New Year's Resolutions for 2014

It is that time of the year again for New Year's Resolutions. I don't think I officially made any last year but I do enjoy setting these as goals and targets I wish to accomplish by the end of the year. If anyone is interested, click here to see the resolutions I made for the year of 2012. 2013 has been a very busy and at times stressful year, but ultimately very rewarding. Key highlights include:

• January included the trials and tribulations of running my own Young Enterprise company.
• I can't remember what else I did over February, March and April apart from visiting the Big Bang Science Fair for a second year. 
• May was  time for hoards of AS exams that turned out fine.
• June was a fantastic start to the summer with a Headstart summer school at Oxford University for materials science where I met some of the most talented, multifaceted and friendly people I have ever encountered.
• July is my birthday month where I celebrated at Eton College at the Universities Summer School. Those 14 days were some of the most academically exhausting  (4 hours of homework for some nights) yet enlightening two weeks I have ever experienced. I will never forget the horrific practice interview I had in the morning of my actual birthday, or the surreal sunset party on an island that Eton own that we had in the evening. 
• I traveled to Madrid in August along with CYO where we had the privilege of playing an open air concert in the medieval town center of Toledo right in front of the facade of the glorious Gothic cathedral. 
• I scrambled through September, attempting to trawl through hoards of research, doing some frantic essay writing and cutting it very short with deadlines in order to complete my Extended Project on the Millennium Bridge. Luckily all was well by the end of this ordeal.
• October was the month where I forced myself to decided on where I was planning to apply for university and for what course.
• November was an relatively uneventful month, apart from attending university interviews and multiple fancy dress parties where I made appearances as a red indian, Ahmed the pizza delivery man and the Cheshire Cat. I have also been busy with preparing for the Physics Aptitude Test and for other presentation evenings .
• December is drawing to a close. During this month I have attended grueling university interviews at Oxford which I will talk about in further depth at a later date. I also was also part of the orchestra for our school's performance of Wind in the Willows. 

I feel like I have grown up over 2013 and become more confident as a person. Now that 2013 is over, here are my New Years' resolutions for this year. I have only got four this year but I believe that they will all have a profound impact on my life. 

Read 24 books over the course of 2014.

I know this sounds terrible but over my teenage years, I think I have only leisurely read enough books to count on one hand. I used to be a relatively keen reader as a child, annually participating in summer reading challenges but I lost my interest. However, over the later half of 2013, I got back into the habit of regularly reading in order to complete my wider reading specified in my UCAS application and really enjoyed it. I rediscovered the wonders of the library and since I have recently acquired a quite a large pile of books I want to get through as well as book vouchers, so I thought it would be a worthwhile resolution. 24 books may not seem to be a particularly large number, but the books I am currently reading are all pretty heavy reads. 

Cut all sugary drinks and snacks out of my diet.

This may seem quite extreme but I honestly don't really get much enjoyment out of eating sweets or drinking hot chocolate and they are detrimental to many aspects of your health.This ban will include all sweets, chocolate bars, fizzy drinks, sugary hot beverages from the likes of Costa etc, and biscuits. I don't really consume these foods that often anyway as it's only when I have lots of music rehearsals that these items are abundantly supplied. This is when I think it is going to be the most challenging to say no to them. I feel like I have quite good self-discipline but we shall see how this pans out. 

Brush my hair at least once a day.

My hair can now be officially classified as being in the very long category of hair lengths. It is pretty much hip length and thus is more high maintenance that it has been ever previously been. I often avoid brushing my hair as it is painful and the back often gets extremely matted. However, in order to prevent my hair becoming too straggly, I shall attempt to remember to brush it at least one a day.

Get into university.

This is rather self-explanatory. 2014 is hopefully going to be the year where I move out from the same house that I've lived my entire life in move to a fantastic city to study a subject I am absolutely passionate about. 

How does your Quartz Watch Work?

Developments in technology have a profound impact on society which I am sure you all know about. However, at the beginning of its research, these fields are often incredibly esoteric so today I am going to talk about a piece of technology that everyone owns and you may even be wearing one right now: a quartz watch.

