The bystander effect

In 1964 a 28-year-old woman named Kitty Genovese was raped and murdered in the street in Queens, New York. There were reputed to be 38 people who witnessed the attack, which lasted for more than half an hour, but nobody came to her aid.

The event entered the literature of psychology as the “bystander effect”, the theory being that people feel less responsibility to help strangers in trouble if there are plenty of other people in the area. There may also be the feeling that if nobody else is doing anything, the situation cannot be all that serious.

However, this theory has been questioned after research that has been done in the UK, The Netherlands and South Africa. This has shown that, in similar situations, people do intervene in 90% of cases. Sometimes only one person does so, but quite often more than one person tries to help.

The researchers also found that people are more likely to intervene the higher the number of other bystanders, which goes dead against the earlier theory. There was little difference as between occurrences in the three countries.

It would appear that people have a natural inclination to help others in trouble, which is reassuring!

© John Welford

A very short introduction to quantum physics

The foundations of quantum physics were laid in the 1890s when the German physicist Max Planck (1858-1947) proposed that radiation from a hot object did not take the form of waves but was produced as chunks of energy which he termed quanta, which behaved like waves when in combination. Max Planck could only propose the notion of quanta as a mathematical concept, having no way of proving their existence.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was interested in the photoelectric effect that occurs when light strikes certain atoms and electricity is generated. Einstein realized that this could best be explained if light travelled as quanta, not waves, and gave the name photon to a light quanta, this being a real entity and not just a mathematical idea.

In 1913 the Danish physicist Niels Bohr (1885-1962) used quantum theory to explain the different energy levels of electrons in an atom. 

Further work during the 1920s by Erwin Schrodinger (1887-1961) and Werner Heisenberg (1901-76) developed the idea of quantum energy levels in atoms, thus creating a new branch of physics called quantum physics. 

Quantum physics explains how electrons emit radiation and shows that an electron can be regarded as both a wave and a particle.

Quantum physics has had many practical applications, such as in the development of lasers and transistors.

© John Welford

Iran's Zagros Mountains

The Zagros Mountains are a snow-covered range of mountains, mainly in south-west Iran, which is normally hot, dry and barren. The range is 550 miles (900 kms) long and 150 miles (240 kms) wide. The highest point is 12,000 feet (3,600 metres) above sea level.

The Zagros Mountains owe their origin to the collision of two tectonic plates, namely the Arabian and Asian plates. This collision began during the middle Miocene period, some 13 million years ago, and continues to this day at a rate of 1.6 inches (4 centimeters) each year. This means that the Zagros range is being pushed steadily higher – like the Himalayan and associated ranges further to the east – and this is a region that is regularly hit by earthquakes.

The range, which extends from the Diyala River (a tributary of the Tigris) in the northwest to beyond the ancient city of Shiraz to the southeast, is formed mostly from limestone and shale and consists of numerous parallel ridges with intervening valleys. The ridges increase in height to the east until they merge with a high plateau that lies at about 5,000 feet (1,500 metres).

The western side of the Zagros range, which includes much of the Kurdish areas of Iraq and Turkey, is drained by strongly flowing rivers that are fed by snowmelt and rainfall of some 40 inches (100 cms) a year.

Tree cover

The higher slopes of the Zagros are covered in oak, sycamore, maple and beech. Willow, plane and poplar trees grow in the higher mountain ravines, while lower down are found walnut, fig and almond plantations that take advantage of the naturally fertile soils in the valleys.

© John Welford

The classification of sedimentary rocks

There are basically two ways of classifying sedimentary rocks, either by how they originated or their composition. The latter takes into account such matters as whether they contain primarily coarse-textured sands or fine clays, or whether they have a high carbon content due to being composed largely or entirely of plant or animal matter. However, it is generally more convenient to combine the two methods into a single classification, as below:

Mechanical Formation

This group comprises rocks that have been formed after material has been moved in fragments from one or several places to another (by the action of wind, water, ice or gravity), where it has become consolidated either by pressure from later deposits, or by cementation, or both. The original material may have been very fine in nature, such as river-borne silt, or much coarser, such as rounded or angular pebbles or rock fragments.

The material that enables fragments to cement together may be a solution containing minerals of various kinds, such that sandstones may contain quartz, calcium carbonate or iron, the proportions of these determining its colour.

Very fine material will form clays or mudstones, less fine deposits lead to grits forming, and much coarser material results in a conglomerate or brecchia (in the former the pebbles are rounded, whereas they are angular in the latter).

Terms used to distinguish rocks by the size of their particles are Argillaceous (e.g. clay, mudstone, shale); Arenaceous (e.g. sandstone, grit); and Rudaceous (e.g. brecchia, conglomerate, boulder clay).

Organic Formation

These rocks were created from the remains of once living organisms which built up over very long periods of time. These can be further classified according to the nature of the plants or animals that comprised the deposits.

Calcareous rocks (chalks and limestones) consist mainly of calcium carbonate, formed from the skeletons of marine organisms, and are distinguished by the size and nature of the particles that comprise them. The finest particles are seen in pure white chalk. Limestone is more varied, including crinoidal, coral, oolitic and shelly, the terms denoting the type of primitive organism that is mainly represented in its formation. Fossils of much larger organisms are often found embedded in limestone.

