’ll be performing at the wonderful Helen Arney‘s “Domestic Science” show on Tuesday – full details (and tickets) here. Hope to see you there!

 

 

* And I really hope it is the first of many.

** Talking of which – congratulations to Andrew Steele, who is (as of Wednesday 21st March) the new FameLab champion!

*** I may, or may not, come perilously close to suggesting that supersymmetry represents a “crisis point” in particle physics.

A Little Banana Activity

It’s a question that bugs us all at some point in our lives: just how many radioactive decays happen in your average banana per second? The banana is often held up (so to speak) as an example of an everyday object that can be used to placate a panicked public in discussions about nuclear safety (whether it should be is another discussion entirely). The source of the radioactivity is the potassium in the banana — or rather, the unstable potassium-40 isotope. You can read all about potassium-40 and its decay modes on Wikipedia. I certainly did.

So to our original question: roughly how many of these decays will take place per second? I thought I’d have a go at a “back-of-the-envelope” calculation. Quite literally:

References: Potassium-40 on Wikipedia, potassium in an average banana (pdf).

I’ve assumed that because the timescales we’re considering are so small compared to the mean lifetime of potassium-40, the first rearrangement pretty much holds.

Now, there are two reasons I’ve posted this. Firstly, the question itself harks back to something I heard while visiting the Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys in September. They’ve got quite an interesting project going on there: the CERN@school project uses the “Medipix” chip for various experiments/data collection activities, and they often demonstrate what it can do by holding a banana next to it as a makeshift radioactive source. 13 decays per second seems like the right order of magnitude to make this feasible.

The second reason, though, is a little more self-indulgent: as I was doing the calculation yesterday, I was operating in bit of a vacuum. The numbers and approximations seemed reasonable, but I didn’t have anyone on hand to check them. Supposing I’d done something really silly with this seemingly trivial calculation? Would people be all, “oh, that’s OK, we all make mistakes”, or would I unleash the unrelenting fury of a thousand internet trolls? It’s an interesting question which I think has relevance to the “open science” debate: sure, “everybody goofs”, but do we like being called on those goofs in public?

I know what I think — but there’s only one way to find out…

Update (1447 4/3/2012): @sirjamesgreen has pointed me to this article which quotes roughly the same number. As he says, though, they haven’t shown their working…