Every single time piece relies on something oscillating with a constant time period. In a mechanical watch, there is a swung balance wheel, when in a quartz watch, it is a tiny quartz crystal, otherwise known as silicon dioxide or just sand. The crystal has piezoelectric properties, so when it is mechanically deformed, whether that is being squashed or bent, a small electric charge accumulates causing a small electric currrent - this is how we create a spark with barbeque lighters. However,  like most things in physics, it can also work in reverse: when we pass a current through the crystal, it will deform. This is what causes the quartz to oscillates and ultimatly keep time.

Piezoelectricity In Detail

This is all a very nice description of what happens, but what is the mechanism that actually causes the quartz to deform when a current is passed through? When an asymmetrical crystal is subject to mechanical stress, there is a change in the overall polarisation and dipole density of the crystal. This is actually quite similar to how capacitors work, which I have currently been studying about in physics. Any spatially separated charge, such as in a dielectric in a capacitor will result in an electric field, therefore an electric potential. In a piezoelectric device, mechanical stress, instead of an externally applied voltage is what causes this charge separation in the individual atoms of the material. When an AC current is applied, the crystal will mechanically resonant and the frequency of the resonance is determined by the physical dimensions of the material, the "cut angle" with respect to the crystalline axis of the original crystal and the ambient temperature.

Why use Quartz?

Many materials exhibit piezoelectric properties, but why was is quartz specifically chosen to be used inside millions of watches today Well it is incredibly abundant in the Earth's crust and apart from its piezoelectric properties, it also has many other attractive properties that make it ideal for use in a wrist watch. The accuracy of a quartz watch is due to its high mechanical and chemical stability. As mentioned above, changes in ambient temperature can change the frequency of the resonance, however, quartz actually has a low temperature coefficient that means that is relatively little change of physical property when the temperature changes. Quartz also has a high Q a resonance which basically means how under damped the oscillator is - A higher Q factor means that there is a lower rate of loss of energy relative to the stored energy in the oscillator and oscillations die out more slowly. Since quartz is also incredibly hard and relatively inert, it you can rely on the  crystal not faulting during the lifetime of the watch.

Measuring Time

So now that we understand why the quartz was chosen and why it vibrates, how do our wrist watches count seconds and tell us the right time? The quartz crystal is cut by a laser into a 3mm tiny fork shape which means that the current from the battery makes it vibrate at 32768hz +/- 0.06hz. This specific number is chosen as it is exactly 2¹⁵ hz (oscillations per second), meaning some simple circuitry can easily use this to determine the time interval between each second. This is also why there are regular pulses per second with the second hand in a quartz watch whilst a mechanical watch moves continuously. Then it's all the simple matter of gears in the correct ratio to move the minute and hour clock.

Conclusion

Once owning a horological device was one of prestige and privilege, but since the perfect piezoelectric properties of quartz crystals were first ulitised in a wrist watch in the 1960s, the price of watches have dropped to the point of disposability. They are  incredibly accurate to within 5 seconds/month, more accurate to an order of magnitude when compared to mechanical watches and only surpasses in long term accuracy by primary atomic stands such as Caesium and Rubidium. I believe that they have truly revolutionised the world we live in and that is ultimately what the whole point of manipulating and using these weird quirks in the natural world to improve human life is all about.

Why Air Bazookas are endless fun

"I'm having so much fun."

Something that I have been curious about for a while are air bazookas. As you can see from my picture from the Big Bang 2012 Young Scientists' and Engineering fair (which I wrote an entire blog post about here), the air vortex cannon or bazooka is a toy which fires doughnut shaped rings of air - or smoke if you fill up the cavity with smoke - that are strong enough to ruffle hair, knock over cans and scare neighbours pets after travelling several meters. It has always intrigued me how these doughnuts of air can travel so far, are formed so easily and are stable, so I am going to attempt to answer these questions in this blog post today.

Toroidal vortices
One of the main reasons why Air Bazookas are so fun is due to their funky doughnut shaped smoke clouds they produce. When you force a large volume of fluid through a small hole, you will get a toroidal vortex. This sounds very technical and esoteric, but a torus is just the mathematical description of a doughnut shape and a vortex is the spinning motion of a fluid - it's the doughnut rings of air that are fired out of the air bazookas.

