Bang Goes The Theory (2009) s01e01 Episode Script
Episode 1
This is Bang Goes The Theory.
we're on a mission to get science out of the lab and into your living room.
Engineer Jem is gonna build, bang and blow up his way through a series of home-made experiments.
Whoa! (LAUGHTER) Biologist and biochemist Liz is willing to go anywhere and do anything to bring you the latest research.
Disgusting! lt tastes like bacon! l'm Dallas, and l'm gonna put myself in harm's way, just to get you answers to some of science's big questions.
Why is this man sticking things to my face? Oh, God.
No! No-o-o-o-o-o-o-o! That's Bang Goes The Theory, putting science to the test.
(BEEP BEEP!) Hello and welcome to Bang Goes The Theory, the BBO's brand new and shiny science show.
On tonight's programme, Jem attempts to build his very own supersonic vortex canon.
Whoa.
l meet a controversial scientist who claims he may just hold the key to the world's energy crisis.
And back here at Bang HQ, we set fire to a home-made tornado.
Before all of that, though, Dallas and l are off to Southampton.
This country is home to over four million OOTV cameras, that is more per head than any other country in Europe, but it's not quite as efficient as the authorities might like.
The technology is incredible, with all those cameras feeding back to secret control rooms like this one, and they're monitored 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year.
ln fact, this is all such a covert operation, that we've got to keep our location a secret and the identity of my friend Barry here, hidden.
But there is one small problem with OOTV, which l can demonstrate with this suspicious looking character.
(PHONE RlNGS) Hi, Liz.
Are you ready? l'm so ready for you.
Me, too.
Oatch me if you can.
Let's track him, Barry.
l've set Dallas the challenge of trying to lose me.
He's looking a little confused.
He's looking shifty, but that's normal for Dallas! He's running now.
Don't run.
Whisky One to Mike 8.
You've got target Zulu.
Description as follows, OO1 male, V-neck jumper.
l was getting quite excited.
l thought, ''There's no way they'll find me in the park.
'' l just noticed a giant camera right there! (PHONE RlNGS) You look so pretty, baby.
You're creeping me out, Bonnin.
Yeah, good effort, but, like, not even close to losing me.
l'll hide from you yet! This is better than any video game l've ever played.
This is awesome.
But if you think Big Brother is watching you, there is one way you could beat him.
l'm gonna get you Liz Bonnin.
All you need to do is change your clothes, grab a friend and you could be off scot-free.
Two people going in, one person going out.
That's it.
We've lost him.
(PHONE RlNGS) What did you do, where are you? Have l lost you? Tell me where you are? l'm back where l started from, almost.
Ah! Look at you, you've got a hat on you, that's so cheating.
l can't believe you won, that's so annoying.
l have beaten Big Brother/Big Sister.
So, OOTV can fail if someone uses a clever disguise, for example, but there is something really distinctive about you that's a lot harder to hide.
lt's the way you walk, combined with your posture, otherwise known as your gait.
Apparently, it's as individual as your fingerprint.
The hope is, if we can make OOTV systems identify people by their gait, then no amount of disguise will ever work.
And now the technology to do just that is being developed by scientists at Southampton University.
Whoa.
- Wow! This is psychedelic.
- lsn't it? This is like a, kind of, early Pink Floyd.
What goes on in here, Mark? This is our gait recognition system.
lt's the only one in the world.
lt's the best, but you could also say it's the worst.
- lt's got eight synchronised cameras.
- Right, what do those cameras do? Well, why don't you walk down the red carpet.
Dallas, will you get a grip and do it properly? Sorry.
The psychedelic colours help the cameras capture not only the length of my legs, but exactly how they move.
Stick the two together and incredibly the computer can instantly tell if it's looking at me, or Liz or somebody else in its database, or at least, that's what it claims.
ls that 3D image, that's like a fingerprint, like, nobody else could recreate that? Absolutely, yeah.
ln a sense, a lot of people are similar.
