Great Mythconceptions Read online

  The dermatologists agree on one thing about cellulite creams — they won’t make cellulite go away. On the other hand, if your skin is normally dry, and if your anti-cellulite cream incorporates a moisturiser, then your skin will look better.

  Tretinoin (retinol) is another ingredient that has been shown to have helpful effects — in some people. It can penetrate the skin. It increases the blood supply of the dermis, increases the production of collagen, and increases the turnover of the cells in the epidermis (the outer layer of the skin). So tretinoin generates newer cells in the skin. Overall, it ‘plumps’ up the skin, making the outer layer thicker. The effect is like throwing a thick picnic rug over bumpy ground — it smoothes it out. The cellulite is now harder to see, because it’s hidden under the ‘plumper’ superficial skin. On the other hand, all tretinoin products carry warnings about potential risks if used when pregnant.

  The anti-cellulite effect is very small for tretinoin. And it’s probably smaller for the remainder of the ‘magic four’ chemicals. (For example, the only ‘research’ that ‘proves’ that caffeine works was carried out by two companies making anti-cellulite products.) And the chemicals don’t work on everybody.

  At their very best, anti-cellulite creams produce a tiny improvement — perhaps.

  There is one treatment that does work — liposuction, or removal of the fat cells. However, the remaining fat cells in the skin will grow larger to compensate — and you could be back where you started.

  Professor Lisa M. Donofrio, a dermatologist at Yale University School of Medicine in the United States is sceptical of the creams. She says that we should just learn to live with, and love, our cellulite. Perhaps in another alternate dimension, she says, smooth skin is seen as boring while skin with lumpy-bumpy fat is seen as beautiful.

  One Company’s

  Opinion

  A paper which discussed cellulite and what retinol (tretinoin) did to it was published by the American Journal of Clinical Dermatology. Two of the authors of the paper were from the Johnson and Johnson Consumer Report division.

  They believed that cellulite is the result of two forces working against each other. One is a moderate, but long-term, excess deposition of fat. The opposing force is that the strands running across the balls of fat overreact to the presence of the fat thus becoming thicker and stiffer.

  In the study, the 15 women who used retinol showed an average increase of about 10% in the elasticity of their skin. But ‘the lumpy-bumpy appearance of the skin either showed little response, or was not responsive to the treatment’. The report also stated that: ‘many purported cosmetic and medical treatments show little effect in improving cellulite, and certainly none cause its complete disappearance.’

  References

  Pierard-Franchimont, Claudine, et. al., ‘A randomized, placebo-controlled trial of topical retinol in the treatment of cellulite’, American Journal of Clinical Dermatology, Nov – Dec 2000, pp. 369–374.

  Sainio, Eva-Lisa, ‘Ingredients and safety of cellulite creams’, European Journal of Dermatology, December 2000, pp. 596–603.

  Einstein Failed School

  At the end of the 20th century, Time magazine voted Albert Einstein to be the Man of the Century. Albert was the guy who blew people’s minds in the early 20th century with his Theory of Relativity (because Relativity was such a weird concept). Einstein was a genuine certified ‘Mega-brain’. It is claimed that he even won the Nobel Prize for his work on Relativity.

  It is also claimed that Einstein failed at school. This has consoled generations of school children with poor school marks. But both of these claims — Nobel Prize and failing at school — are dead wrong.

  First, Einstein did not win the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on Relativity. Part of the reason was that this theory, even in 1921, was still controversial.

  Let’s back up a little. In 1905, Einstein had the biggest year of his life. He wrote, with the help of his wife, Mileva, five ground-breaking papers that, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘forever changed Man’s view of the Universe’. Any scientist would have been proud to write even one of these magnificent papers — but Albert published five of them in one year!

  One paper, of course, dealt with Relativity — what happens to objects as they move relative to other objects. Two papers proved that atoms and molecules had to exist, based on the fact that you could see tiny particles jigging around when you looked at a drop of water through a microscope. A fourth paper looked at a strange property of light — the Photoelectric Effect. Plants and solar cells use the Photoelectric Effect, when they turn light into electricity. In fact, each year, plants (doing the Photoelectric Effect for free) turn 1000 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into 700 billion tonnes of oxygen and organic matter. (And some people don’t like plants!)

  The results of Einstein’s and Mileva Maric’s final exams. It’s an extract from the minutes of the mathematical department (Protokoll der Mathematischen Abteilung). It is said that all candidates passed the exams successfully, except Mrs Maric.

  His fifth paper was a mathematical footnote to his Special Theory of Relativity. It was called ‘Does the Inertia of a Body Depend on its Energy Content’. This paper carries the famous E = mc2 equation, where E is the ‘energy’, m is the ‘mass’, and c is the speed of light. If you convert a mass, m, entirely into energy, this equation tells you how much energy you get. My children and I were lucky enough to see this equation, written in Einstein’s hand, when a Special Relativity manuscript came to Sydney as part of a worldwide tour. I felt an amazing sense of awe.

