Usually I find it easy to resist reality TV, but not the Great British Menu. I just get sucked in and then have to know who will score highest on the courses, and then who wins on the Friday. I really don’t think this has anything to do with the science on show in the cooking, I just start rooting for the chefs as they try so hard to make their elaborate dishes.

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One of the ways of distinguishing between good science, and poor quality science and pseudo-science, is that good science leads to predictions that can be tested by experiments. Poor quality and pseudo-science does not. For example, we know there will be an eclipse of the Sun visible from parts of Europe on March 20th 2015. We can calculate the orbit of the Moon very accurately and so predict that the Moon will be between the Earth and the Sun then. This prediction is testable: Just go to the right part of Europe, and see if it goes dark.

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Over Easter, I had a very nice lunch back in south Wales, at The Butchers Arms in Alltwen. It was very good, I can recommend it if you are in that part of the world. We asked for a jug of water, which came with slices of both lemon and lime. Very nice. As a scientist I was curious about the fact that the lemon slice floated on the top of the water, while the lime slice sank to the bottom.

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For the last post I looked up Adam Riess’s website - he shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for co-discovering the remarkable fact that the rate of expansion of the universe is actually increasing. From that I followed a link to a page with a scan of the page in his logbook where he did the first simple calculation on the data his team had gathered. This was the calculation that first showed that the universe is expanding faster and faster.

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