We've got a head, a body, two arms, two legs.
lt's when you get into the more details, because you've got muscles, your legs are a slightly different length, it's the combination of all of those that gives you the uniqueness.
- Oan l put this to the test, see if it recognises me? - Sure, go ahead.
Over 200 people have walked through this tunnel and been registered in the database.
When l walk through again, the computer has no idea who to expect.
lt will compare my walk with all the walks it knows and then come out with the top five closest matches.
Dallas.
Wahey! There it is, absolutely.
Awesome, can l try mine? - You're welcome, go ahead.
- OK.
The genius of the system is in the 3D model it creates.
lt can recognise someone's gait from any angle, so ultimately it could identify me from any OOTV footage.
Right, my gait's logged into the system from the first time l walked through, will it know me this time around? Yeah! That was even quicker! Although, you and Lee are quite similar! Don't take it personally.
Lee could be a girl's name.
l want to find out is Lee a man.
Oan you tell me that, please? No, Lee is a man.
l walk like a man? Oan l just try one more thing, just really, really quickly? A little scientific experiment? What are you doing? Have a look at this.
Oh.
For goodness sake! Dallas! That's really annoying they had to cut that bit out.
Do you see what happens when you mess about? At least John Oleese has a little bit of competition there.
True.
One of the things we want to do every week on this show is to attempt an overambitious and foolhardy experiment - and the man in charge of that is Jem.
- Oh, yeah.
Yep, this week l intend to take this fairly unimpressive piece of kit and turn it into a weapon that could do what the big bad wolf never could - blow down a house of bricks.
Now, l know this is basically a tube with a hole at one end and rubber at the other.
But here's the basic idea, if l tap it, ever so gently, it produces beautiful little smoke-ringed vortices.
They remain very stable as they travel through the surrounding air.
- Nice, eh? - Look at that! Yeah.
This is a lovely bit of aerodynamics.
As the blast of air emerges from the tube it gets wrapped up into this doughnut shape.
That doughnut shape is able to transfer the energy of the blast incredibly long distances.
- l love it.
- lt is good.
But it's not great.
What l want to do is make that bigger, faster, stronger and a whole load more powerful.
Smoke rings might seem like a pretty gimmick, but they're actually a fascinating piece of aerodynamics.
What happens is a blast of air gets dragged back at the edges and folds itself into an incredibly stable swirling doughnut.
lt's just, how do l get that to happen at explosive speeds? My challenge is going to be to create a vortex with a really powerful explosion.
That means the air forming it will be travelling faster than the speed of sound, which totally changes the way it behaves.
lf l'm going to do it with a big explosion, l fancy trying to understand a small explosion first.
That's why l'm using the bursting of a balloon.
But producing even a small vortex ring with an explosion isn't easy.
Nothing.
That suggests to me there is no vortex coming out of that, that's just a turbulent tumble of air, absolutely no ring-shaped vortex.
Plan B.
l've discovered a neat trick.
Adding a barrel to the same piece of kit seems to smooth out the air flow, producing that all-important vortex ring.
Although we couldn't see it, l'm convinced that that was a vortex ring.
Now, l've just got to scale it up to as big an explosion as l can handle.
What l'm aiming to do is turn those delicate little smoke rings into high-speed battering rams.
After hours of experimentation, l think l've discovered the perfect design for what, when scaled up, will become my massive vortex canon.
This is the final prototype for our vortex canon.
lt's powered by a mixture of air and one of the most explosive gases on earth, acetylene.
l make the explosive gas mix by injecting acetylene through this little hole in the back.
l then ignite it by creating a spark between these two screws.
But the key is this conical barrel here.
lt allows the expanding gases to expand in a smoother, more controlled way, just the best conditions to create the most stable vortex ring possible.
That's the theory, but let's try and put it to the test and knock over this bottle from 20 feet.
l've calculated l need 125mls of acetylene in here to produce the perfect mix.
When this goes, it will produce a supersonic shockwave.
The thing is, can my barrel turn that into a ring-shaped vortex? Here goes.
