Brian Clegg
speaker
45 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Brian Clegg’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The classic is the Empire State Building. It's typically struck, I think, about 25 times a year. In fact, there's even one guy that was a U.S. park ranger called Roy Sullivan, who's been struck by lightning seven times in his career, thankfully survivable.
I spend a lot of time talking to people about science, and all too often what comes up is it's a bit more complicated than we thought, that science tends to be a little more complicated than we think about it. And what I'm looking at here, in a fairly light way, a fairly fun way, is...
areas where we think that science is different from the way it really is, or where we simplify it so much that actually we don't really understand what's happening. So it's just trying to open up a little bit. It might be urban myths, it might be folklore, or it might just be not quite getting the science right in what I hope is an enjoyable way.
And it seems crazy to say water doesn't conduct electricity, but actually it's a really bad conductor of electricity. But what is happening is it's the impurities in the water that enable it to do that conducting. So if you take totally pure water, it's a really bad conductor. And sometimes there's little things like that, or for that matter, toast. Toast falling butter side down.
You know this thing, you drop a slice of toast, it falls on the floor. It's always the butter side that hits the floor. Or is it? Can that really be true? And a number of TV shows have actually tried to demonstrate it's not true. But unfortunately, what they've tended to do is toss toast in the air, a bit like tossing a coin.
But the reality is when you drop a slice of toast, you don't throw it up in the air like a coin, it slides off your plate or it slides off the work service. And they're just about the right height that when something slides off and starts to turn, it has enough time to turn
No, absolutely not. The actual water, literally pure water, H2O, is a bad conductor. It's a good insulator. But the fact is, almost all the water we deal with on a day-to-day basis, the water that comes out of the faucets in the bathroom, is water that has minerals in it. And that's a good thing on the whole. There's nothing wrong with that. It's not a problem.
But these minerals are in the form of what are called ions. So they're basically positively or electrically charged, negatively electrically charged. And that means that they can carry an electrical current. And it's those impurities in the water that actually carry the current. And it is dangerous, of course.
Yes, you don't want to play around with electrics when you're in contact with water, because on the whole, the water we experience isn't pure.
Yeah, it certainly does. I think one of the reasons for this is, you know, lightning is probably the most dramatic natural occurrence that most people have experienced. You know, there are bigger things out there, more horrific things like earthquakes and so forth. But the fact is most people have experienced lightning. It's pretty frightening stuff if it's fairly close.
And if you ever see an actual lightning strike where it hits a tree or something like that, it's very dramatic. And certainly, over the centuries, most people would not have seen lightning strike in the same place twice. And because of that, a kind of folklore built up around it. But the fact is, it does happen, and it happens a lot.
Any one time around the world, there may be 20,000 lightning storms, thunderstorms happening. And somewhere where there's a nice, big, pointy thing, you will get more than one strike. So the classic is the Empire State Building. It's typically struck I think about 25 times a year and it has been struck as many as 15 times just in a single storm.
The fact is lightning really does strike more than once on the same location but it's almost become a way of referring to something. So we don't necessarily literally mean lightning doesn't strike fires, but rather more metaphorically, it's not likely to happen.
In fact, there's even one guy, there was a US park ranger called Roy Sullivan, who's been struck by lightning seven times in his career, thankfully survived them all.
I'm not sure he's still with us, but when he was around, the kind of job he was doing, he was out there, out in the wilds a lot, out in places where you may possibly get struck by lightning more than most of us are.
anybody who actually owns fish, particularly if you have a pond, knows instinctively almost that this isn't right. Because the fact is, Goldfish learn, for instance, that if you come to the edge of a pond in a particular place, holding something and sort of shaking it around, food's coming, and they come to you. They remember it. They do have a memory.
But in science, scientific terms, it's been tested by training them, for instance, to go through mazes, and they remember how to do that. In fact, all the evidence is that the original three-second memory bit came from a commercial, an advertisement. that was done just humorously referring to this. And somehow it's become part of what we tend to believe.
And it's handy for a joke, but it's not really something.
It's a problem that you get in a lot of scientific experiments, actually, not just the anecdotes. Because if somebody is just reporting, say, how they feel or what's happened, we can't actually isolate what the cause is.
Now, what you actually find in practice is that when people have said, oh yeah, the kids have got really excited, they've had lots of sugar, there is often some other thing going on at the same time. So, you know, take children to a party, Yeah, they get lots of sugar, they get really excited, but also they're in a party, so is it really surprising that they're getting excited?
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