Ten Hundred Words of Science

Most of the time you see people using their voices to talk. Those talking voices can be written down as words on paper. Then we can read those talking voices. We put those papers together and call them books.

But some people can’t hear! What do those people do? They don’t use their voices. They use their hands to talk to each other. But those talking hands can’t be written down on paper yet. How do we make books if we can’t write down talking hands?

Those people use computers to make movies of talking hands. Those movies can be shared with many other people, like books are shared with many other people. But movies are not books.

Now computers can make books too. We don’t need paper anymore. So we can put both words and movies in the computer. People can then decide to read words of talking voices, or watch movies of talking hands.

If there is a good story in the computer, kids can pick to read the story or watch the story!

My job is to look at the sun. But, I do not look at the normal light that we see every day, I look at a different kind of light which is much stronger and is used by doctors to look inside your body. The sun makes this light only sometimes and it is hard to tell when it is going to happen. It is very important to know how this light is made, because if there is a man in space when the light comes from the sun, he is going to have a bad time.

As the sun goes around, it builds up a kind of power inside it. When enough power is built up, lines of this power can go up to the outer part of the sun and let out a big sudden burst of light and hot stuff. The hot stuff can hit us and make space men have a bad time, but it can also break the space things we put up into space so that we could make phone calls and find out where we are. This is another reason why understanding these bursts is a good idea.

The kind of light that I look at is only made during these sun bursts. When the power lines break at the outer layer of the sun, tiny things are made go very very fast. Sometimes they can even get close to how fast light goes. These tiny things are pushed in all directions, but many of them go down back into the sun and hit a place where there are slightly bigger things that are all very close together. The tiny things hit into this place very hard and make it very hot, but also make the type of light I like to look at.

Because this type of light is made straight away when the tiny things hit their bigger friends, I am able to look at the light and make a good guess about how fast all the tiny things were going. This also gives me an idea about what made them go so fast, and what they did on their way down before they hit their bigger friends. If I look at enough of these bursts, I hope I will be able to make a good guess on when to give space men a warning so they have a good time in space.

It is very hard to understand how new ideas for things have made people’s life different; ideas and things we think of as old come from older ideas that used to be new and cool. Phones and computers are good things that have changed the world a lot, and they are all over the place, but we only sort of understand how they change they world. They change things a lot! But that change doesn’t just HAPPEN. All new ideas and things are part of a LOT of OTHER things that join up and make the world we’re used to seeing work like it does. Some of the ways that ideas and things change the world come from the way people think the world works, some come from the way people live and work together in different places, or even the way we think about the new idea and how to make it work.

I try to understand how a new idea or thing, like phones and computers, really WORK in real world situations, how they change the world, from the approach of someone who makes new things and comes up with new ideas. A very bright guy said that asking questions and trying to make new things is like how everyone has a way to make amazing things happen… but that same way also makes very bad things happen. My thought is Right now a lot of new ideas could make amazing things happen very soon. The US Space Team are really trying to make space cars that can go to other stars; People are changing tiny living things so that they can do anything we want. A hundred hundred hundred other new ideas. But right now the world is in trouble, because of how people have acted.

The question, then, is how do we bring these really cool new ideas into the world in a way that makes amazing things happen, to deal with the problems that are coming to a head now around the world, and to make something better for us as people together. What do these new ideas mean for the world, and also, how can I, as somehow who wants to make cool stuff, act to make a better world?

That’s the big question I think about. Inside that question, I study the way we make power and get it to people and things, and the way new ideas and new things change the way we set that stuff up. Everything we do uses power, from moving, seeing or thinking, to lighting things, making food, or flying places, and all the ways we power that stuff is joined up in hard to understand ways. So I try to figure out how new ideas for making more power or using power a lot better change everything else, and how different people will be changed in different ways, and how we can make those changes good for everyone. We have a lot of good ideas, but they don’t work very well with the way we have been making and using power for a long time, and they change things in different ways in places with lots of money like the US, than in places which don’t have a lot of money. We try to come up with new ways to join up things so that really cool new kinds of power can get to people in really good ways, and then use those new power ways in real places around the world.

A little part of everything is really in every place at once, especially very little light things. If a wall is not very thick at all and some thing can be on either side of it and the thing gets close to the wall, sometimes that thing just shows up on the other side of the wall from where it started. Tiny things like that have stuff on them that makes forces on other things. They take some of that stuff through the wall with them.

We study how little things go through walls and how to make the tiny walls that more tiny things can go through and so that they can take more stuff with them when they go. If the tiny things can take more stuff through, we can use that to make better computers some day.