Whoa! Err, yes! Pretty good, but l promised l was gonna knock down a pile of bricks.
l'm going to scale up the prototype by more than 150 times.
And if it works, we might just be able to see a vortex ring.
lt's something l've never tried before and l'm not sure if it will really work.
So, let's just hope the late nights are going to be worth it.
That is one of the trickiest builds l've ever attempted.
lt looked hard.
ls it gonna work? You'll have to wait until later in the programme, but l am gonna show you something else.
Do you want to see another kind of vortex, this one from nature? Yeah.
Are you ready? Yeah.
l'm gonna show you a home-made tornado.
Let's go! Here is a good fact for you, when you think of tornados, you probably think of the big twisters in the American Midwest, but there are actually more reported tornadoes in the UK per square kilometre than there are in America.
They're just less big and impressive.
We don't mind a bit of a challenge, so, right here, we've got our own home-made tornado machine.
ln a real tornado, it's just a spinning mass of rising air.
So to cause our air to spin, we rotate this mesh and to get it to rise, we set fire to it.
Have you any idea what you're doing, Jem, or are you just making this up as you go along? lt looks too home-made, l know what you're saying.
lt'll be fine.
l'm definitely not fire retardant today.
- l've got loads of hairspray in my hair.
- That was your choice.
l'm just letting you know.
- You'll probably be OK.
- You promise? That's it.
Now it's alight, the heat from the fire is causing that spinning column of air to rise.
Just like in a real tornado, that rising spinning column of air sucks in cold air at the base.
Now here that cold air feeds the flames and makes the vortex even more intense.
That's good actually.
lt is beautiful.
Great.
l love it.
- Essentially, you're a fire-starter.
- A twisted fire-starter.
Maybe just some kind of scientific prodigy! One of the things we want to do is explain the science behind the headlines and also meet some of the scientists who are making them.
Liz went to meet someone, who l think it's fair to say, divides opinion.
Oh, yeah, a lot of people have a serious problem with what this guy is doing.
He thinks his work is absolutely essential, he also thinks he might just have the answer to our planet's energy crisis.
Take a look at this.
l'm heading to possibly the most controversial research facility in the world.
Now l can't tell you exactly where l'm going, because a lot of people are dead set against both what is going on out there and the man who runs the entire operation.
Oraig Venter was one of the first people to decipher what makes us people, and not, say, dolphins or seaweed.
He jointly sequenced the human genome, the complete set of genes that is unique to humans.
And Venter is now taking that genetic research one step further, because he wants to create new forms of life.
For some, Oraig Venter holds the answers to our world's future.
But to others, he's Frankenstein, a scientist playing God.
We're trying to understand basic life by learning how to now write the genetic code.
So we start with the digital code in the computer and four bottles of chemicals and we actually build the DNA molecule from scratch.
So, you're designing a genetic code on the computer and then you're actually making it in the laboratory? Exactly.
l'm sure some people will be very scared of that notion? Some people prefer to live in a cave and work with whale-oil lamps.
ls there any danger that in the future they will harm the environment, or harm us, because they're not ''natural living beings''? lf irresponsible scientists design things to go into the environment, yes, l think that is always a potential danger.
One of the rules that we're trying to establish is that nobody makes anything that can survive in the environment on its own.
To help in his quest for new life, Oraig Venter is taking his boat, Sorcerer ll, on a hi-tech mission around the world.
Oombing the depths, the controversial millionaire scientist hopes to find unknown species, whose unusual genes could be the basis for new synthetic life.
So, do you reckon there are, like, many new species just on this filter paper alone? - 85% of what we find is totally new.
- That's pretty incredible.
So it means there will be lots of new ones here.
Fantastic.
- And thousands or millions of new genes.
- That's amazing.
We've discovered now about 20 million genes.
So before we started the expedition, there were only about a million known to science.
20 million genes already you've discovered, just from the ocean? Just from these filters off this boat.
So the majority of genes known to science came from this vessel.
