Review: Marty Jopson – The Science Of Everyday Life

As part of the Otley Science Festival last week a capacity audience at Otley Courthouse were thoroughly entertained by local scientist Dr Marty Jopson who presented an evening entitled “The Science Of Everyday Life”.

Marty is a local resident in Otley but is known to millions of viewers throughout the UK from his regular appearances on the BBC’s One Show where he travels the length and breadth of the country (and abroad as well) bringing scientific stories to the masses. With his prominent long wavy hair and handlebar moustache he is instantly recognisable and typifies exactly what people think a scientist should look like! And his show is exactly what it says on the can as he looks at how science affects us in our everyday lives.

Marty started with talking about bubbles - something every child and parent loves, blowing these through a round hole and creating bubbles of varying sizes depending upon the size of the aperture of the hole itself. He mentioned Plato’s laws regarding the composition of these from soap and water and their molecular structure. This then led to a discussion about Jaffa Cakes and whether these were cakes or biscuits (something that had been tested in court a few years ago with relation to the VAT laws) and concluded that because they went hard after exposure to the air for a period of time that they must be cakes as they go hard whilst biscuits go soft. The air in cakes led to various experiments using both Baking Powder and also Bicarbonate of Soda with the latter producing great explosions in an old film canister when mixed with lemon juice.

The next part of the evening concentrated on static electricity and why when you get out of your car and your bottom moves off the fabric of the car seat you create over 15,000 volts of electricity so that if you touch the metalwork of the car then you often receive a shock from the static that has been produced. As well as the voltage, we were also told that you generate 10,000 degrees of heat from this process as well.

As part of this sequence looking at electricity, Marty looked at “time” and was fascinating talking about the quartz in a clock or watch, how waves in the quartz are produced at 32,768 waves per second (or two to the power fifteen for the mathematically minded amongst the audience), about how mobile phones and computers know the time from GPS satellites in space and how these link up to determine exactly where on earth you are located. He demonstrated this by using young audience members holding ropes across the theatre area to signify the radio waves cross-connecting to determine the exact position where he was standing. The show ended with an insight into how sonic booms are produced and why we hear the crack of a whip which he amply demonstrated to the audience using a bullwhip he had to hand.

This was a brilliant evening, totally fascinating and giving the audience which comprised quite a number of families with children a great insight into how science affects our everyday lives. A book written by Marty with the same title as the talk is available covering many more subjects than he was able to include in the one and a half hours he had available at the Science Festival. Once I have read the copy that I bought at the end of the show, I will review it for the paper as I am sure this is something that parents might wish to buy for any science students as a present for Christmas.

by John Burland