From the physics of the perfect pizza to quantifying the fame of individuals, physics has had its fair share of quirky stories this year. Here is our pick of the 10 best, not in any particular order.
Building blocks
When games designer John Coveyou began a crowd-funding page on Kickstarter earlier this year for a new game that he and his colleagues had designed, he probably never imagined the amount of support it would get. Coveyou has a Master’s degree in environmental and chemical engineering from Washington University in St Louis, US, and is the founder of Genius Games. He took to the site in early February to raise $9000 to turn a particle-physics deck-building game called Subatomic into reality. Players start with a hand of cards consisting of up quarks, down quarks and photon cards, which they use to form protons, neutrons and electrons. Cards can then be combined to build certain elements such as helium, lithium, beryllium and boron. Basically, the person with the most “mass” wins. The game is designed for two to four players, aged 10+, and has an estimated playing time of 40–60 minutes. Within 30 days, the Kickstarter had raised more than $250 000 from 4548 backers.
The price of football
This year saw France win the 2018 FIFA World Cup. As with every recent World Cup, Panini released its official sticker album. But how much would you had to have spent to complete the album? There were 682 stickers in the 2018 version with five stickers in a packet that each cost 80p. If you happened to be incredibly lucky and had no duplicates then it would take 137 packets, or £109.60, to complete. In reality, you probably ended up with lots to spare – probably of an obscure Panamanian right back – so Cardiff University mathematician Paul Harper analysed the realistic cost of finishing the album. He found that, if you just bought packet after packet without swapping duplicates with friends, you would need to buy, on average, 4832 stickers or 967 packets to complete the book, at a whopping £773.60. But if you got together 10 friends in a swap group, filling the album would reduce the cost to a mere £247. Bargain.
Spot the difference
Can you spot the changes made to the new logo for the DESY lab in Hamburg (see far left image)? On closer inspection you might make out the addition of a small orange dot after the word DESY, while the lines that go through the six balls now stop rather than sticking out at the other end (and are slightly thicker). So why did the lab feel the changes were necessary? “The new logo is a way of expressing and keeping up with the momentum of our research centre [and] we think [the new logo] is clearer and more dynamic,” a DESY spokesperson told Physics World. “The new orange dot represents the undiscovered, the unknown. If you see it as a punctuation mark it also turns the logo – and with it DESY as a whole – into a statement.” Given that the orange dot has such a deep meaning, do the six blue balls represent anything in particular? “They are completely up to the interpretation of the beholder, so no matter whether you see a simplified model of an atom, the six quarks, lollipops, dumbbells or a particle collision it’s all correct,” adds the spokesperson.
Muhammad Ali: still the greatest
Physicists Edward Ramirez and Stephen Hagen from the University of Florida put their knowledge of physics to use by devising a way to quantify and compare the fame of individuals. Using statistical methods, they determined how famous someone is by looking at various metrics including Google searches and the number of edits to a person’s Wikipedia page. After analysing fame for hundreds of people who died in 2016 and 2017, they concluded the top three celebrities were Muhammad Ali, Fidel Castro and Prince. The researchers also found that the statistical distribution of fame obeys a power law that has similar characteristics to “other natural and social phenomena” such as landslides and market crashes. They even tackle the perception of “celebrity death clustering”, showing that it is rather a “statistical consequence” of the large number of famous deaths each year.
Laws of procession
One event where you’re guaranteed to hear a lot of noise is the annual Rose Monday parade in the German city of Cologne. It occurs on the Monday before Lent and involves the usual fancy costumes, floats and dancing. Physicist Michael Schreckenberg at the University of Duisberg and colleagues are such big fans of the parade that wrote a paper about its dynamics . Having gathered GPS data of the marchers between 2014 and 2017, they found something odd: people at the end of the parade moved along the route much faster than those in the lead – something that goes against conventional wisdom about how traffic jams form. Schreckenberg says that this strange behaviour occurs because a fire engine initially sets the pace, but then leaves after a certain point, resulting in the groups behind speeding up. “Knowing this, one could try to put same decelerators into the procession, like more fire engines,” Schreckenberg told Physics World. “Or from the beginning the fire engine should be fast as the final group.” The team now want to find out if this behaviour is a universal phenomenon and occurs at other kinds of processions too.