Now, the big question is, why is he doing this? Knowledge and science is not just a nice thing to have, it's an absolute necessity now.
We have 6.
5 billion people on the planet.
ln 40 years, there's gonna be nine billion people.
We can't provide food, medicine, clean water and energy for the 6.
5 billion.
We have to have new science, new knowledge to be able to survive.
The controversial scientist even claims his new life forms could be the answer to the world's energy crisis.
These are the organisms that capture OO2 back from the atmosphere.
These are the organisms that make the oxygen that we breathe.
Some of these same organisms could be the solution for future energy, new ways to capture back OO2, new ways to make fuels, instead of burning oil and coal.
Now we can genetically modify to have them do that process much more efficiently.
Obviously, there will be people who are saying you are playing with life here.
You're making new synthetic organisms, is that really moral? lt is absolutely moral.
lt's immoral not to do this work, because it's such a dire consequences if we don't have some new solutions.
Why, in your eyes, is this the only way forward? Why is it, clearly, just the way to go? lt's not the only way forward, but biology is the only one that's truly scalable in a short period of time to have a big impact.
lt's not often you meet a man who literally could change the world and this kind of research is truly revolutionary.
Like him or loath him, Venter is pushing the boundaries of science and with it may just shape the future of our planet.
That was such an interesting film.
Having met him, are you a fan, do you think, of what he is doing? l'm really fascinated by the whole subject.
There's no doubt the implications for medicine and science are huge.
Essentially, natural selection is all about selecting for the useful genes, geneticists are speeding up that process.
When you think about it, it's already happening with selection for more productive cows or bigger and better crops, but what they're doing now is taking that technology and pushing it even further.
So they're cherry-picking genes from different organisms, placing them all into a new organism that they have created, so they're essentially creating new life forms.
Exactly, that's the thing l think that some people are gonna get a bit scared about? Yeah, of course.
But we've got to know about this stuff, because it is happening now.
People like Venter are changing the face of science literally as we speak.
Exactly.
Now, there's a fourth member of our team, Dr Yan, but as you can see, he's not here.
So vast is his intellect we couldn't actually fit him into Bang HQ.
Yes, indeed.
That's why instead we've sent him on a one-man mission to bring science to the high street.
- Apparently, he can cook.
- Oh! The question is how on earth do you fry an egg over a stove, if you haven't got a frying pan? l'm not entirely sure what to do with that, but we'll leave it for a little bit and see what happens! - That's not too bad.
- Would you eat it? l'm not too sure about that! Do you want me to show you a different way of doing it? - Yeah, go on, then.
- You can do it with paper.
l'll show you.
l've got the Daily Mirror, here if you want.
Yeah, go on, l'll do it with The Mirror.
l want to see this, man.
- You think it'll just burst into flames, right? - Yeah.
Burning is just a chemical reaction.
lt takes a certain amount of heat to get the reaction going.
That's because it takes energy to break apart long molecules like those in paper.
ln fact, it takes quite a lot of heat energy to make paper spontaneously burst into flame.
lts ignition temperature, as it is called, is about 232 degrees centigrade, that's Fahrenheit 451 .
So, if l just put some oil in and treat this like a frying pan, like you would any other normal frying pan.
Put an egg in it.
So, do you think it will burst into blames? You're burning the paper.
l thought the paper would go, boom! l trained as a chef for 20 years, this is the first time l've ever seen this.
lt's bubbling.
Look at that! lt's cooking.
Yeah, it's frying, look.
Yeah.
lt's cooking.
Perfect.
Well, the egg is absorbing the heat and keeping the paper below that critical ignition temperature, but it's still quite hot, enough to fry the egg.
- Shall l give it a try? - Yeah.
- That's amazing, how that's done that.
- Oh, you are clever, you.
There you go.
l'm quite hungry, actually, l haven't had any lunch, yet.
That's not edible! l wouldn't! Mmm, really nice.
OK.
Hmm, that is delicious, actually.
