Inflight Science: A Guide to the World from Your Airplane Window

By Brian Clegg

The perfect companion to any flight - a guide to the science on view from your window seat. There are few times when science is so immediate as when you're in a plane. Your life is in the hands of the scientists and engineers who enable tons of metal and plastic to hurtle through the sky at hundreds of miles an hour. Inflight Science shows how you stay alive up there - but that's only the beginning.

Brian Clegg explains the ever changing view, whether it's crop circles or clouds, mountains or river deltas, and describes simple experiments to show how a wing provides lift, or what happens if you try to open a door in midair (don't!). On a plane you'll experience the impact of relativity, the power of natural radiation and the effect of altitude on the boiling point of tea. Among the many things you'll learn is why the sky is blue, the cause of thunderstorms and the impact of volcanic ash in an enjoyable tour of mid-air science. Every moment of your journey is an opportunity to experience science in action: Inflight Science will be your guide.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Icon Books
• Release date: Apr 7, 2011
• ISBN: 9781848312807

Brian Clegg

Brian Clegg is a popular science writer whose Dice World and A Brief History of Infinity were both longlisted for the Royal Society Prize for Science Books. He has written for publications including Nature, The Times and BBC Focus.

Book preview

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Previously published in the UK in 2011 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [e-mail]

www.iconbooks.co.uk

This electronic edition published in the UK in 2011 by Icon Books Ltd

ISBN: 978-1-84831-280-7 (ePub format)

ISBN: 978-1-84831-281-4 (Adobe ebook format)

Printed edition (ISBN 978-184831-241-8)

sold in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asia

by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House,

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or their agents

Printed edition distributed in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asia

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Printed edition published in the USA in 2011 by Totem Books

Inquiries to: Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

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Printed edition distributed to the trade in the USA

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Printed edition published in Australia in 2011 by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd,

PO Box 8500, 83 Alexander Street,

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Printed edition published in Canada by Penguin Books Canada,

90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700,

Toronto, Ontario M4P 2YE

Text copyright © 2011 Brian Clegg

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset by Marie Doherty

Contents

Title page

Copyright

List of illustrations

About the Author

Disclaimer

Dedication

At the Airport

Terminal boredom

An airport divided

Bag check

Testing the air

A lesson in detection

Body scan

Who do you think you are?

The science of superstition

Taking to the Sky

Aircraft basics

Fuelling flight

The greenhouse effect’s good side

Flying the green way

Getting moving

Big radar is watching you

Something on the air tonight

Sat nav on the flight deck

The universal language

The latest model on the runway

How Newton’s laws get you going

Joining the jet set

Rotation and climbing

Under pressure

Wing work

Control surfaces in action

Exploring the Landscape

The mystery of the fields

On the Nazca plains

Chalk marks the spot

The traces of the past

Following the water course

Fascinating fractals

The making of meanders

How does your town grow?

The infinite coast

Gravity always wins

From river to sea

Water, water everywhere

Time and tide wait for no one

On the crest of a wave

What colour is the sea?

Above the Clouds

Into the clouds

An adventure in cloud-spotting

All the way to cloud 9

No pot of gold for an endless rainbow

Over icy seas

Up into the sunlight

Voyage to the heart of the Sun

Why is the sky blue?

Why does the Sun keep shining?

Taking a trip through a quantum tunnel

Crossing flight paths

Leaving a trail in the sky

Is there life out there?

Going walkabout

Travelling through bumpy air

The flash of lightning

A static charge

Making lightning

Electricity on the move

There’s safety in metal boxes

Grounded by the ash

Volcanic eruption

In the radiation zone

Fooled by a natural high

A cosmic collision

Cabin Life

Pressure on the blood supply

Catching up with jet lag

Crossing the time zones

What jet lag is (and isn’t)

Taming jet lag

Resorting to medication

Is there a jet lag north/south divide?

