First up is Benito who is researching black holes, although he claims that "it's not rocket science". A star's gravitational field is always trying to push it inwards. However, this is countered by nuclear fusion pushing back outwards from the centre of the star. At some point the star will run out of fuel and so nuclear fusion will cease. There is still an electromagnetic force acting against the gravity but gravity is very persistent.
The gravity starts pushing the electrons into the nuclei of the atoms in the star, forming neutrons. At this point we have a neutron star. Eventually it will keep collapsing until the escape velocity needed to get away from the pull of the gravity is higher than the speed of light. Eventually, the star collapses down to a singularity and we have no idea about what happens at this point – all of our equations break down.
Black holes don't last forever, eventually they radiate away their mass through quantum effects. This radiation, Hawking Radiation, means that black holes aren't really black and they evaporate over time. This leads to the so-called "information paradox" - information is lost in a black hole which is against the fundamental tenets of quantum theory. For example, if you burn a book, you could theoretically put it back together again from the ashes. However, if you threw the same book into a black hole, you could never ever reconstruct it as it would just evaporate from the black hole as thermal radiation.
Key learning: it's possible to model a black hole in a bath tub.
Next up is Rich who is researching fiction coming about as a result of the financial crisis of 2008. Specifically, how this fiction ties in with changes in social class and the rise of neo-liberalism.
But what is neo-liberalism? After the Second World War, the Labour government started to nationalise the key industries such as the NHS, coal mining and car production. Over the next thirty years, unionisation improved workers' rights. Then in the mid-seventies recession hit. In 1977, the UK had to get a loan from the IMF and as part of the terms had to start selling off state industries.
The nation's economy started moving away from production to the finance industry. Under Thatcher this move to financialisation increased apace and we became a true service-based economy. This lead to the social class starting to change and working class identity began to be lost.
People who own homes or work in offices aren't seen as truly working class. Thatcher herself claimed that "class is a Communist concept" and the UK was on its way to becoming John Major's "classless society". However, despite this, we still have terms such as "chav" and "hoodie" which are loaded with class undertones.
After 2008, we saw the rise of the 99%. There is a real change in the way that we talk about class following the recession but it's not the same way that we spoke about it in the seventies. It is much more based on individual identity now. The novels that have come out relating to the crash have tended to represent society in a diverse way. Books, such as Number 11 by John Coe, reflect the changes in social class over the last thirty years.
Key learning: Fiction about the financial crisis has been dubbed "crunch-lit".
Finally we have Florence who is researching ways to make jet fuel out of greenhouse gasses. At some point we are going to run out of crude oil and this makes some really useful chemicals. There are 136 litres of oil in a barrel of crude oil. 85% of this is made into fuel while the other 15% is made into these other chemicals.
We are looking at replacing our dependency on fossil fuels with bio-fuels. There are three types of bio-fuel: Primary, which uses the food part of the plant (e.g. sugar/starch); Secondary, which uses the non-food part of the plant (e.g. straw); Tertiary, which uses the waste parts of the plant.
The most important part of the process is the hydro-carbons. We're very good at changing hydro-carbons into different hydro-carbons. At the minute we can even make jet fuel using primary bio-fuels. Can we find a way to use waste instead so that we don't get into a fuel vs food debate?
The bacteria that Florence is working with use carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide in the same way that our bodies use sugar. They then create ethanol, acetate and a chemical that can be used to make jet fuel (among other things). These bacteria have been genetically modified to make them more efficient at producing jet fuel.
One of the other things that's being looked at is optimising the vitamins that are used to grow the bacteria. Which vitamins do the bacteria actually need? By focusing on just the three essential vitamins, they have made savings of 1.7p per litre of fuel. While this doesn't sound like much, it would soon add up at an industrial scale.
Key learning: We get around 30,000 useful chemicals from crude oil
PubhD returns to The Vat and Fiddle on Wednesday 20 April with talks on biology, history and physics.
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