Mmm, fine.
l'm going to give that a go! Right now, l'd' like to drag you back to my world, a world obsessed with vortex canons.
Phew! Here it goes.
'My prototype vortex canon' (BANG) '.
.
blew a bottle into a bin from 20 feet, 'but l've been working day and night to go a lot, lot further 'and do something that this country has never seen before.
' l've taken a huge risk and scaled it up.
What l'm hoping to do is produce a vortex ring so powerful that it creates a visible ring in the still air around it.
An enormous amount of thought and experimentation went into creating this - a vortex canon.
A one-litre explosion goes off in here, it drives high-speed gas down there and a perfect ring vortex emerges from here.
We love it, but not as much as this - 150 litres of exploding acetylene and oxygen comes down here, 12 feet of steel barrel, and emerges there, at a three-foot aperture as a perfect vortex ring.
l hope.
Now the power of this is an unknown quantity, but here, in this quarry, we're going to do a whole series of experiments and find out just what we've made.
The ultimate challenge is to produce a visible doughnut of air so powerful that it will do what the big, bad wolf could never do - take out of wall of bricks.
But just like in the fairy tale, we'll start with something a bit lighter.
According to legend, a really good blast of air should be able to bring down a house of straw.
Let's see how it goes with an explosively generated vortex ring.
Here goes, this is the gas.
'lt's the first time it's ever been fired 'and with 150 litres of one of the world's most explosive 'gas mixes in there, 'l'm not even sure that this is really a safe place to stand.
' Seems about right.
l'm going to need these, l reckon.
Here we go.
Three, two, one OH, YES! 'Oall me hopeful, but there was definitely something there, 'but was it a vortex ring?' Filmed at 1 ,300 frames per second, there is no doubt, but the ring you can see is not a smoke ring.
lt's formed by the pressure drop within the vortex, condensing the water out of the damp air above the lake.
A 200 mile an hour cloud.
Ho-ho-ho! Bring on the sticks and bricks! Three, two, one Yes! Fantastic! Well, it makes mincemeat of a house of sticks.
Bring on the bricks! Even in fairy stories, they couldn't get a blast of air to knock down a house of bricks.
We're heading into the world of the unknown a bit.
So we're going to experiment.
We'll try changing the elevation on it, changing the gas mix, to see if we can get a perfect gas mix, that's just the right amount of molecules of acetylene, reacting with just the right amount of molecules of oxygen.
So there's no passengers in there, it's got to be all explosion.
Let's see how that goes.
Three, two, one HEY! Yes! That's incredible! That was amazing.
l so loved your reaction at the end of that.
That ring looked so perfect, honestly, you'd think it was a special effect or something.
l've got to say it was frighteningly real.
Loads of people didn't think it was going to work and l was utterly overjoyed when it did.
l can tell you were a real happy bunny about that.
On that heroic note, it is time for us to go, Bye! Bye.
Now you're going to have to put your ear plugs in because it is amazingly loud.
- Ok, hang on, hang on.
- Ready.
- Yeah.
- Ok, ready.
Right, it takes a couple of seconds for it to go, you ready? - Yeah.
- Threetwoone (LOUD EXPLOSlON) Oh my life.
we're on a mission to get science out of the lab and into your living room.
Engineer Jem is gonna build, bang and blow up his way through a series of home-made experiments.
Whoa! (LAUGHTER) Biologist and biochemist Liz is willing to go anywhere and do anything to bring you the latest research.
Disgusting! lt tastes like bacon! l'm Dallas, and l'm gonna put myself in harm's way, just to get you answers to some of science's big questions.
Why is this man sticking things to my face? Oh, God.
No! No-o-o-o-o-o-o-o! That's Bang Goes The Theory, putting science to the test.
(BEEP BEEP!) Hello and welcome to Bang Goes The Theory, the BBO's brand new and shiny science show.
On tonight's programme, Jem attempts to build his very own supersonic vortex canon.
Whoa.
l meet a controversial scientist who claims he may just hold the key to the world's energy crisis.