The key take-away
What does it take to bake the perfect pizza? That vexing question was answered this year thanks to physicist Andrey Varlamov, who is research director of the Institute for Superconductivity and Innovative Materials in Rome. Teaming up with physicist Andreas Glatz and “food anthropologist” Sergio Grasso, Varlamov looked at the physics of cooking a pizza in both a traditional woodfired brick oven and an electric oven. Describing the heat transfer between the bottom of the brick oven and the pizza, Varlamov found that the cooking time for the perfect pizza is about two minutes – similar to what is seen in a traditional pizzeria. However, if you wanted to replicate this time with an electric oven with a steel surface it would mean heating the interface to 300 °C, which would end up incinerating the pizza. To get a better-cooked pizza in the electric oven requires reducing the interface temperature to around 230 °C and taking 50% longer to cook it – hard to do if there are many hungry customers waiting. Varlamov says that’s why it’s always better eating out at a pizzeria with a traditional brick oven.
The sound of drips
One of the most annoying sounds is surely that produced by a dripping tap. Yet it could become a thing of the past thanks to researchers from the universities of Cambridge and Poitiers. While much work has been done on the fluid mechanics of a falling water droplet into liquid, little research has been carried out on what produces the characteristic “plink, plink” sound as the water droplet hits a liquid surface. By using an ultra high-speed camera, a microphone and a hydrophone, the team recorded droplets falling into a tank of water. They found, perhaps surprisingly, that the sound is not caused by the droplet itself, but by the oscillation of a small air bubble trapped beneath the water’s surface. One way to stop the noise is to add soap to lower the surface tension of the liquid. “[But] I think the best way to stop the sound being produced is to get whatever is causing the drip fixed,” co-author Sam Phillips from Cambridge told Physics World.
Blueberry Earth
It’s probably not a question you’ve thought about before. But what would happen if the Earth were replaced by an equal volume of blueberries? Well, now you can sleep easy, thanks to computational neuroscientist Anders Sandberg from the University of Oxford. Sandberg, who works at something called the Future of Humanity Institute, was inspired to carry out the work after a user posted the question on the Physics Stack Exchange website. By taking into account the density and compressive strength of blueberries, Sandberg found that a “blueberry Earth” would turn into a “roaring ocean of boiling jam” with an ice-like core much like a “warm granita” — that classic Italian semi-frozen dessert made from flavoured sugar and water. “The final state of blueberry Earth is somewhat similar to oceanic exoplanets, although far lighter than any observed so far,” he writes in the seven-page paper. So is there a chance that a blueberry Earth could be somewhere in the universe or possibly lurking in the Kepler mission’s data? “I would be pretty shocked to find a blueberry Earth,” Sandberg told Physics World. “But a super-light ocean world? Maybe.” Sandberg says that he may study the physics of another “crazy world”, but adds that he suspects that other fruit planets would end up being similar. “There is likely some kind of ‘fruit main sequence’ that is parametrized by the water/solid content or maybe also the density and air content,” he notes.
Noteworthy physics
Many readers will remember answering those tricky electromagnetism exam questions in which you had to use the right-hand rule to calculate the direction of an induced current when a conductor attached to a circuit moves in a magnetic field. In August, Switzerland chose to illustrate its new 200CHF note – worth about £160 – with an image of the rule that is sometimes named after the British engineer John Ambrose Fleming. The chiral note is part of the “ninth banknote” series of the Swiss National Bank and marks its move away from using well-known people on Swiss money. The 200CHF note is about “matter” and contains an image of a proton-proton collision at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on the other side. The LHC was included no doubt to celebrate the success of the Geneva-based collider’s success at spotting the Higgs boson in July 2012, but given the particle’s mass surely the Swiss should have introduced a 125CHF note?
Bitter legacy
Finally, some scientists have laws named after them, or even particles and elements. But how many can claim to have their very own beer? Well, the late Peter Mansfield now does after Matthew Davies from the International Centre for Brewing Science at the University of Nottingham teamed up with the Nottingham-based Castle Rock Brewery to create an ale to celebrate the life of the Nobel-prizewinning physicist. Mansfield, who died in February 2017 at the age of 83, spent most of his career at Nottingham. There he pioneered the development of Magnetic Resonance Imaging, which led to him sharing the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with the US chemist Paul Lauterbur. The 4.2% ABV “Sir Peter Mansfield ale” is a “five-malt bitter” with “four hop varieties” that are added at various stages throughout the brewing process. For those in the UK, the beer is available in pubs “across the East Midlands and Yorkshire”.
You can be sure that next year will throw up its fair share of quirky stories from the world of physics. See you in 2019!
