Ten Hundred Words of Science

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.