Lecture 2 – Why chocolate melts and jet planes don't
As we zoom into the microscopically small realm beneath our fingertips to explore the tiny world we have created inside mobile phones, jet planes and chocolate, curious things start to happen. Gravity becomes less and less important, while stickiness and quantum mechanics start to dominate.
This is the wild west of science, where anything and everything seems possible, but is it? Can we create invisibility cloaks, self-healing phones and super-strong jet planes just by controlling the scale of things? Journey into the inner space of the things around us to find out how the very small affect the very large.
Mark Miodownik shows that even the taste of chocolate depends on the size of extraordinary crystals which are designed to only melt in your mouth. Moving up in scale he then reveals how sperm whales – one of the world’s biggest animals – use a unique material called spermaceti to increase and decrease their body density and adjust their buoyancy.
About the 2010 CHRISTMAS LECTURES
From the very large to the very small, size is an important factor for both living and non-living matter.
Beginning his journey into the world of scale with a furry friend, Mark reveals why hamsters fare better than humans when jumping from the top of a skyscraper. We find out why mountains don't grow any taller, why the size of an elephant means it has trouble dancing, and why ants can lift many times their own body weight.
Scaling down to the molecular level, Mark Miodownik reveals why chocolate tastes so good and returns to size again to explain how sperm whales – one of the world’s biggest animals – have developed nifty ways of diving deep into the ocean.
2010 CHRISTMAS LECTURES supporters
