{"id":2732,"date":"2012-11-21T09:08:38","date_gmt":"2012-11-21T09:08:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=2732"},"modified":"2012-11-21T09:08:38","modified_gmt":"2012-11-21T09:08:38","slug":"the-bbc-science-club","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2012\/11\/21\/the-bbc-science-club\/","title":{"rendered":"The BBC Science Club"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I watched <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/programmes\/p00zxmqd\/episodes\/guide\">this<\/a> the other night as it promised to be <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-admin\/post.php?action=edit&amp;post=1133\">Brian Cox-free<\/a>. \u00a0It was, and I was impressed with what went on: populist, but serious-ish. \u00a0I actually learned something \u2013 about Einstein's work on fridges.<\/p>\n<p>The kitchen experiment to measure the speed of light using only a microwave oven and some cheese slices was worth the hour spend watching. \u00a0The experiment (you can do this at home) gave an outcome of 3.2 x 10 (to the power 8) m\/s, which is only ~7% higher than the accepted speed. \u00a0Given that [i] the measurement of wavelength was done with a ruler, [ii] the hot spots on the cheese were rather diffuse, and [iii] the geek trusted with the ruler confessed to be a theoretician, this must have been well within experimental error \u2013 not that anyone bothered to mention such arcane niceties. \u00a0There was also much glossing over of important bits of the calculation, amidst mumblings about GigaHertz, such that it was all rather breathless and not completely satisfactory. \u00a0The cheese was also underdone.<\/p>\n<p>I shall be watching the next episode when \"extinction\" is on the agenda. \u00a0Brian Cox perhaps ...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I watched this the other night as it promised to be Brian Cox-free. \u00a0It was, and I was impressed with what went on: populist, but serious-ish. \u00a0I actually learned something \u2013 about Einstein's work on fridges. The kitchen experiment to...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates","category-talks-and-presentations"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2732"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2732\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}