A moving experience

Relatively interesting

Galileo’s big idea

In the jet stream

The special one

Anti-ageing flights

A nice cup of tea

Hearing food

Technology in Flight

Following your course on the map

Projecting the world

At the bleeding edge of technology

Keeping the screen flat

Bartholin’s crystal wonder

Giving light the liquid crystal twist

Taking your hi-tech with you

The view from the flight deck

Following the guidance of inertia

Tracking your way through the air

Einstein’s accelerating revelation

The feeble force

Gyroscopic gyrations

Distant Views and Back to Earth

Viewing the distant mountain peaks

As old as the hills

It’s cold on them thar hills

The icing on the mountain

Around the bend with a siphon

The vacuum solution

Meeting the night sky

A view of Venus

The amazing Moon

The changing face of the man in the Moon

Welcome to the galaxy

The street light fantasia

The amazing eye

Making up a picture of the world

Eyes wide

First touch on the runway

Final steps

Picture credits

List of illustrations

1. The electromagnetic spectrum

2. A transformer

3. The undercarriage of an Airbus A-380

4. The greenhouse effect

5. A tug in action

6. Producing lift in a sheet of paper

7. Features of an aircraft wing

8. A crop circle

9. The Nazca lines

10. The Uffington white horse

11. Estimating distance

12. Old Sarum

13. River meanders

14. An evolved settlement

15. A planned settlement

16. Contours of a rugged coastline

17. A Koch curve

18. The Ganges river delta

19. The tides

20. Waves breaking near the shore

21. Cumulus clouds

22. A thunderhead cumulonimbus

23. Stratocumulus clouds

24. Cirrus clouds

25. Contrails

26. A storm on an aircraft radar

27. Forked cloud-to-ground lightning

28. Pico do Fogo volcano

29. Seatback entertainment

30. A polarizing filter

31. An aircraft flight deck

32. Light bends in an accelerating spaceship

33. Mountain peaks

34. An annular solar eclipse

35. The phases of the Moon

About the author

Brian Clegg is a science writer (website: www.brianclegg.net). He runs www.popularscience.co.uk, and his most recent book was Armageddon Science (St Martin’s Press, 2010).

Disclaimer

The experiments in this book are designed to be safe, and many of them can be done on board an aircraft. Those that are better carried out at home are clearly indicated. When carrying out any experiments in the air, make sure that you don’t disturb other passengers or distract the cabin crew. Any experiments that could cause damage, danger or disturbance are clearly marked as not to be performed and are theoretical examples only. The publisher accepts no responsibility for any damage, injury or loss arising from any of the experiments contained in this book, theoretical or otherwise.

For Gillian, Chelsea and Rebecca

At the Airport

Terminal boredom

You’re sitting in the terminal, waiting for the flight. A whole mix of conflicting emotions could be vying for attention: boredom, excitement and fear included. Boredom often wins. Flying may be the quickest way to get to a distant destination, but it includes a lot of waiting around.

Even if you’re a seasoned traveller, though, there’s something special about taking to the air, an excitement that’s often triggered by the scent of kerosene on the tarmac, or the sound of an aircraft engine starting up. And there’s an element of fear – because however much you enjoy flying, there’s something highly unnatural about being suspended in a metal and plastic tube seven miles up, with only science and technology to keep you alive.

If you don’t like flying (and I don’t), a little science might help by providing some very reassuring statistics. The risk of being killed in a plane crash in any particular year is 1 in 125 million passenger journeys. This makes it three times safer on any particular journey than travelling by train – and when did you ever worry about that? The equivalent risk for a car is 1 in 10 million – twelve times as dangerous. You’re more likely to have a fatal accident during six hours spent in the workplace than you are during six hours on a plane. There’s only so much reassurance you can get from statistics – but flying is incredibly safe.

Our focus will be on what you see and experience on board an aircraft, but it’s quite possible that boredom will kick in as you wait in the terminal. You can only do so many trips round the duty-free shops, or drink so many coffees. So let’s take a brief look at some of the extreme technology you might encounter on the ground before taking to the air.

An airport divided

Airports have a strict divide between groundside and airside. To get from one to the other, particularly when flying internationally, you will face a barrage of technology aimed at identifying you and checking that you aren’t carrying anything dangerous. If airlines were permitted, they would also weigh you as you pass through (this was done in the early days of flight). Plane loading is very sensitive to weight and airlines have to rely on average weights to know how much load the passengers are contributing.

