Stowe’s Mathematics, Technology & Science Newsletter

Alternative fuels What lies in the future of transport?

Life on Other Planets What life is really out there?

The Paradoxical Cube The Theory and Analogies

Behind Quantum Observation

Volume 3, Issue 1 Michaelmas 2015

Science Review

Written and produced by…

Matthew Hill

Elliot Mitchell

Alex McQuitty

Charlton Kerr

Samuel Lodge

Ben Barrett

With thanks to...

Stowe Science Department

Mr Tearle

Mrs Roddy

Mr Fletcher

And thank you also to the General Office.

Welcome to Stowe Science Review!

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Contents

3 Charlton Kerr explores the ideas of quantum

duality through perception, using the concept

of the paradoxical cube.

4 Alex Mcquitty journeys into the near future of

vehicles, providing a fascinating insight into

the fuels of tomorrow.

6 Samuel Lodge investigates the possibilities

of life amongst the stars.

7 Ben Barrett narrates the technological

innovation of the Mercedes Unimog

Multipurpose vehicle

8 Our sixth crossword will push your scientific

knowledge of space to its limits. The solution

to the previous crossword can also be found here.

Have your say... Science Review wants to know what you think about scientific

affairs - please email sciencereview@stowe.co.uk with your

views on the topics discussed in this issue.

We look forward to hearing your views!

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The Paradoxical cube is an analogy of the abstract world of quantum physics; it demonstrates that there is a

duplicity or duality to our acts of observation.

The Universe follows the laws of quantum physics, and according to these laws the physical Universe is

fundamentally paradoxical. Our Universe is composed of facts and their opposites at the same time – but we

can only view a fact or an opposite at any given moment, not both – hence we don’t observe these

paradoxes.

The Universe, unobserved, continues on its way with a jumbling of facts and counter facts. This is necessary

because without this intermingling, there would be no “real” world. The observer in observing the Universe

plays his role by cutting it, as they wish, to prevent confusion by its challenging convolutions. By observation,

the observer then solves these paradoxes dealing with the Physical Universe.

Perhaps the best way of visualising the above is by using the idea of a “cube” below. But “it” is not a “cube”.

“It” is 12 lines joined at 8 points – why do we make this abstract form go straight into a 3-dimensional solid in

our interpretation as though we are conditioned as a race to navigate everything we can visualise into a solid

structure? The illustration can be seen as a “cube” in more than 1 way if you look for long enough – but you

can never see the cube in two ways at once. Similarly there are multiple ways to look at reality. As an

observer you have a choice in how you view the cube. This act of observation is what solves the paradox of

the cube.

Physicists know the world is like the paradoxical cube, and can be realised in complementary ways, known

as the Principle of Complementarity which holds that, objects have complementary properties which cannot

be measured accurately at the same time.

Our physical Universe embodies this

complementary nature in its wave-particle

duality. Our Cosmic House is in so many ways

like the paradoxical cube. In this way, we can

view the Universe in terms of particles, or in

terms of waves – these are seemingly

complementary to each other – thus we have the

“Complements of the Cosmic House”.

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact.

Everything we see is a perspective, not the

truth.”

Marcus Aurelius

By Charlton Kerr 3

The Paradoxical Cube

We all know that at some point fairly soon the world will run out of fossil fuels. And if you were to ask someone what car they would be driving after this, you could forgive them for saying that it would be electric. But this may not the case, as there are a vast variety of alternative fuels available that will mean you may even have to change your car. The idea of having a car powered by something different is by no means a new one, there are examples of cars being powered by wood dating back to the Second World War and the first ever production car, the Ford model-T, was designed to be run on ethanol. In the 1930s the engineer Tang Zhongming even invented a charcoal powered car for the Chinese car industry. So what actually are the alternatives? Firstly there is biodiesel, which can be made from almost any oily organic compound including algae, waste cooking oils (McDonalds recently announced it would be making biodiesel from its food waste) and even the fat from alligators. The most common sources however, don’t come from toothy amphibians, but from crops like oilseed rape, which accounts for two thirds of the biodiesel in Europe, and sugar beet. I mentioned earlier about a wood fuelled car, and you may think this completely ridiculous, but it is actually more popular than you may think, with users including many cars from the 1940s, when oil was in such short demand in areas like north Africa and eastern Europe, and in many areas of North Korea. A wood fuelled car works by essentially burning wood with virtually no oxygen, producing a flammable mixture of carbon monoxide, hydrogen and methane. This wood gas is then fed into the engine and burnt with surprisingly good results, as roughly one tonne of wood will substitute around 360 litres of petrol. However this does mean driving around with a boot full of wood and having to cut up your own fuel, a disadvantage compared with ethanol for instance! You will almost certainly have heard of ethanol as a fuel. It’ s particularly popular in the Americas, especially

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in Brazil where 21.1 billion litres of ethanol fuel were produced in 2011. So huge is the production, it is now the law to use fuel made of 25% ethanol and 75% petrol, and some car manufacturers have made cars that run on 100% ethanol. Almost all of this is made from sugar cane. The drawbacks of this are that you need a vast amount of sugar cane, for example the ethanol made in 2011, required more than seven million acres of sugar cane. But despite these fantastic ideas, neither of them are completely free of vices. Imagine if you could just make a fuel from nothing, like from sunlight. Wouldn’t that be great? This has, in fact, already been successfully done. The way it works is by focusing sunlight onto a series of cobalt ferrite rings using an 88m2 solar furnace (essentially a large mirror). This heats the rings to nearly 1’500oC causing them to shed an oxygen atom. Then you pass carbon dioxide over them and the cobalt ferrite will help itself to an oxygen atom, creating carbon monoxide, the building block of hydrocarbons. The same thing can be done with water to

create pure hydrogen gas, a process up to 1’200% more effective than the current methods. By doing this we can efficiently reduce carbon dioxide emissions to more or less zero, by taking emitted carbon dioxide and feeding it through one of these, generating petrol, and after it has been burnt, you can just turn it back to petrol again and burn it. The perfect solution. While fuels like this are still quite a few years ahead of us, they give us hope towards alternatives to fossil fuels

in the future. Diminishing resources and the ever-rising greenhouse gas levels will force us to provide

ourselves with other fuel sources, so these are giving us options for the future of road travel.

