Last Monday night was the inaugural meeting of the Beirut Big
Bang Club. No, it isn't a group of aging hippies trying a bit of swapping with
“50 shades” as the operating manual. Rather it has the high minded purpose of
trying to make sense of the recent developments of modern science. The group is
the brain-child of Vicky, an Anglo-Dutch lady ex-pat living in Beirut, together
with two of her friends, Brighid and Tracey.
I was told never to accept lifts in cars from strange men,
but I thought it was safe to offer some ladies of my acquaintance a lift back
to Beirut after a memorial service up in the mountains for a late friend. They
just happened to be the same three mentioned above. Rewarded for my gallantry
by their company over an Indian meal, wine and conversation flowed. Vicky
suddenly turned to me and said “You know something about black holes, Graham, could
you come and talk to us about them?” She explained that there was a small group,
including all those then round the table, interested in such phenomena but the
group needed someone to explain things in understandable terms. Some years ago
I had written a poem about the Large Hadron Collider (it’s published elsewhere
on this blog) and Vicky thought I could, well, sort of, you know, expand on it
a bit; in prose; with a few diagrams and pictures.
How could I possible resist? Quite easily you might say.
“Sorry the buses don’t run frequently enough”, “but you have a car, you've just
given us a lift”; “I’m going on a very long trip”, “No, you aren't you've just
come back”; “But I don’t know anything about the subject”, but that damned poem
and my even more damned ego got in the way of that one. So I heard myself say
“Yes”. Oops.
I prepared for what I hoped would be a twenty minute talk,
covering a bit of the “Sky at night” with a dash of relativity propped up by a
childish drawing of a space ship (courtesy of Prof. Richard Feynman), a few impressively big numbers and a
teaspoon.
The day arrived. Vicky had accumulated about fifteen
intelligent, enthusiastic, questioning people, gave everyone food and drink,
and then started proceedings with an amazing introduction of someone that, I
realised with some trepidation, was me.
And then we were off.
Some TV programs I've seen approach modern science
popularisation with a “this is incredibly weird and complicated and difficult
and you won’t understand it – see, look at these clever people standing in
front of chalk boards writing loads of incomprehensible symbols and
things”. I’d wanted to do rather the
opposite and show how the simplest observations like “it gets dark at night”
can lead to profound conclusions with a small sprinkling of logic, how even
really big numbers can become accessible (that’s what the teaspoon was for) and
how the same phenomena that account for those exotic objects known as “black
holes” have a direct bearing on things like the working of cell ‘phones and
SatNavs.
After an hour and a half, barely half the material had been
used and the questions were still going strong: thankfully, so were the
answers. But enough is enough, so we adjourned, well, -ish, because the
discussion kept going. It had made for an enjoyable if very different from
usual evening, the first of a series no doubt.
A few loose ends need to be tied up. Getting dark at night implies
the observable universe is finite. The teaspoon, well it turns out that if you
count the number of water molecules in a teaspoon, and then calculate the
distance to the edge of the observable universe, in kilometres, the two numbers
are roughly the same.
Finally and especially thanks to Vicky and her friends for
starting the Big Bang Club.
No comments:
Post a Comment