Making such an estimate has, at least once, caused problems. The plane, taking off from a German airport, struggled to get away from the runway and only just managed to claw its way into the air. It later turned out that there was a coin fair on in the city, and many of the passengers were coin dealers with their pockets crammed with new acquisitions, because they didn’t want to risk their new purchases being stolen from the hold baggage. All this unexpected spare change pushed the passengers’ weight well above the expected average. Added up over the entire aircraft, there was so much extra load that the plane didn’t respond as the pilots expected it to, causing a few worrying moments on take-off.

Bag check

Your first encounter with interesting technology is likely to be the security scanners. Your hand baggage is put on a conveyor belt that carries it through a powerful X-ray machine. That name ‘X-ray’ is not because of some special scientific naming convention, it’s just that when discoverer Wilhelm Roentgen first came across rays that would pass through solid objects he called them X-rays (or rather X-Strahlen) to show that they were unknown and mysterious. They were officially renamed Roentgen rays, but everyone liked Roentgen’s original nickname for them, and it stuck.

In reality, X-rays aren’t particularly mysterious – they are nothing more or less than light, but light of a colour that is far outside the spectrum that we can see. All light is ‘electromagnetic radiation’, a special interaction between electricity and magnetism that comes in a huge range of ‘colours’. As well as visible light there is radio, microwaves, infra-red, ultra-violet, X-rays and gamma rays – all exactly the same kind of stuff but with varying amounts of energy (see illustration 1. below). We now know that light is made up of tiny particles called photons (more on these later). X-rays consist of much higher-energy photons than visible light. If you prefer to think of light as a wave, as it was probably described to you at school, then X-ray waves have a shorter wavelength (the distance in which the wave makes a complete wiggle) than visible light.

01.tif

1. The electromagnetic spectrum: visible light forms a small segment near the middle.

When ordinary light hits an object like a suitcase that isn’t transparent, the photons of light are absorbed. This happens because the energy in the photon is sucked up by one of the particles that make up the suitcase. Every object we see around us is made up of atoms, and each atom consists of a very small central part, the nucleus, which contains over 99 per cent of its weight, surrounded by a fuzz of tiny particles called electrons. When a photon of light meets an electron, the electron can consume the energy in the photon. This leaves the electron buzzing around with more energy than it started with.

This process of an electron absorbing or giving off the energy of a photon of light is called a quantum leap, a term that has come to mean a large, significant change, even though a real quantum leap is an absolutely tiny difference.

Once the electron has absorbed the energy of the photon, it’s as if it were teetering on top of a high wall. Before long, that extra energy shoots back out in the form of a new photon, and the electron drops back to having less energy. We don’t know in which direction a particular photon will shoot off, but over time some will head towards your eyes. It’s these photons, pumped out by the electrons in an object, that allow you to see it.

X-rays are made up of photons too, and as with all other forms of light, they travel at 300,000 kilometres per second, but each photon has a lot more energy than a photon of ordinary light, enabling it to smash past the electrons in an object’s atoms with much less interaction. This means that X-rays can penetrate many substances that stop ordinary light dead.

In the process of battering through matter, the X-rays can cause damage to the molecules (molecules are just collections of atoms that are joined together) that make up an object. Each cell in the human body contains huge molecules of DNA that contain the instructions for how the cell should behave. If these molecules, or other important chemicals in the cell, are damaged by the impact of X-rays, the changes can increase the chances of cancer forming. This is why medical X-rays have to be used with care, keeping doses to a minimum. Before the 1960s this wasn’t appreciated. You still saw X-ray devices in shoe shops, for example, where you could peer through and see your toe bones wriggling around inside the shoe.

Inanimate objects are less susceptible to damage (though photographic film can be fogged), so baggage X-ray machines are considerably more powerful than most medical X-rays. Those big scanners you now find in airports use a wide band of X-rays, some more powerful than others. After passing through your bag and its contents, the X-rays reach detectors, working on a similar principle to a digital camera. There are two sets of sensors, one behind the other, separated by a metal shield. The weaker X-rays are stopped by the metal shield, so register only on the front detectors, but the more powerful X-rays blast on through the shield, so are spotted by both.