How are they formed?

1. The diaphragm of the air bazooka is pulled back and released, suddenly pushing air out of the bazooka. As the air approaches the hole, it has a uniform velocity.
2. As it passes the hole, the air on the edge is slowed down by the drag from the surface of the hole, as well as coming into contact with the stationary air outside the bazooka. This forms a velocity gradient with the air in the centre of the hole/ inner layers having the greatest velocity and the air at the circumference/ outer layers with the lowest velocity.
3. This velocity gradient causes the inner layers of air to "roll" around the outer layers, forming the vortex. Imagine an air molecule towards the outer layer - it is being pushed harder from the inner layers as they are travelling at a faster velocity than the air on the outer layers, giving the air angular momentum and causing it to spin.

Why are they so stable?

Another reason why Air Bazookas are endless fun is due to the fact that the air doughnuts hold their shape for a relatively long time before dissipating. Toroidal vortices are incredibly stable due to the fact that moving fluids exert less pressure on their surroundings than still fluids. Air molecules are constantly colliding with each other and their surroundings as they are a gas, meaing that there is air pressure. When you disturb air, there is still the same amount of kinetic energy, but more is in the direction of motion and less on the surface, meaning the pressure is lower for fluids with higher velocity. I'm not sure if that is a 100% correct derivation, but what we are discussing is Bernoulli's Principle: the fast air moves, the lower the air pressure.

Since the velocity of air inside the vortex is greater than the velocity of air outside, there is also higher pressure surrounding the torus, which squeezes and maintains its shape. This net inwards pressure acts with the same principle as vacuum packaging to make the toroidal vortices very stable.

Why do they travel forward?
A further reason why Air Bazookas are so fun is that you can aim and fire them at other people - for us to understand why we can do this, we must appreciate why they travel forward in the first place. As the flow of air in the vortex "rubs" against the still air, friction causes the torus to move itself forward. This is exactly like how a bicycle wheel works: if you imagine a spinning bicycle wheel which is then dropped on the ground, the friction between the spinning wheel and the ground would cause it to move forward. Another analogy is like how a swimmer pulls himself/herself along through the water.

The energy required to move the ring forward and to keep the vortex rotating comes from the momentum of the rotating air inside the vortex. Air has momentum as it has mass. The spinning air inside the torus is where energy is stored - once all this energy is used up through work done to overcome the frictional forces, the doughtnut of air dissipates.

Why do they travel so far?
The last reason why air bazookas are so fun is that you can aim and fire air doughnuts at people several meters away. The reason why this is possible is the poloidal flow of air in the vortices - the flow of air around the "width" of the doughnut. Since the air is moving, the friction between the vortex and surrounding stationary air decreases, meaning that longer distances can be travelled with little loss of mass and kinetic energy with air doughnuts than if it was just a jet of fluid.

So in conclusion, it's all a matter of fluid dynamics.

I feel like I should start referencing where I get my information from. Here are my main sources:

• Skulls in the Stars
• Arbor Scientific
• San Francisco State University
• ABC
• Wikipedia

Plans for the Summer Holidays

For once, I actually have a decent amount of free time this summer so I am eager to make the most of it and not spend all of it sleeping or watching movies on my laptop, even though that is probably what will happen.
This is what I aim to achieve over the next few weeks

Academic Goals:

• Decide on what degree course I actually want to take - I know, I haven't even done that yet
• Write my personal statement
• Apply for work experience in October
• Cover C3 content
• Cover physics A2 content
• Cover chemistry A2 content/ do tech coursework, depending on which I will take on next year
• Complete EPQ
• Read, read and read

Recreational Goals:

• Write a "recreational" blog post on here about any science that interests me every day that I don't have a "planned" activity for the day
• Learn about what my dad actually does for a living
• Practise violin ready for the tour
• Learn to play bass - songs I want to learn include
• Hysteria by Muse
• some songs from RHCP - not decided which ones yet
• Get Lucky by Daft Punk 
• Blurred Lines by Robin Thicke
• Street Life by The Crusaders
• Katachi by Shugo Tokumaru 
• Feels Like We Only Go Backwards and Apocalyptic Dreams by Tame Impala

Social Goals:

• Socialise at least twice a week - lol. 
• Try not to become a complete recluse

Oxford Day Five: Design & Make Task and Departure

Again, I am writing this post over a week after the end of the Headstart course simply because I've been pre-occupied with catching up with school work that I missed over the week. However, the last day was a great day so I thought it's better late than never and I'm going to share my last day at Oxford with you.