How should I live? What should I do in life? These are questions we all have to answer. Because we all have to live some way or the other. Big and small questions about the right way of doing things come up all the time. And our life as a whole is always our own attempt to answer the question about a good way of living.

Still many people don’t think much about these questions. They just live like they are supposed to live. They live like they believe other people would want them to live. And believe in things that people around them believe in. So they let other people decide about their lives.

But there are some people who feel that they must try to answer these questions. Who stop and ask: Should I really believe this? Should I really live like this? And they will not go on, before they know the answer. They are willing to go deeper and deeper and spend a lot of time with these questions. In fact, they can spend their whole life trying to figure out something other people think is not interesting at all.

In the best case, these people can find new answers to life’s big questions. Answers that open people’s eyes and change the way they look at their lives. This could change the way people are living. In the best case, these answers can help all of us to live our lives better.

This is what I do for work. I try to find new ways of thinking that will make people live a better life.

I work on finding good ways for people to work (or play or just get to know each other) using computers. you might think you know all about this if you already have a lot of “friends” on your computer. but when a business is trying to help their people work together, they need to know what to do to help. they have to know whether a game is just for fun or can help people work. and when a school wants to help students learn, they have the same questions.

What I do is try things out, watch to see what happens, and explain the ways in which work or learning was done, noting especially whether it was done better or worse.

A ‘census’ happens when we ask all the people in the land to answer some questions and then add up all the answers. One of the things that I do at work is help people to use the numbers that we find when we add everything up. In this land (‘United_Kingdom’), we ask these questions every ten years. We have been doing this for more than two hundred years.

We can use the answers to find out how many people there are: how many men, how many women, how many children and so on. The questions cover things like the jobs that people do, the houses that they live in, and the people that they live with. So, we can find out how many people do different sorts of jobs, and what different sorts of people do the same job. We also ask questions about how well people did at school, about whether they look after other people and about whether they are sick or well.

When we check the answers, we can do things like looking at the number of different sorts of people who do a job. Sometimes there are less women in some jobs than we would expect, sometimes less people who believe in different Gods, and sometimes less people with different colored skin. If we find things like this we worry that different people are not all being given the same chances.

When I said that there might be less people who believe in different Gods doing a job than we would expect, how do we know how many we should expect? We can find out by looking at how many people there are in each group in all the people, and then seeing if there is the same share in the people doing each job. If we did not ask all the people, we might just have to guess about this.

A question that I am interested in asks people about where they used to live a year ago. This lets us see how many people have changed the place that they live in, and how they have all moved about. This helps us to decide where we might need to build new schools or hospitals or other things. If lots of people with children have moved to a place, then we might need to build a new school there.

One of the most interesting things that we can do is find the answers that a person made the last time that they answered the questions, and the answers that the same person gave ten years before. We can also look at their answers from ten years before that, and ten years before that, and even ten years before that! We will only find all of their answers if they are old enough, of course. If they are younger, or if they came to this land not many years ago, we will only find some of their answers. When we look at all these answers from different times, we can start to understand how things that people did a long time ago - such as the job that they did, or how well they did at school, or what their family was like or the jobs that their parents did - might change the way that their life turned out as they got older.

We can join the answers from now and from ten years ago (and earlier) for a small group of people. You and I do not know if we are in this group. The joined up answers give a huge number of facts about a person - so many that it might be easy to work out who that person is, even though we are not told their name or where they live. That is why it is important that people do not know if they are in this small group, and also why the actual numbers have to be kept under lock and key! People who use the numbers for this small group are told what they can and can not tell other people: they must make a serious promise not to tell things that might let others work out the name of someone in the small group.

After one hundred years have gone past, all the answers that people gave can be shown to everyone. People can find out very interesting things that happened to their family long before anyone who is living now can remember.

Some of the people who run this land have said that they don’t think that we should have carry on asking these questions to all the people. One reason for this is that it takes a lot of money to ask all the people lots of questions - paper forms have to be sent to all the houses, and other people have to read all the completed forms, and type the answers into a computer. It is true that it takes a lot of money, but it is important to remember that although we ask the questions every ten years, we keep on using the answers for a long time after. A lot of the ways that we use the answers are to try to make sure that we save money at other times: such as not building a new school when there are not enough children to go to it.

