Mother London | SFTW | The Science Issue

The Science Issue

26.04.2012

Guest
Editor

By Chris Hatherill head nerd and founder of super/collider

super/collider mixes up science and pop-culture - commissioning installations, putting on events, mounting expeditions and contributing to titles ranging from Another to Vice. Their head nerd treats us to an issue all about ‘science’; talking us through their most exciting projects and inspirations for 2012. Expect robotic space travel, a homemade particle collider and a photographic journey into the world’s melting icecaps and glaciers. Lab-coat not required!

Exploring the Asteroid Belt

Manned space missions may be going nowhere fast, but robots are out there kicking ass in deep space day in, day out. Personally – in an era where astronauts think they’re rockstars – I’ll take the cold, emotion-less reports of robotic probes any day.

This year will see the arrival of a massive new rover about the size of an SUV on Mars and the continuation of a bunch of ongoing missions ranging over literally billions of miles of space. There’s one orbiting Mercury, another touring Saturn and yet another on its way to Pluto.

But one of our current favourites is working closer to home. Right now, NASA’s Dawn Probe is now making mankind’s first foray into the main asteroid belt that lies

between Mars and Jupiter. It’s an amazing place, with millions of space rocks ranging in size from tiny pebbles to pock-marked little worlds, like the one Le Petit Prince lives on. Launched in 2007, Dawn arrived at Vesta, the second largest asteroid we know of, last July. Since then it’s been beaming back amazing 3D images, animations and data renderings of the surface; find yourself some old-fashioned red and blue cinema specs, and take a look.

Once it’s done studying Vesta, NASA will send the probe off to Ceres, an even bigger asteroid that’s a properly spherical dwarf planet. Beyond just being plain awesome, the mission is interesting because the asteroid belt may well be the next place we send astronauts. Let’s just hope they leave the guitars at home.

A star is born

Back on earth one of the most exciting projects we’re following is the National Ignition Facility’s attempt to trigger nuclear fusion using the world’s most powerful laser. Although this sounds like apocalyptic 2012 end-of-the-world stuff it’s actually quite the opposite. If they succeed – and there’s still a lot of work to do – we might just find ourselves with a clean, safe, virtually inexhaustible source of energy to power (and hopefully help clean up) the world.

How? Well, nuclear fusion is the same ultra-efficient process that has powered the sun for billions of years and will keep it burning for billions more.

Instead of splitting heavy atoms apart like with nuclear fission, it fuses light elements like hydrogen to release vast amounts of energy. Unlike with fission, nuclear nasties are kept to a bare minimum – and the process is inherently safe because it’s very hard to keep it going. Any malfunction and the whole thing stops working, as opposed to running out of control. Best of all, the ‘fuel’ for such reactors can be found in ordinary seawater, so there’s lots to go around.

If you’re thinking it sounds too good to be true and wondering why we haven’t declared the search for green energy over, it’s because we’re not quite there yet. The facility is gradually ramping up its tests – the most recent one used 1000 times more energy than the USA consumes at any one moment – and even if they succeed it will be years before we can turn the findings into a working power plant. Still, it’s looking promising and the latest we’ve heard is that a successful ignition test could come as soon as September. In the meantime it looks like we’ll need to keep turning the dimmer switch down.

The Homemade Particle Accelerator

We recently had the privilege of working with Patrick Stevenson-Keating, a young designer who graduated last year from the University of Dundee.

The first project of his that we came across demonstrates the idea of ‘parallel universes’ using a laser built into a super sleek well designed little desktop device. Called the Quantum Parallelograph, it was inspired by the work of Professor David Deutsch of Oxford University, and the earlier work of Professor Hugh Everett, who argue for infinite copies of ourselves existing within multiple universes.

On his website he explains: ‘The Quantum Parallelograph seeks to reveal to the personal user how such ideas of alternative realities may be envisaged. The device uses online sources to find the “parallel lives” of users, and prints out a short statement about their “simultaneous” life in a parallel world.’

Building on his Quantum Parrallelograph, we challenged him to create a homemade particle accelerator for Milan Design Week with the caveat that it had to fit into a department store.