By Alex McQuitty

5

Extraterrestrial Mysteries — Are They Out there?

6

Is there life on other planets? This is a question pondered by scientists and philosophers since the dawn of humanity. In the late 20th Century it was a question many attempted to answer, one in particular was Radio astronomer Dr Francis Drake who in 1960 began a systematic search for intelligent signals using a radio telescope which slowly searched the galaxy for six hours a day searching for radio waves from a potentially intelligent source. Drake's project was designed to be cheap and simple but proved unsuccessful. The next year Drake was meant to be hosting a meeting of the "search for extraterrestrial intelligence" (SETI). It was in preparation for this meeting when he formulated his equation as he said: “As I planned the meeting, I realized a few day[s] ahead of time we needed an agenda. And so I wrote down all the things you needed to know to predict how hard it's going to be to detect extraterrestrial life. And looking at them it became pretty evident that if you multiplied all these together, you got a number, N, which is the number of detectable civilizations in our galaxy. This was aimed at the radio search, and not to search for primordial or primitive life forms." The resulting equation obviously doesn’t give an accurate answer for the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication could be possible and instead as it was intended it provides an interesting idea and talking point about the contributing factors towards calculating a probability of us finding one of the aforementioned civilisations. The main problem with the equation in finding an accurate answer is that the final 4 parameters (fl ,fi ,fc ,L) are unknown and hard to estimate which has resulted in a very broad range of possible values. This led to the original estimates made from the equation having a minimum of 20 and a maximum of 50 000 000. However later calculations based on the Rare Earth hypothesis, a theory opposed by Drake, which states that the emergence of complex life requires an exceedingly rare combination of astrophysical and geological events and circumstances; suggests an answer of 8x10-20 which would suggest that we are indeed alone in the Milky Way Galaxy and probably the Universe as well. However, Drake and many others argued an alternative view that the Earth is a typical rocky planet in a fairly common planetary system in a regular barred spiral galaxy. This was known as the principle of mediocrity and using estimates based on it are around 280’000’000. There is much argument over which of the parameters is most important to the final outcome, which is obviously open to interpretation, but the astronomer Carl Sagan speculated that with the exception of L all other values are fairly small and therefore the lifetime of a civilisation or rather the ability of technologically advanced civilisation to avoid self-destruction is the major determining factor. Sagan used this to help motivate interest in environmental issues and to warn against the dangers of nuclear warfare.

Written By Sam Lodge

The Mercedes Unimog was created to try to make a vehicle that could truly go anywhere and do anything,’ ‘a jack of all trades’. It is an all-purpose truck with agricultural capabilities as well. They are, for example, very popular with the SBS (special boat service) because of their versatility and wide range of applications. The idea behind creating the Unimog was to invent something that could do everything; a sort of Swiss army knife on wheels. This machine has an intriguing history dating back to 1951 when the first Unimog rolled off the production line, however, for this article we are going to focus on the modern day U 216 - U 530 models designed to be the most compact option for the widest variety of tasks. The U 216 – U 530 models have several interesting design features that distinguish them from the competition. For example, the vehicle can continue to fully operate at temperatures as low as -26°C due to heated brake and fuel systems and an insulated fibre composite cab. Another feature is the innovative “Variopilot” a system by which the driving control unit and pedals can be moved from one side of the car to the other through the push of a button, enabling it to travel the globe with ease. The Unimog also utilises portal axles which involve small gear mechanisms in the wheel well to raise ground clearance over any independent suspension or solid axle design. They enable the driveshafts and suspension arms to be attached much higher up. The Unimog’s gearbox is really its centerpiece: the U 500 has eight forward and eight reverse gears, low and high range options and a variable torque system that means on starting the torque can be as much as doubled. The Unimog can generate 1120 newton metres of torque through its direct injection, four valve, turbocharged euro VI engine producing 156-299 horsepower. Overall, this vehicle is a masterpiece of engineering, and its use by organisations worldwide highlights this, in both military and civilian situations. It has already been in use for decades, and its future looks very bright, once again emphasising its masterful design. With the advent of yet more technology, I can see the Unimog living on for decades more.

The Mercedes Unimog — Swiss Army Knife on Wheels

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Written by Ben Barrett

Turyev. We would also like to thank our latest

writers in the Upper Sixth for their

contributions and support. Finally, we would

like to thank Mr. Tearle and Mrs. Roddy for

their help and support with the editing

process.

This Sixth Issue is the first Science Review

Issue to be edited and developed by Matthew

Hill (Lower 6th Grafton) and Elliot Mitchell

(Lower 6th Bruce). We both cannot express

how thankful we are for the help of Matthew

Selvey, Olaoluwayipo Olarewaju and Egor

Note from the Publisher

8

Space Crossword

SSR Issue 5 Solution

1. A minor shift in the course a celestial body travels along. (12)

2. A faint brightening of the night sky in the region of the antisolar

point. (11)

3. The densest and smallest stars known to scientists.(7,4)

4. Name of the recent mission to place a lander on the comet

67P. (7)

5. A small ball of rock coated in ice that travels through space.

(5)

6. Path travelled by celestial body affected by gravity. (5)

7. A system of two stars in which one star revolves round the

other or both revolve round a common centre. (6,4)

8. Closest major galaxy to the milky way. (9)