• Question: Please can you tell me about a very strange piece of science.

    Asked by Zealousy to Chris, Josh, Rebecca, Rob, Susan on 16 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Susan Cartwright

      Susan Cartwright answered on 16 Jun 2015:

      OK, here’s one.
      When we shine a beam of light through two slits, we get an interference pattern: where the crests of the waves from the two slits coincide, we get a bright stripe; where a crest meets a trough, we get a dark stripe. The result looks a bit like a zebra crossing.
      That’s not too strange, but when we repeat the experiment with electrons instead of light, we also get an interference pattern. Electrons, in this experiment, look like waves, not particles.
      Maybe that’s not too strange – it’s what we learn from quantum mechanics. But now reduce the electron source so that only one electron at a time is emitted and directed at the slits.

      YOU STILL GET AN INTERFERENCE PATTERN! The elctron somehow interferes with ITSELF – effectively, it has gone through BOTH slits.

      Now THAT’s strange. But true. You can see it on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJ-0PBRuthc

    • Photo: Rebecca Dewey

      Rebecca Dewey answered on 16 Jun 2015:

      When you look at a picture of (let’s say) a big letter H on a computer screen, the light from the screen is focussed on the retinas at the back of your eyeballs. Each spot in the retina has a detector that tells it if it’s receiving light or not, and this information all gets collected up into the optic nerve and taken to the visual cortex to be processed. Your brain processes the information and reconstructs a version of the letter in the part of the brain that deals with vision, also known as your visual cortex, which is at the back of your head, in the bit that sticks out the farthest (it doesn’t look like a perfect letter H, but a bit distorted) but it is distorted in the same way every time because every bit of the retina maps onto a different part of the visual cortex.

      The same is true of touch. There is a part of the brain called the somatosensory cortex, which deals with touch information. The somatosensory cortex is a long strip of the brain running from approximately the top-middle of your head, down to just above your ear. Your body is mapped along this strip, almost in order from head to toe, but with especially large bits for very important parts of the body, such as fingers, face, etc.

      A similar thing is true for sounds, but the brain is mapped to frequency. Different parts of the auditory cortex (guess what that does? it is the part of the brain that processes sounds!) are mapped to high sounds and low sounds.

    • Photo: Josh Meyers

      Josh Meyers answered on 16 Jun 2015:

      For this I would like to point you towards the ignobel prize! This is a prize given for strange and cool pieces of science!

      Also, here is a scientific study of whether it is better to kill someone with a full or an empty bottle?!
      http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1752928X08001728

      There is loads of strange science out there!

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