This distinction between the two strengths of X-ray is used to produce different-coloured images on the operator’s screen. This way the picture will distinguish between ‘soft’ matter like plants, plastic or explosives – which are usually coloured orange by the scanner – and less penetrable matter, which will let only the more powerful X-rays through – typically coloured green. The result is to give more depth to the image and to distinguish at a glance between the different types of material within your baggage.

Testing the air

It’s also possible that your bags will be subjected to a sniffer, hunting down explosives by their smell. Like many substances, explosives are to some extent volatile. This means that some of the molecules making up the chemicals within the explosive evaporate at room temperature and waft into the air. Molecules in solids and liquids are always bouncing around, and some bounce with more energy than the rest, managing to escape. This is the process that makes it possible for us to smell anything, whether we’re sniffing the bouquet of a glass of wine, or appreciating the tempting odour of baking bread. It’s also why a pool of water will eventually evaporate, even at room temperature.

Sometimes the sniffer will be a dog. Arguably, the dog is the oldest piece of highly developed technology still in active use. It might seem bizarre to call a dog ‘technology’. Yet dogs have been consciously moulded into distinct breeds with specific functions in mind. They were the first autonomous technology – they function on their own, as opposed

Reviews for Inflight Science

[ricksbooks · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Brian Clegg's "Inflight Science" is a breezy collection of scientific anecdotes loosely oriented around what is seen and experienced on an airplane flight. The breadth and depth are just about right for a transcontinental flight: informative enough to be educational, but topic-surfing so quickly that interest doesn't have the opportunity to wane. Much of the science is roughly high school level material, but from time-to-time Clegg dips into Einstein's relativity, forcing one's brain to engage fully.

Avid science readers won't find much (anything?) new here so the book isn't recommended for them, but for those who enjoy picking up a pop science magazine, this book will make your flight time pass quickly.

(Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy via the Library Thing Early Reviewers program.)

[gtvalentine · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Using the framework of an airplane flight, from waiting at the airport terminal to takeoff and cruising to the return to terra firma, Brian Clegg's "Inflight Science" teaches a broad array of flight related engineering and science. He covers the electromagnetic spectrum, airport security systems, gravity, clouds, how an airplane wing works, relativity, and, naturally, he answers the question "why is the sky blue?"

The writing is inviting and clear, never getting too bogged down in the details, yet managing to provide a good overview of many topics. I think it may leave technical-minded readers wanting more, but I think the intent of the book was to provide an engaging overview of the many areas of science and engineering that surround us when we fly. I think it succeeds.

[bragan_8 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A book meant to accompany you on a plane fight and explain some of the science behind what you're experiencing as you zoom through the skies. It covers most of the stuff you'd expect: the physics of flight, the nature of clouds, why your ears hurt like that, etc., but also works in lots of other scientific topics, from the optics of color to the nuclear processes that make the sun shine.

There really wasn't much of anything here that was new to me, and the writing is very clear and simple, rather than trying to be especially entertaining, so I personally didn't get as much out of it as I might have hoped, but if you're interested in learning some scientific basics while munching down on your little packet of peanuts, it's worth a look.

[lisalangford_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

INFLIGHT SCIENCE by Brian Clegg is chock full of facts. Using flight as a launching pad (okay, yes, pun intended), Clegg relays scientific facts about altitude, astronomy, quantum physics, the earth, color...and much much more. Not only does Clegg describe the science behind much of those things (why IS the sky blue?), and real world examples of the science, he also provides experiments for readers to try to illustrate the scientific concepts he's describing.

I thought of my brother when I read this book, a science-y (and dare I say it, geeky?) kind of guy even as a kid, he would have loved this book.

This would be a great book for any science buffs out there, and for teachers to either use in their classroom or have in a classroom library for kids to read.

[cvanhasselt_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Breezy and light, this book takes readers from the departure gate to touching down in an airplane, examining the science that abounds aloft. Everything from angular momentum to x-rays is covered, in short, easy to read sections. None of the science is particularly in-depth or technical, a disappointment for some readers. But what the book lacks in depth, it makes up for in breadth. Clegg's clear style, with an occasional dash of British wit, makes for a very pleasant, if light, read.

