Oh, that's right, I was off finishing a book, and having done that, I took a break, moved house, and started thinking about an idea that hit me in 1993. It had its roots in a science fiction book I read in about 1960, plus or minus two, and you can read about that book here, and that link takes you to my big blog.
In 1993, I was setting up Sciencescape at the Australian Museum, and in Thinkers' Corner, we posed a puzzle: our civilisation is about to crash, you have one piece of indestructible metal on which to engrave a thousand words about the key ideas of science, things that will help our descendants get science going again, things like there is tiny life all around us, and wash your hands and boil the drinking water.
Not long after that, I came up with the idea of SPLATS, a much more fully developed set of golden rules in science, those key ideas that most scientists agree on, most of the time. Long before Twitter and Tweets, far earlier than X or Bluesky, I set a limit of 160 characters for each idea, though it was permissible to chain them together.
Here are some examples, relating to surface tension:
- Surface tension gives rise to capillary action and this explains why water will soak into a rock, and many other effects, including 'wetting'.
- Surface tension affects many animals, but it usually has a greater effect on small animals which encounter greater pro rata forces on their smaller mass.
- Surface tension effects give rise to the meniscus at a liquid boundary, the curve being shaped by the relative attractions of the molecules for each other.
Now I want to introduce readers to primitive science, the notion of exploring deep effects, using stuff that should be around your home, and as you may have guessed, I will start with surface tension.
Here, we are looking at tiny dew drops on spider webs, and when you get down to it, you may see how this relates to surface tension.
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