Maths, but not as you know it…
The third video in the fluid dynamics trilogy I made for Numberphile. Rivers contain 80% of pollution which ends up in the ocean, so understanding where the water goes when it leaves the river mouth is of upmost importance in the fight to clean-up our planet.
Watch part 1 on the Navier-Stokes Equations here
Watch part 2 on Reynolds Number here.
“30kg of plastic has been found in a blue whale’s stomach: how much would that be if a person swallowed just as much proportional to their own bodyweight?” Tom Crawford from Oxford began his guest lecture at Hebel-Gymnasium with this question. The students calculated that you’d find six (empty) plastic shopping bags in a human stomach. The other results worked out over the course of the entertaining presentation were also very impressive.
Tom Crawford doesn’t just have rock music as a hobby, rather with his tattoos and piercings, he looks like a rockstar too – though his tattoos are all to do with maths: since for example, the decimal places of “e” (Euler’s number) wind around his arm, the number pi is also encoded in an infinite series. On his YouTube channel “Tom rocks maths”, he presents science in an entertaining way – sometimes even pieces of clothing fly off during stripteases: “I want to show that maths isn’t always just super serious but it can also be fun.”
The mathematics lecturer is currently part of the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Heidelberg. This is where the best maths and computer scientists in the world are meeting up with junior researchers and journalists. Crawford came to Schwetzingen at the invitation of maths teacher Birgit Schillinger. He brought along some exciting questions. The common theme was Tom’s favourite number, pi, which is used in so many formulas. How many ping pong balls are needed to lift the sunken Titanic off the ground? Which factors are involved when a footballer bends a ball so that it flies in an arc past the wall into the goal? When calculating the trajectory, several physical variables play a role. But how? Crawford studied the mathematics behind it. His doctoral thesis was on fluid mechanics: What path does a river take when it flows into the sea? The findings help us to understand sea pollution and possibly help to stop it.
At the end, the Hebelians made Platonic solids, of which, amazingly, there are only five. Strange? No, Tom explains this number by the sum of the angles at the corners – all very logical! Finally a student’s question, which example in mathematics has impressed Tom the most: “It is terrific how the wave characteristic of light follows from Maxwell’s equations, which deal with electricity and magnetism, with only the help of mathematics. Maths is just awesome!”
Birgit Schillinger
Thanks to Cameron Bunney for the translation.
The original article in Schwetzingen can be found here.
80% of marine pollution comes from the land via rivers, and so by understanding where river water goes, we can focus our clean-up efforts on the most susceptible areas. Live interview with BBC Radio Oxford.
Come and watch me explain my research in full detail at New Scientist Live on Friday 11th October 2019.
My PhD thesis on modelling the spread of river water in the ocean in its entirety – not for the faint hearted! Unless you are a researcher in fluid mechanics, I strongly recommend reading the summary articles here before tackling the beast below. If you have any questions/comments please do get in touch via the contact form.
Creating scientifically accurate nail art whilst discussing my research in fluid dynamics with Dr Becky Smethurst and Dr Michaela Livingston-Banks at the University of Oxford.
We recorded 1h30mins of footage, so this is the heavily edited version of our chat ranging from the fluid dynamics equations needed to describe the flow of water in a river, the Coriolis effect, the experimental set up replicating this, and how these experiments can help with the clean up of pollution.
Plesiosaurs ruled the oceans during the time of the dinosaurs with specially adapted flippers that enabled them to swim faster and with greater efficiency than any other animal. Luke Muscutt studied the 4-flipper arrangement by conducting experiments at the University of Southampton to investigate exactly how it all worked…
With thanks to the UK Fluids Network and the Journal of Fluid Mechanics for supporting this video.
How fast should an animal be able to move? And why are the biggest animals, which pack more muscle, not the fastest? That’s what Yale scientist Walter Jetz was wondering, so he and his colleagues looked at hundreds of animal species and have come up with a new theory that successfully puts a speed limit on most species…
You can listen to the full interview with the Naked Scientists here.
Image copyright Dawn Key
I went along to the Royal Society Summer Exhibition to meet coral expert Jorg Wiedenmann and to see his collection of glow in the dark corals…
You can listen to the full interview for the Naked Scientists here.
Yes, you read that correctly. I really did spend a good chunk of the 4 years of my PhD spinning a giant fish tank. This isn’t just any old spinning fish tank though, as you may have guessed, it was specially designed to represent the real-world scenario of a river discharging into the ocean, but on a manageable scale in the lab. So what does such a setup look like? Well, below is a diagram of the tank, taken from my thesis (please excuse my crude drawing in Microsoft Word – it’s harder than you might think).
Let’s start with the tank itself. It’s made from acrylic (basically plastic) and is 1m x 1m with a depth of around 60cm, though it was only filled to 40cm with salt water. As you can see in the diagram, the tank is actually divided up into two sections by an internal barrier. The reason for this was to allow the source structure to be attached to the outside of the tank – I wasn’t allowed to drill holes into the actual tank despite all of my protests… It had to be attached in this way to allow the freshwater from the model river to flow into the main tank which contained the salt water in the model ocean.
The freshwater is stored in the reservoir (a plastic box) attached to the top of the metal structure surrounding the whole setup. This is to provide stability once the whole thing starts rotating, and also I assume to prevent things from flying off and hitting me. The river water flows out of the reservoir down a pipe and enters into the source structure. The amount of water released is controlled by a flow meter and an electronic switch. Once in the source structure, the water begins to accumulate until it resembles a flowing river and then it is released into the ocean (saltwater ambient). The water continues to flow throughout an experiment, much like a real river.
This all happens of course whilst the whole thing is spinning on a giant turntable. Turntable is an appropriate name because it basically just looks like a giant set of DJ decks (with only one disc a metre across). The speed is controlled by a computer and it can go pretty fast, trust me. Before the electronic switch was installed to start and stop the flow of freshwater from the reservoir, I used to have to climb up a ladder and flick the switch manually as it went spinning past. This was fine for the low speeds, but once things started speeding up I couldn’t flick the switch without knocking the entire structure which disturbed all of the measurements I had made. The only answer was to basically climb onto the structure myself and hang off the side whilst it went spinning round at high speed. If anyone ever saw me doing that I’m pretty sure I would have been thrown out of the lab, but hey when science calls ‘you gotta do what you gotta do’.
Now the source structure (shown in the diagram and picture above) was quite the piece of engineering… by which I mean an absolute nightmare to design. Most of the first year of my PhD was spent trying out different designs until finally we found one that gave a discharge that looked like an actual river. If the stream comes out too strong then it looks like a jet – think about squirting a hose in your garden. If it’s not strong enough then it’s just a point source – like a sponge slowly leaking out water. Neither of which represent a river. The trick was to feed the pipe carrying the freshwater into an l-shaped box filled with foam. The combination of the shape, plus the presence of the foam, meant that the box would become sufficiently filled with water before any of it exited into the ocean. It was key that the box filled up above the depth of the opening into the saltwater, so that the depth of the water when it left the source was known (and equal to the depth of the opening). We need to know this initial depth because the depth of the freshwater as it enters into the ocean is incredibly important in determining the properties of the current that forms, but that ladies and gentleman is another story for another day.
All of the articles explaining my PhD thesis can be found here.