If we did not ask questions of all the people, what could we do instead? In some lands, they do not ask these questions. However in those lands they usually have a computer that keeps track of people, so that they always know how many different sorts of people there are in each place. In this land, we do not have a computer like that, so we can not use it in the same way. Sometimes, we ask questions to a group of people, instead of all the people. If that group has the same share of different sorts of people that we can see in all the people, then we think that the answers would be the same for all the people. It saves a lot of money to only ask questions to a group of people. But there is a problem with this! How do we know that the group of people has the same share of different sorts of people as there are in all the people? This is part of the same problem that I mentioned above, when we worry about whether people have the same chances. We need to ask questions to all the people from time to time to make sure that we still know how many different sorts of people there are!

What makes things stick together (or not stick together) and what are things made from? In every day life, there are many ways to make things stick together and many things to make things from. What happens, though, when things get really, really small? I study how things stick together and the things themselves in the smallest space we know how to make.

It turns out we need only three forces to explain all sticking together (or not sticking together) and only around 20 different things. Could we figure out a way to make this number of forces even smaller, maybe one or two forces? Can we make the number of things smaller? To study this we run small things into each other when they are moving almost as fast as light, and watch what comes out.

It also turns out this things running into each other when moving as fast as light happens to be close to the situation as at the start of time. So, on the side, we also study what the world might have looked like then.

‘Air Distillation’

For my job, I turn air into the different parts that make air up. We make the part of air you can breathe, and two parts of air you shouldn’t breathe, because your body can really only use the one part that you can breathe. All three air parts are used for lots of things, so it’s good that we can make the air parts go away from each other. So, how do we do that?

Well, first we suck the air into a thing that turns around and around really fast. Turning around so fast makes the air get hot. The hot air goes through a big box that has cold air parts coming out of it. The cold air parts make the hot air get colder, and the hot air makes the cold air parts get warm enough to do things with them.

The air is cold after going through the box; so cold that it’s almost wet like water. The cold wet air goes into the bottom of the thing that makes the air turn into its parts. Here’s where it starts to get hard. The part of air you can’t breathe go away from the rest of the wet air parts because it needs to be colder than the other wet air parts to stay wet. So, it turns into a really light air part that goes to the top of the thing that makes the air parts go away from each other and leaves through the box we talked about.

As the light air part you can’t breathe leaves, the wet air parts still stuck in the thing that makes the air parts go away from each other fall down until at the bottom, the air part you can breathe turns into very cold wet stuff.

Here’s where it gets way harder. A little bit of the light stuff you can’t breathe goes through a thing under the wet stuff you can breath. Since the light stuff you can’t breathe is warmer than the wet stuff you can breathe, it makes the wet stuff you can breathe turn into light stuff you can breathe. The light stuff you can breathe then goes out of the box we were talking about. The light stuff you can’t breathe that was going under the wet stuff you can breathe gets colder than it was because the wet stuff is very cold. So the light stuff you can’t breath turns back into the wet stuff you can’t breath, and goes all the way to the top of the thing that makes the air parts go away from each other, and falls down to the bottom. The falling down makes it turn back into light stuff you can’t breath, but the falling also makes the wet stuff you can breathe much colder so it stays wet longer until there’s lots of it.

Everything in the world can be turned into wet stuff, or really light stuff. You just need to know how hot or cold to make it. The stuff that a car is made out of need a lot of hot to make it wet. The stuff you breathe just needs a lot of cold. Most stuff that is like the stuff we breathe, you know the really light stuff that you usually can’t see, needs a lot of cold to make it wet. That’s how ‘distillation’ works.

I study what makes up space and time by imagining what happens when very small things hit each other. It turns out that very different forces act the same when you look at them in the right way. It is funny, but the least strong force brings together heavy things and really only acts (in a way we can watch) on big things. The strongest force that we know about keeps together the middle of the smallest things we can see. It is so strong that it can really only act on things very close together — if you pull too far, it just makes new things that are close together. It turns out that the thing carrying the least strong force acts just like a pair of the things carrying the strongest force.

This job of imagining what happens when very small things hit each other used to be very hard and would take a long time. Part of the reason is because we are talking about the chances of things happening. We have made it easier by cutting the big problem into lots of easy little problems that we fix and carefully stick together. This way of doing things has a strange name but it means something nice: the chances of things happening always adds up to one.

All living things need stuff called ‘DNA’. This stuff tells living things how to get built. But it changes fast in some living things, and slow in others. Why? My job is to figure this out.

To do my job, I get lots of this stuff out of different animals, read it using big box full of many parts, then use computers to guess how fast it changes. Once I know how fast it changes I try and figure out why it changes that fast. By looking at the stuff in a LOT of animals, and by looking carefully at how the animals live, I have started to understand what makes ‘DNA’ change. So, we now know that this stuff changes a lot faster in animals that are small, have a lot of children, and die quickly.

