Beamlines

Botany: A Blooming HistoryAnd now we return to part one of this series

Now we come to the second part of the seriesBotany: A Blooming Historyentitled

When I was a teenager, my two scientific passions were astronomy and botany.  However, at my school in the early 1960s, one could either do A-levels in Mathematics - Physics - Chemistry (Science A) or Chemistry – Botany - Zoology (Science B).  I chose the former option, being very much put off by medicine which was more or less entailed with the latter.  Botany still is a scientific passion – if I were time-transported back to the Jurassic I would be eager to investigate the flora, leaving others of the party to keep a watch-out for dinosaurs.

A pleasure it is, when Chemistry World drops through my letterbox each month, to read the Historical Profile therein.This month (June 2011) featured the discovery of nitrous oxide, aka laughing gas, in No Laughing Matter, by John Mann, emeritus professor of chemistry, Queen’s University Belfast.  The caption declares:Had it not been for nitrous oxide’s subversion as a recreational folly, its utility as an anaesthetic could have been uncovered much earlier.

As a teenager, in the early 1960s, I developed an interest in botany, and in particular ferns and the so-called “fern-allies”.  So, living in the drier South-East of England, I welcomed trips to places where these plants about, such as Wales, mountainous Scotland, and Cornwall.  But today I am travelling through time, showing how our knowledge of this branch of the Plant Kingdom has expanded over the last 200 years or so. 

White DwarfsFancy a trip to Sirius?  This is what you might see as you are approaching your destination.

“Auntie”, better known as the BBC, has just treated us to a two-parter, Everything and Nothing, by Jim Al-Khalili.  He thoroughly knows his history of science, rather than treating it as an add-on, and delivers the significance of what he says without spoiling it through philosophy and vain deceit” [1].The blurb says:

Archimedes steps in again.  The MacTutor tells us that “Archimedes considered his most significant accomplishments were those concerning a cylinder circumscribing a sphere, and he asked for a representation of this together with his result on the ratio of the two, to be inscribed on his tomb.” And one year after it was told us how to produce carbon spheres in relative abundance (at least, enough to buy a decent quantity from your laboratory chemical supplier), along comes Sumio Iijima telling us how to make cylinders. 

When I was a lad, we were taught that carbon had two allotropes, graphite and diamond.  Although they’re both covalently connected, in neither of these is there anything that one would regard as a ‘molecule’. 

You may recognize the famous Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky, whose best known work is “Pictures at an Exhibition”.  But the pictures that follow are from a totally different exhibition, that of the Association for Science Education Annual Conference 2011, held at the University of Reading from 5th to 8th January. 

When I were a lad (ay!) my father suggested that map projections was something I ought to interest myself in.  So I got hold of paper, ruler and pencil, drew a square grid, and then started filling in the outlines of the continents.  What emerged was something like this (maps like this are generated using this wonderful program from Brazil):Now that wasn’t too good, was it?  Africa doesn’t look too bad, but Greenland’s horribly squashed, isn’t it?  So I borrowed some books from the library, and started to learn about all sorts of different projections.

Warning! If you’re thinking this is going to be about gruesome punishments or such like, prepare to be disappointed! This is about teaching and learning electromagnetism.