Breakfast was as usual and I ate close to nothing. Afterwards we had to pack up our bags and drop them off in the Porter's Lodge along with our keys, meaning no more key checks - it was the beginning of the end.

We then walked over to the Materials department for our last day of activities. We had a team design project involving the usual task of designing and building something which could protect an "Egg Telescope" from a fall from space to Earth, or in our case, from a 7 meter drop. I managed to conjure up this idea of having a tetrehedral tubular paper cage which help the egg in suspension inside of it due to strings in tension. I've actually done various "engineering" activities like this before in the past, but this one was slightly difference as a fast decent was advantageous, so we also added a small parachute to only slightly reduce velocity. We had a set amount of Materials Pounds that we could spend and it was possible to gain monetary sponsorship from our course directors and student mentors. Our group managed to get this guy called Jon Connolly to join our team in manufacturing our egg vessel & parachute. He actually proved to be a worthwhile investment and our design proved to be highly successful with no egg cracking. We then had presentations to share our designs with the rest of the group. There were some incredibly impassioned presentations and I was astounded by just how good some people were at public speaking. In the end, scores were added up and turns out our team won! Yipee. We each got a commemorative Mansfield College mug as a prize which I will treasure till the end of time.

Next were some more presentations including the winners of the poster competition which unfortunately we didn't win, and finally our certificates for attending this Headstart course.

This was the time we made our final walk through University Parks, back to Mansfield to collect up our bags and say our goodbyes. I actually had a 2 hour wait before my coach back so I was one of the last ones to leave the college. Here are my final thoughts about the course in bullet points as I'm boring of writing in paragraphs:

• It has made me realise that perhaps materials is not the university course for me, but I still find it utterly fascinating.
• Gay bacon is nice!
• I loved how we actually had a decent amount of free time. I anticipated homework to do or other such more structured activities in the evenings but we could do whatever which was great. 
• It was great to be surround by so many like-minded people, make random science jokes, spew out random science facts and for people to actually find them interesting - wow I sound so lame. 
• The people came from all over the country but were all incredibly friendly, intelligent and talented. 
• Punting is fun! 
• It's a shame the course wasn't longer as once you finally get to know everyone's names, it's the end of the course
• I can't do without my veggies
• I weighed myself on the Friday we got back and I managed to lose 1.5kg of weight (or mass correctly speaking) over the previous 4 days which is absolutely insane as I cannot remember a time in my life when I have ever even lost weight - I love food too much. 
• Being short in Oxford has its advantages as there were slanty ceilings in our halls.

Okay that's all I can think of for now. This is actually such an exciting time of year as I'm going on another course in Eton starting on Tuesday! This meeting even more new people which is always fun. I find sustaining friends is hard but making friends is fun. However, it's going to be a completely different vibe as there's going to be over 100 of us studying a plethora of subjects. I think I'm going to attempt to keep a diary log of my time there too on this blog as I love documenting everything. It's going to hard to sustain it though as I only managed to keep the Oxford blogs going for 3 days before I succumbed to tiredness and stopped writing them the day of occurrence. Let's just see how it goes? 

Oxford Day Four: Posters, Materials and Free Time

This day has been written retrospectively on Saturday 22nd June as the accumulative effect of sleep deprivation over the last few days has taken its toll and I could not force myself to stay awake to write these blog posts on the actual days of occurrence. However, I thought as I well I might as well write it now as I'm going to forget most of the details sooner or later.

Breakfast was as usual although this time I skipped cereal all together and instead went for toast. I stole a little pot of jam to take home as they looked really cool. We then walked to the materials department for our first activity of the day, which was poster making for our group. Our poster was on "Catalytic Wizardry" and the article we had to review was utterly confusing.