This is a pretty fun job. When I’m not figuring all this stuff out, I work at telling students how to do all of this too.

I study tiny flying animals that bite people. These tiny flying animals make some people sick. To help, I study things (like Off!) that keep these tiny flying biting animals from biting people. Sometimes these things (like Off!) Sometimes these things (like Off!) make people smell bad, make them bad to eat, or make the tiny flying things sick. I want to know what things in the tiny flying animals sense Off! and how that tells the animal that a person smells bad or is bad to eat.

I also just want to know more about how these tiny flying animals think and eat and live and find people to bite.

After high school, I decided what I learned was not enough so I wanted to do more school. So I went to a bigger, harder, more well known school to learn more about the tiniest parts that make up everything that is in the world and in space. I spent most of my time learning why they do what they do, how they get along with each other, and how they form and cause both the normal and the very cool things we see and use every day.

And to change things up and keep my mind always interested, I also took classes in reading and writing. The books I read and movies I watched were all made by people from the cold upper part of that large area across the even larger body of water to our right. The land of blue eyes and light hair. I wanted to study their works because I grew up in the same part of the world and wanted to stay reminded of their way of life.

I write stories about people who are trying to understand how the world works, or how we can all live better in the world, and the different ways they go about studying this.

Some people study how animals live, what they eat and why they live where they live (or don’t). Other people study old rocks or the wind and rain, or how people used to live a long time ago. Still other people figure out how to build things that work well and last a long time, things that help people live better lives—especially people who don’t have very much to begin with.

A lot of people are trying to figure out how we all can live without hurting the places we live, because there are more and more of us every year and the things we have done and built have already hurt these places a lot.

I talk to all these different people and try to figure out how to write about what they are doing in ways that lots of people can understand and (I hope) find exciting and interesting. This can be hard, because these people I talk to are usually doing things that aren’t easy to put into simple words, and sometimes they need help explaining what they do in simple words. Sometimes I go to where these people are working to see what they are doing in person (I like that part a lot).

After I write the stories, I send them to the people who told me to write them in the first place, who read them to see if they can be even better stories. Once we all agree that the stories are the best they can be, the stories are put onto paper and sent out all over the place so as many people can read them as possible. Then the people who told me to write the stories give me money for my work (I like that part too).

This work is important because the more people know about and understand this kind of work, the more we will all understand how amazing our world is, and how important it is to live in ways that hurt where we live as little as possible.

And they’re really cool stories.

In the world, there are many animals who live together and also do things together, like going to places and looking for food. We know a bit how this works, but not completely. My job is to understand how exactly they do that, and especially what the way they move together has to do with whether they like each other or not (because lots of animals have friends too). I think this is a very important question, and so far not many people have thought about it.

So I use tiny computers on the animals and big computers in the office, and the tiny computers send numbers to the big computers and I draw a bigger picture to make sense of all this (sometimes it is not so easy).

Then I write and I talk about it, which is also a big part of my job.

My world is your world. I use things like you use things. I see things as you see things. But I also see things another way; with numbers.

Each day, I search the world for cool things that I do not understand. When I find something I do not understand, I search for numbers to help me understand, and to help you understand. Once I understand this thing, I can use this understanding for good; or for bad, but usually for good. I do this by looking forward. Not today, not now, but tomorrow, and the day after. That is right, I use numbers to guess what will happen in the time after the now; now. And I use this guess to act now so that I and everyone is happy now and tomorrow, because this leads to more things.

The coolest thing about this, is that I can use numbers to understand pretty much everything. Things that fly. Things that roll. Things that jump. Things that breathe. Green things. Red things. Blue things. Light things. Dark things. Made up things. Real things. Things that go. Things, lots and lots of things.

I speak numbers. I know tomorrow in numbers. At least I think I do…

Most stars in the sky have their own worlds going around them. They are hard to see, for a few reasons. The space on the sky between the star and its worlds is tiny, because they are far away. And, the star is so much brighter that it hides their light. Also, the air above us makes the star’s light shake and move in not-straight ways before it reaches the ground. This causes confusing pictures, even with our best light-focusing things.

However, when a world is new, it is hot like a kitchen thing and gives off a very red kind of light. The largest, youngest other-star worlds give off enough very-red light to stand out next to their home star. We use big light-focusing things to break the light of this type of world away from its home star. Then we look at the color of the world’s light to figure out what stuff it’s made of, and how it came together in the first place. Some years ahead, with better light-focusing things, we will try the same thing on smaller other-star worlds which are more like the one we live on.