The Aha! Moment: A Scientist's Take on Creativity

8 Rotating Things

127 8 Rotating Things O ne of the purest examples of an idea suddenly coming from the subconscious realm of the Random-Ideas Generator to the conscious mind was that of James Watt (see chapter 1). His idea for improving the steam engine came to him suddenly during a stroll on Glasgow Green in 1765; but it took him years of hard engineering effort to make it work. Furthermore, as Nicolas Carnot later noted (chapter 15), his cold external condenser is a direct counterpart to a steam engine’s hot external boiler. Yet that inspiration of James Watt was crucially important. He is rightly known as the father of the steam engine.Arthur C. Clarke extols the steam engine, with the crank and valve gear on its rotating wheel, as the most visually appealing of rotating machines. In my TV career, I have also devised visually appealing rotating machines. Here are some of them. Golden Syrup I got the idea while spooning golden syrup. My RIG said,“Do this for Yorkshire TV!”The culinary“twiddle,”or honey, spoon is well known. It is basically a narrow rod you can turn. You can hold lots of honey, or jam, or syrup, on it. By contrast, a static spoon merely holds the liquid in its bowl; the rest drains off. All good cooks and painters have to develop the right sort of turn, and so did I. H. K. Moffatt even has a paper on the physics of twiddle spoons!1 He defines a speed that gives a fairly even distribution of viscous fluid. At lower speeds, asymmetric lobar deformations occur, like backward-breaking waves. At higher speeds, disc-like instabilities develop, and the viscous liquid may be thrown off. I was glad to have come across 128 The Aha! Moment that paper; it gave me a sort of scientific anchor in my approaches to YTV. I imagined an apparatus in which you could spin a rotating glass tube and pour viscous golden syrup onto it. In the event, I used a soda bottle as my rotor; this was safer, cheaper, available in many identical copies and easier to transport from Newcastle to the YTV studios in Leeds. I built my apparatus from neatly covered planks of wooden board. I powered it from an electric drill, its speed governed by a variable transformer . A little pulley on the drill drove a big one on the shaft with the bottle. The camera and the audience saw that turning bottle. Incidentally, I have always liked a studio audience. It acts as a sort of guarantee that what the camera is seeing is real. The claimed demonstration is actually happening in the studio and is not just a piece of clever editing. The show’s physical sciences moderator Magnus Pyke had several jugs of golden syrup and controlled the knob on the variable transformer that determined the rate of spin of the bottle. A large photographic developing tray, under the rotor, collected the syrup that fell off. As usual, the whole apparatus had to come apart easily. It let us conduct rehearsals and explore trial takes. When a bottle was covered in syrup, we could remove it and put on a new one. (I had brought lots of bottles with me.) Everything worked. Magnus could pour golden syrup onto the rotating bottle, vary its speed of rotation, and expound on the various effects. Figure 8.1 Syrup on a Spinning Bottle Sticky golden syrup can be held on a spinning bottle. Too slow a spin just lets it slump off. Too fast a spin forms an irregular disc. The syrup streams away from the bottle (arrowed) and may fly off. Rotating Things 129 The whole thing even got into a promo for the show. Said Magnus in that promo, “in which I get into a pretty sticky situation.” Moffatt’s paper seemed sound. If the bottle turned too slowly, the syrup simply slumped sideways off it into the tray. There was a speed at which a lot of syrup could be held about stably on the bottle. But too fast a spin was even more fun. The syrup formed disc-like instabilities that soon got asymmetric (fig. 8.1). Ultimately the rig, racing at high speeds, lobbed blobs of syrup at the TV cameras. My sense was that the bottle held the maximum amount of golden syrup at about one-third of the...