Ferruginous is a term that denotes the presence of iron, usually from the precipitation of hydrated iron oxide in the water of ancient lakes and marshes. Decomposing vegetable matter formed the basis of ironstone and “bog iron-ore”.

Siliceous rocks can be formed from the remains of sponges and minute organisms such as diatoms (single-celled plants rich in silica). These include nodules of chert and flint found in other rocks, and beds of diatomite.

Carbonaceous rocks are formed from plant accumulations and are high in carbon content. Depending on the age of the deposits and the pressure they have been put under, they can take the form of peat, lignite or coal.

Chemically Formed

These come about from the precipitation or evaporation of solutions of salts. All water that falls as rain will acquire salt in some form as it runs across the surface or finds its way underground, and these salts are often partially or totally released before the water cycle is completed. Rock formation can occur when sufficient salts accumulate in the same place. Five types of chemical formation of rock types can be distinguished.

Carbonates.  Stalactites and stalagmites in limestone caves, or travertine around hot springs, are examples of carbonate deposition. Dolomite is a chemically formed compound of calcium and magnesium carbonate.

Sulphates. Hydrated calcium sulphate, in the form of gypsum or alabaster, is formed by evaporation in inland drainage basins.

Chlorides. These produce rock-salt, either on the surface or at depth.

Silicates. As well as flint and chert (mentioned above), sinter is a silicate rock, formed around the vents of hot springs.

Ironstones. Most iron ores have accumulated from chemical precipitation within sediments, although some are the result of igneous activity.

Sedimentary rocks are typically laid down in strata of varying thicknesses, and the process can continue at the same place for extremely long periods of time (millions of years in some cases). It is sometimes possible, for example, to detect annual depositions made by ancient rivers, and use these to determine the age of a particular formation.

© John Welford

Welcome to Stalin World!

Grutas Park is a sculpture park in woodlands deep in the Lithuanian countryside. It is otherwise known as Stalin World, as though it were Lithuania’s answer to Disney World. Perhaps it is.

The main feature of the park is the collection of dozens of statues and busts of former Communist leaders, including Lenin, Stalin, Karl Marx and the founders of the Communist regime that ruled Lithuania when it was part of the Soviet Union before 1990.

Grutas Park was the brainchild of Viliumas Malinauskas, who was at various times a heavyweight wrestling champion, a Soviet-era soldier and the manager of a collective farm. After the fall of Communism he made a fortune from mushroom farming, and it was this money that led him to create Stalin World.

In 1998 he bought many of the statues and busts that now grace the park when these came up for auction having been removed from public display in various towns and cities. Some of these were enormous lumps of granite or bronze whereas others were relatively small. Many had been damaged when being toppled from their previous places of honour.

Malinauskas had no wish to venerate these people – many of whom had been responsible for the death of thousands of people, but to remind visitors of the history of the Soviet Union and how terrible it had been.

To this end, Malinauskas acquired other features of the Soviet system, such as watchtowers from which Soviet-era military music blares, and other reminders of the “gulag” system of camps for political imprisonment. The closest one gets to a Disney World experience is the short train ride one can take in a cattle wagon – ushered on board by uniformed guards – to a reconstructed prison camp surrounded by barbed wire.

After opening Grutas Park in 2001, Viliumas Malinauskas reminded visitors that it was better to see something once than hear about it ten times.

© John Welford

A few facts about atoms

Everybody knows that all matter is composed of atoms, but there some facts about atoms that almost boggle the mind!

For example, we all know that atoms are extremely small, but did you know that you could fit two billion atoms into the dot on top of each letter “i” in “billion”?

An atom consists of a nucleus, containing protons and neutrons, and electrons that whizz in orbit round the nucleus. There are as many electrons as there are protons in the nucleus.

However, what is not generally appreciated is that an atom consists mainly of empty space! If you could imagine an atom that was the size of a sports stadium, such as a Premiership football ground, then the electrons would be whizzing round the upper tiers of the stands and the nucleus would be a pea in the centre circle!

In other words, all matter is an illusion – everything that exists does so thanks to the energy contained in atoms. The actual matter in the atoms is almost non-existent.

© John Welford

How the Pacific Ocean got its name

Why is the Pacific Ocean so named? It was thanks to the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who sailed across it in 1520. His voyage down the eastern side of South America had been beset by storms and so, when he eventually found a passage to the west (through what is now known as the Strait of Magellan) he was greatly impressed by the calm sea he found on the other side.

The Spanish word “pacifico” means peaceful, and so it seemed to be an appropriate name to give this newly-discovered ocean. Of course, no ocean is without its bad weather, although the Atlantic does experience more storms than the Pacific. However, Magellan’s original impression was what he marked on his map and the name has stuck!

What Magellan did not appreciate was that the Pacific, at 166 million square kilometres, was twice the size of the Atlantic Ocean and the world’s deepest, at up to 4000 metres. The Pacific Ocean is actually larger than all the world’s land surfaces put together.

© John Welford