We originally looked at making a long, linear accelerator, but the glass alone would have broken the budget. Instead, Patrick came up with the altogether more interesting concept of making it out of organically-shaped hand-blown glass bulbs,

which he’d been experimenting with. So it was that we found ourselves in the distinctly low-tech surroundings of a glassworks in Harlow, Essex making the components for a CRT-style particle accelerator one bright spring morning.

A few weeks and more than a few late nights later (by him, not us, I must add) we went round to see how it was coming together and were blown away. Not only was there a working prototype sitting on the table, but Patrick had built a bespoke black control box that visitors could plug things into and push a big button to turn it all on. I think that all-to-often with science communication the importance of design and beauty gets lost, which is what we love about his work.

Under Pressure

As we’re all painfully aware, the planet’s icecaps and glaciers are fast disappearing. In an effort to document them and contribute to our understanding of how things are changing, photographer Klaus Thymann set up Project Pressure back in 2008 to document their disappearance.

Since then, the idea has grown into a not-for-profit initiative that has travelled to remote areas ranging from Ecuador (pictured above) to Iceland to seek out and shoot the world’s most endangered and uncharted glaciers.

The team's most recent expedition took them to the Ruwenzori Mountains in Western Uganda, where they were able to photograph glaciers that have previously

been hard to reach due to the conflict in the neighbouring Congo. Though the ice covered as much as six square kilometers in the 1950s, there is now less than one square kilometer left – with some experts predicting they could vanish completely by 2025, making them among the most threatened white spaces on the planet.

Far more than just pretty pictures, the ultimate aim of the project is to generate the world’s first Glacier Atlas – a resource containing hundreds of images of the world’s retreating glaciers from every continent on the planet – and an online platform for sharing images. In May, we’re sponsoring their latest mission, where the goal is to reach and photograph glaciers in the Nepalese Himalayas that aren’t even officially named.

Twice in a Lifetime

Early on the morning of June 6, Venus will pass between the Earth and the sun – visible as a small, perfect black dot crossing the vastness of the solar disc. Though not as dramatic as a 2001 style total eclipse, the Transit of Venus is one of the rarest and most beautiful sights in astronomy. It only takes place twice every century and our first chance to see it happened in 2004 – you may remember Wolfgang Tillmans’ photo of it from the cover of Truth Study Center. The next one won’t be until 2117, so unless the NHS improves drastically us lot won’t be around to see it.

In the olden days, the Transit of Venus was a big deal because astronomers were just beginning to predict and accurately measure the way the solar system worked.

It was hoped that by observing the event from various points on the earth, astronomers would be able to work out the distance between the earth and the sun. Following the first observed Transit in 1639, expeditions were mounted all over the world with varying degrees of success. The unfortunate Guillaume Le Gentil, possibly the unluckiest of all, spent eleven years trying to check out the 1761 and 1769 Transits, missed the first one, caught dysentery, lost his job and wife then nearly went insane when the second one was clouded over after a solid month of beautiful weather in India.

So what can you expect if you’re luckier than him? From London, the sun will rise just before 5am with the Transit already in progress. Your best bet is to find a high-up spot looking towards the sunrise and slightly north – an east-facing balcony or rooftop with a clear view of the horizon would be perfect. Looking directly at the sun with binoculars, a telescope or even just your eyes is bad idea,

so check out Astronomers Without Borders’ excellent Transit site for ideas on how to watch it safely. Happy sun-gazing!

About the Author

Chris Hatherill is a journalist and editor who, having worked for the likes of Vice and Sleazenation, set up super/collider to explore science from a pop cultural perspective. You can follow their adventures in nerdland on Twitter or better yet via their visually-based mailout.

http://www.super-collider.com/

Credits

Lead Image. Courtesy of The National Ignition Facility; Story 1. Images courtesy of Nasa; Story 2. Courtesy of The National Ignition Facility; Story 3. Image from Patrick Stevenson-Keating; Story 4. Images by Klaus Thymann, from Project Pressure; Story 5. Image from super/collider.