Reaching out to the stars on the fast approaching end of the festival

The festival has been incredible and informative for the whole week, but this has did not stop the weekend from being better.

I kickstarted the weekend with Barry Marshall – a Nobel Prize winner in recognition of his 1982 experiment on himself, which showed that the bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, causes stomach ulcers.

Hearing how he grew these bacteria and then swallowed a potentially lethal dosage of them was fascinating! There was no easy or correct cure for these ulcers at the time and so, unlike in most scientific situations, his hypothesis had to work.

My favourite talk for the day had to be Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock, who has inspired me since I decided to study science, so I was really happy to finally meet her.

She is one of the few female scientists really leading the way in outreach and public engagement (thankfully, this number is growing).

She has had her own series on the BBC called Do we really need the moon? and will soon to be presenting a series about why we need satellites, which was also the topic of the talk she gave.

The reason you can read this blog or even understand the reason that you’re alive is to do with the satellites we have in space. Equally, we get weather information from satellites and can also tell where the most destructed areas are after a major disaster.

However, our satellites are becoming more vulnerable to things such as ‘space junk’, which ranges from inactive and broken pieces of satellite to things left behind by astronauts.

In addition to that, 2012 and 2013 see the height in our solar activity (solar maximum), with the Sun shooting out matter the size of Earth (the Sun is 1 million times larger than our planet).

This could endanger our satellites, so we need the information from other satellites scoping space and mechanisms such as the ‘safe mode’, which puts these satellites on “sleep” to avoid any damage or malfunctioning during the solar maximum.

It’s always mind-boggling when you hear the statistics out in space – our local galaxy, the Milky Way, has ~200 billion stars and there are some 100 billion galaxies in space.

It makes you wonder what we’re doing out there or what we hope to achieve but the scientists at Cheltenham say another 30 years and we’ll possibly have a space base on the moon.

Mark Henderson’s signing
Later on in the day, Mark Henderson, author of The Geek Manifesto, spoke about the lack of scientific representation to parliament. Admittedly, I didn’t feel I learnt much, as I have been to a talk of his before and it was kind of the same stuff.

However, I finally bought his book and was really happy to get it signed. I did find out he was meant to have a blue cover for his book, instead of orange, with white stripes, which would have come out looking more like The Greek Manifesto!

So what do you think of, when you think of numbers? Not much, right? Just 1, 2, 3, 4… a quantifiable system invented 8,000 years ago in Iraq. Yet we take it for granted what this counting system is actually about and being able to quantify something.

In his talk, Alex Bellos, helped bring light to the fact that numbers are all about ‘cardinality’ and ‘ordinality’. Cardinality is the amount (such as the identity of the number – how many bananas are in this bowl, for instance) while ordinality is the order in which it appears, knowing that 3 is less than 4 but more than 2: understanding its amount with respect to another.

We also got to see that numbers aren’t represented in the same way. For instance, tallying in the UK is by four strokes and a diagonal line crossed over the previous four to represent five, while in South America it is a square with one diagonal line from one corner to another (where each side of the square also represents a number).

Please also go online to watch ‘flash anzan’ and fill in his survey ‘www.randomnumbersurvey.net’ in contribution to his second book.

Maths took another turn to end my night, and that was some stand-up maths by Matt Parker. He remembers so many numbers and has a speciality in bringing together stand-up comedy and maths.

It was incredibly funny but it’s impossible to re-enact the jokes, so just see him in action when you can and if you’re a huge maths fan sign up to a ‘mathsjam’ community (mathsjam.com), which are located about the UK.