For me the best science writing tells a story, perhaps examining the history of a topic, or revealing the minds and personalities that make science and technology happen. This books misses that high mark, found in such top-notch works as Rebecca Skloot's "Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks." This book is more a collections of facts united by their relationship to flight. Clegg jumps around from topic to topic, from crop circles and meandering rivers, to cirrus clouds and the physics of lightning. Loosely stitched together, these snippets of science never quite gel into a thoughtful examination of the subject.

But in the end, if you are looking for a few cogent facts about flight, perhaps enough to get a conversation going with the attractive man or woman in the aisle seat next to you on a plane, this is the book for you. Look for depth elsewhere, but for a good quick read about flight, start here.

[rastaphrog · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An interesting look at the "science" involved in flying. Depending on how much of a science geek you are you may not learn very much new information, but it's a fairly good read all the same. For the most part it's easily understood by the layman, but it does get into some heavier subjects that most of us ignore or don't even think about on a regular basis.

[ferdaszewski · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I really wanted to like this book. I am a science nerd and I love flying, but ultimately Inflight Science was disappointing. It stays at a very basic and elementary level, it would start to touch on something interesting, but then dart off onto the next topic. The over feel of the book was very scattered and it lacked focus. There is so much that I would love to know about flight, but none of it was in this book.

[gothamajp · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

As someone who has spent most of his career in the aerospace industry, and currently flies over 50,000 miles a year, I spend a lot of time looking out of airplane windows. This seemed like the perfect book for a plane flight - so that's where I read it. Maybe I was expecting too much, but overall I found the text more frustrating than illuminating.

The aeronautical sciences were glossed over, and a lot of the cool technology that makes a modern airliner work left out.

And while I did learn some things about the word outside my aircraft window, I felt it either didn't go far enough, or too easily veered off into discussions of irrelevant examples that you would never probably experience in decades of flying.

Early in the book Clegg admits that he doesn't enjoy flying, and that fact, at least to me, underscored the tone of the book. It felt like a popular science book shoe horned into a narrative framework that the author wasn't comfortable, or familiar, with. There is a good science book in here struggling to get out - it just needed a different perspective.

[lsg_10 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is science for the rest of us - anyone with a good knowledge of physics or earth science will have encountered most of this before. However, for those without that background, this is an interesting introduction to science and how we can see manifestations all around us. I found the experiments rather simplistic but the book was well written and one that I would heartily recommend for someone who says that all science is boring.

[keristars_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Inflight Science is an enjoyable look at geology, applied physics, astronomy, and meteorology as relates to or experienced from an airplane. While none (or at least very little) of the information in the book was new to me — thanks to my high school AP chemistry and AP physics courses and a university-level astronomy course, as well as on-going interest in related topics — I found the way that Clegg links the diverse topics to the experience of airplane flight to be novel and interesting.

I don't know if this is a book I would have chosen on my own, but as an Early Reviewer win (or a loan from a friend), it was an entertaining refresher of my science knowledge. Clegg's explanations are easy to understand and build upon each other very well. For example, although special relativity is a tough topic, I thought it was addressed very well, and naturally came from previous explanations Clegg had given.

This book will be easier to read if you have some science (especially physics) knowledge — I wouldn't give it to a teenager without a decent vocabulary or ability to use a dictionary, due to science terms (most of which are explained, but not all!) — and can easily translated Br-Eng terms and spelling to Am-Eng. But it's a fun read and using airflight as a link is a nice way to cover diverse topics and provide a good, basic look at the world through science.

[fakelvis · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

From your arrival at the departure airport, via the security checkpoints and your plane's departure, through to landing in your destination -- Brian Clegg runs you through all the popular science related to a typical flight.

While the 'hard science' is somewhat lacking, this is still a worthwhile book that you can't fail to learn one or two things from.

Written in an informal and educational manner, Inflight Science feels more like an extended secondary school science lesson than a serious discourse in 'the science of flying'.

That said, if you're looking for an easy read, or if you're new to popular science books, then this is a good choice for a long flight: it'll open your eyes and keep you entertained.

If you're already well-read in matter of science, this is probably one to miss.