Afterwards we had a lab sessions where we tested the tensile strength of steels rods with two different carbon contents (0.18% and 0.8% I think from my memory) until failure on an apparatus which recorded and plotted data with respect to force and area. We then had a really interesting chat regarding first year course content for materials, as well as introducing to us some of the basics of metallurgy, such as dislocations, work hardening, annealing, tempering, iron-carbon phase diagrams, characteristics and properties of pearlite and ferrite. I found this session incredibly interesting and made me really want to study materials. I surprised myself with how much I knew about steel already from studying resistant materials, but it was fantastic to get into the real nitty gritty of why heating up steel of a certain carbon content will give it certain mechanical properties instead of just memorising it as a fact that that will happen.

Again it was a brown buffet lunch at the Holder Cafe at the materials department and I had no appetite.

The afternoon was absolutely amazing as we had free time (yippee). We first went punting again as I didn't really get to punt much on my first time two days ago. I was initially apprehensive but it turned out we had the dream team on our punt and I think we did pretty well, apart from the part where we almost died from almost crashing under a bridge after we decided to hold onto another group's pedalo for momentum. After cruising around and harassing some geese, I managed to park our punt (badly) before heading off to our sanctuary - Tescos. I co-bought some strawberries and then group headed off to university parks. We chilled a bit before the boys started playing football and us girls chatted before heading off to view the physics department.

The evening included our formal conference dinner so the girls got dressed up in pretty dresses and the guys in their white and blue stripy shirts. We all politely sipped juices out of wine glasses in the JCR for the dinner reception. The atmosphere was lovely, although I was feeling particularly lethargic at this stage due to the warm surroundings and dim lighting. The actual dinner included posh pate and pickles for starters; venison, potato and root vegetables for mains; chocolate brownie and ice cream for pudding and lastly coffee and chocolates to round off the meal. By this point I was feeling absolutely awful and ate very little of this meal which pained me. I donated my entire dessert to a good cause so at least that wasn't wasted.

Afterwards was suppose to be a DVD night, but alas, there was no DVDs. Instead we had more circle time, which I was not feeling. I decided to have an early-ish/not really night and just head up to my room to sleep.

Oxford Day Three: JET and quiz time

Today was another fantastic day in Oxford. Again the breakfast began the day which was the same cereal and juice. This time I decided to have two packs as I was feeling particularly hungry, which did not turn out to be a good idea as I drenched my Alpen in milk. I don't usually drink any cow's milk at home so throughout the day I had awful stomach pains, which probably means I am mildly lactose intolerant. Anyway, that is probably TMI.

First we had a lecture on Nanomaterials by Jude Britton, a PhD student. It was an interesting lecture as she talked us through what a nanomaterial is (a material that is one billionth of a meter) and why they are so useful - properties quantise, can be used in drugs and surface area increases exponentially.  We talked about some of the techniques that her department uses to observe these tiny, tiny particle, such as Scanning Electron Microscopy, Transmission Electron Microscopy and Scanning Probe Microscopy. Her research group covers various nanomaterials, such as carbon nanotubes, chalcogenides and graphene.

Next was a lecture delivered by David regarding presentation skills.

Before lunch, we finished off our research in preparation to our visit to JET at Culham. Lunch again was disappointing, but luckily they had watermelon - my favourite - and I had slices of that.

Afterwards, we went on the coach to JET. At this time I was feeling pretty nauseous but I kept this to myself. We were equipped with hard hats and entered the facility. We could not view the actual JET as they were preparing it for running or something like that, so we just walked around the big hall with all the different spare parts. We viewed the control centre as well as the training facilities for the operators of the robotic controls for inside the Tokamak. I have more written up about nuclear fusion from Oxford Day One, so please check that out if you are interested into why we visited the centre.

Dinner included some nice steak, potatoes and some vegetables for once: courgette. Afterwards was our quiz night and I was part of the Cumberbitchezzzz/Jar Enthusiasts. We didn't win but it was fun whilst it lasted. Next we played some truth or dare which ended up with me in a bin and  then an awful chair-moving-around game. Now I am tired and going to sleep.