  The Theory of Relativity captured the public’s consciousness. In the 1920s, there were claims that only five people in the whole world understood this theory. (Actually, these days a keen high school physics student could work through it.) But it was the unglamorous Photoelectric Effect that won Einstein the Nobel Prize. While he was in Shanghai he received a telegram from the Nobel Prize Committee informing him that he had been awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics ‘for your photoelectric law and your work in the field of theoretical physics’. There was absolutely no mention of Relativity.

  And now the second myth. Einstein definitely did not fail at high school.

  Einstein was born on 14 March 1879 in Ulm, Germany. The next year, his family moved to Munich, where he started school in 1886 at the age of seven. At the age of nine, he entered the Luitpold-Gymnasium. By the age of 12 he was studying calculus — an advanced subject normally studied by 15-year-old students. He was very good at the sciences. But, because the 19th-century German education system was very harsh and regimented, it didn’t really develop his non-mathematical skills (such as history, languages, music and geography). In fact, it was his mother, not the school, who encouraged him to study the violin — and he did quite well.

  In 1895, he sat the entrance examinations of the prestigious Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich, Switzerland. He was 16, two years younger than his fellow applicants. He did outstandingly well in physics and mathematics, but failed the non-science subjects, doing especially badly in French — he was not accepted. So he continued his studies at the canton school in Aargau, studied hard, and finally passed the entrance exams.

  In October 1896, he finally began his studies at the Federal Polytechnic (even though, at 17, he was still one year younger than most of his fellow students). Also in that year, he wrote a brilliant essay that led directly to his later work in Relativity. Einstein did not fail at high school, and was definitely not a poor student.

  So how did this myth start?

  Easy. In 1896 — Einstein’s last year at the school in Aargau — the school’s system of marking was reversed.

  A grading of ‘6’, previously the bottom mark, was now the top mark. (Einstein scored 4.91 out of 6 — quite a good mark.) A grading of ‘1’, previously the top mark, was now the bottom mark. Anybody looking up Einstein’s grades would see that he had not scored any grades around ‘1’ — which under the ne
w marking scheme, meant a ‘fail’.

  School children can’t use this mythconception as a crutch any more — they’ll just have to work harder …

  Special Relativity for Idiots

  Special Relativity is fairly easy to understand if you remember one thing — the only thing constant in the Universe is the speed of light. This is a slight oversimplification, but not too much.

  Light travels at about 300 000 km/sec, or 300 m every microsecond (or millionth of a second).

  Mass is not constant. As bodies travel faster, they get more massive. If they could reach the speed of light, their mass would be infinite (not just big, not just as massive as the entire Universe, but even bigger again — that is, infinite). Photons of light (which travel at the speed of light) get around this problem by having a mass of zero when they’re not moving. When they are moving, they have a small mass.

  Length is not constant. As a body travels faster, it shrinks (but only in the direction of travel) until it reaches zero length at the speed of light.

  Time is not constant. As a body travels faster, its internal time slows down, until it reaches zero at the speed of light.

  The only thing that stays constant in all of this is the speed of light.

  Einstein’s Brain

  Einstein’s brain went ‘missing’ soon after he died in 1955. Thomas Harvey, a duty pathologist at Princeton Hospital, New Jersey, removed the brain within seven hours of Einstein’s death and preserved it. It then became the subject of controversy, because the executor of Einstein’s will, Otto Nathan, claimed that Harvey was a thief.

  Harvey left Princeton, and the brain ‘vanished’ until 1978, when the journalist Steven Levy found Harvey in Wichita, Kansas — and Einstein’s brain in a box marked ‘Costa Cider’. Harvey didn’t really have the qualifications to study Einstein’s brain, so he had begun to mail small sections of it to expert neuroscientists.

  A brain has ‘neurons’ (so-called thinking cells) and ‘glial’ cells (which supposedly don’t do any thinking, but just act as ‘support’ cells to the neurons). Einstein’s brain looked average to the naked eye, and was of average weight. Under the microscope, it had a very high ratio of glial cells to neurons in the inferior parietal lobe — part of the brain that does spatial and mathematical reasoning. To the trained eye, the inferior parietal lobe was about 15% bigger than normal.

  Einstein’s brain is finally back in Princeton — in a secret hiding place.

  References

  Reader’s Digest Book Of Facts, Reader’s Digest Pty Ltd, 1994, pp. 234, 416–417.

  Broks, Paul, ‘The adventures of Einstein’s brain’, The Australian Financial Review, 28 March–1 April 2002, p. 3.

  Weiss, Peter, ‘Getting warped’, Science News, vol. 162, 21 and 28 December 2002, pp. 394–396.

  All White, My Sun

  Practically every society on our planet shares the mythconception that the Sun is yellow. These societies include Native Americans, Australian Aborigines (what colour is the Sun on the Aboriginal flag?), the Dutch and so on. Of course, they have all been deceived.

  A white surface takes on the colour of the local lighting, and you can use this to prove that the Sun is white. Think about what happens if you wear white clothes in a nightclub with red mood lighting. Your clothes look red. What happens to a white car around midday on a sunny day? The white car remains resolutely white, refusing to turn yellow. The Sun is white. In fact, the Sun defines the word ‘white’.

  How did this almost-universal myth originate?

  We don’t really know, but one explanation is that the Sun is yellowish only when you can almost safely look at it — when it’s on the horizon, at sunrise or sunset. At these times the light from the Sun has to pass through a much greater than normal thickness of air. The dust in the air bends away the blue light, leaving the other end of the spectrum — the yellow-red colours.

  Or perhaps the Sun ‘appears’ yellow when you compare it to the blue sky. You get this effect if you stare at the blue sky for a long while, and then quickly take a glimpse of the Sun. Your colour vision has been shifted to the blue, and for a few moments, you see the Sun, and its afterimage, as yellow-red.

  Regardless of how this myth started, it is taught to young children when they learn to paint. They are never told to ‘paint the Sun white’, but to ‘paint the Sun yellow’. There is probably a very practical reason for this — white paint doesn’t show up very well on white paper.

  Consequently nearly all of us believe that the Sun is yellow, even though we see white cars and white clothes every day. They wouldn’t look white if the Sun was actually yellow. And the Sun always looks white when you get a brief glimpse of it (as long as it’s high enough above the horizon).

  Why are so many of us tricked? We are a little like the characters in The Matrix movies, whose entire sensory systems are fooled! The only ones who have seen the light are the astronomers.

  White Sun

  The Sun pumps out its energy virtually across the whole electromagnetic spectrum. This energy includes x-rays, radio waves, and roughly in the middle of the spectrum, visible light. Sunlight appears to be white, because it consists of roughly equal intensities of all visible wavelengths, from red to blue.

  Sir Isaac Newton was one of the first scientists to prove this. In 1665 and 1666, he experimented with sunlight coming into a darkened room, through a single small entrance. He placed a triangular glass prism in the path of the beam. When the light passed through the prism it split into all the colours of the rainbow, and landed on a white card. He had proved that white light is made up of the colours of the rainbow.

  References

  de Grasse Tyson, Neil, ‘Things people say: The only thing worse than a blind believer is a seeing denier’, Natural History, July – August 1998.

  Fan Cools Room

  One of the great summer myths is that a fan will cool a room. A fan cannot cool a room — it can only cool the people who are sitting in the room.

  Think about a day when the air is cooler than your skin. On average, your body generates about 100 watts of waste heat (about as much as a light bulb). If there’s no wind, this heat creates a thin layer of warm air that sits next to your skin. Once this layer has warmed up to skin temperature, it becomes a very good heat barrier. Heat cannot pass into this layer from your skin — because heat can normally travel only from a hot place to a cooler place. As your skin temperature increases, you begin to feel uncomfortable. The only way out of this cycle is to move around, or to sweat.

  Enter the fan.

  When a fan blows wind across your skin, it pushes away this warm layer of air. On a day when the air is cooler than your skin, the fan replaces the warm skin layer of air with cooler room air that has not been preheated by your skin. You will definitely feel more comfortable when the fan switches on. However, the fan did not cool the room. All it did was remove the warm air near your skin. You can prove that the fan didn’t lower the temperature by checking a thermometer both before and after you switch the fan on. You will see that there is no change.

  But what happens on a really hot summer’s day, when the air is already hotter than your skin temperature? In this case, you begin to sweat. The fan will now cool you down even better. The air will blow over your slightly moist skin, and turn the water in your sweat into vapour, which it carries away. It takes a lot of energy to turn water-as-a-liquid into water-as-a-vapour. Because this energy comes from your skin, your skin will feel a lot cooler.

  You can test this by wetting the tip of your finger in your mouth, and then blowing on it vigorously — it will feel cooler as the air carries away the molecules of water. Once again, you can prove that the fan doesn’t cool the room at all by using a thermometer as you switch on the fan — the temperature doesn’t change a bit.

  By the way, evaporation is how a resting person dumps 25% of their waste heat. Water is evaporated from the lining of their lungs, as they breathe out.

  This tells you tw
o things. First, if you have a pet that does not perspire (such as a ferret), there’s no point in using a fan to cool it down. (If your ferret is at risk of heat stroke, gently bathe it with tepid water.) Second, there’s no point in leaving the fan running when you’re not in the room. In fact, the motor in the fan will generate a little waste heat, making the room slightly warmer.

  Extreme

  Air Cooling

  A fan cools you by removing a layer of warm air that would normally sit next to your skin. This is fine in the middle of summer, but could kill you in the middle of winter.

  The technical term for this is ‘wind-chill’. Antarctic and Himalayan travellers have found that they can survive perfectly well, bare-chested, in temperatures as low as –40ºC — as long as there is absolutely no wind blowing. But if there is the slightest breath of wind, they have to cover up immediately.

  The wind removes the warm air and replaces it with cold, dry air. It takes a lot of energy to warm and moisten this new air — more than you can deliver easily.

  The wind-chill factor was created in the mid-1940s to give people living in cold climates an easy way to work out what effect a wind would have. A scale was devised to predict the combined effect of wind speed and low air temperature. For example, a wind of a certain speed (say 16 kph) at a certain temperature (say –4ºC) is equivalent to a lower temperature (say –13ºC) with no wind.