And back here at Bang HQ, we set fire to a home-made tornado.
Before all of that, though, Dallas and l are off to Southampton.
This country is home to over four million OOTV cameras, that is more per head than any other country in Europe, but it's not quite as efficient as the authorities might like.
The technology is incredible, with all those cameras feeding back to secret control rooms like this one, and they're monitored 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year.
ln fact, this is all such a covert operation, that we've got to keep our location a secret and the identity of my friend Barry here, hidden.
But there is one small problem with OOTV, which l can demonstrate with this suspicious looking character.
(PHONE RlNGS) Hi, Liz.
Are you ready? l'm so ready for you.
Me, too.
Oatch me if you can.
Let's track him, Barry.
l've set Dallas the challenge of trying to lose me.
He's looking a little confused.
He's looking shifty, but that's normal for Dallas! He's running now.
Don't run.
Whisky One to Mike 8.
You've got target Zulu.
Description as follows, OO1 male, V-neck jumper.
l was getting quite excited.
l thought, ''There's no way they'll find me in the park.
'' l just noticed a giant camera right there! (PHONE RlNGS) You look so pretty, baby.
You're creeping me out, Bonnin.
Yeah, good effort, but, like, not even close to losing me.
l'll hide from you yet! This is better than any video game l've ever played.
This is awesome.
But if you think Big Brother is watching you, there is one way you could beat him.
l'm gonna get you Liz Bonnin.
All you need to do is change your clothes, grab a friend and you could be off scot-free.
Two people going in, one person going out.
That's it.
We've lost him.
(PHONE RlNGS) What did you do, where are you? Have l lost you? Tell me where you are? l'm back where l started from, almost.
Ah! Look at you, you've got a hat on you, that's so cheating.
l can't believe you won, that's so annoying.
l have beaten Big Brother/Big Sister.
So, OOTV can fail if someone uses a clever disguise, for example, but there is something really distinctive about you that's a lot harder to hide.
lt's the way you walk, combined with your posture, otherwise known as your gait.
Apparently, it's as individual as your fingerprint.
The hope is, if we can make OOTV systems identify people by their gait, then no amount of disguise will ever work.
And now the technology to do just that is being developed by scientists at Southampton University.
Whoa.
- Wow! This is psychedelic.
- lsn't it? This is like a, kind of, early Pink Floyd.
What goes on in here, Mark? This is our gait recognition system.
lt's the only one in the world.
lt's the best, but you could also say it's the worst.
- lt's got eight synchronised cameras.
- Right, what do those cameras do? Well, why don't you walk down the red carpet.
Dallas, will you get a grip and do it properly? Sorry.
The psychedelic colours help the cameras capture not only the length of my legs, but exactly how they move.
Stick the two together and incredibly the computer can instantly tell if it's looking at me, or Liz or somebody else in its database, or at least, that's what it claims.
ls that 3D image, that's like a fingerprint, like, nobody else could recreate that? Absolutely, yeah.
ln a sense, a lot of people are similar.
We've got a head, a body, two arms, two legs.
lt's when you get into the more details, because you've got muscles, your legs are a slightly different length, it's the combination of all of those that gives you the uniqueness.
- Oan l put this to the test, see if it recognises me? - Sure, go ahead.
Over 200 people have walked through this tunnel and been registered in the database.
When l walk through again, the computer has no idea who to expect.
lt will compare my walk with all the walks it knows and then come out with the top five closest matches.
Dallas.
Wahey! There it is, absolutely.
Awesome, can l try mine? - You're welcome, go ahead.
- OK.
The genius of the system is in the 3D model it creates.
lt can recognise someone's gait from any angle, so ultimately it could identify me from any OOTV footage.
Right, my gait's logged into the system from the first time l walked through, will it know me this time around? Yeah! That was even quicker! Although, you and Lee are quite similar! Don't take it personally.
Lee could be a girl's name.
l want to find out is Lee a man.
Oan you tell me that, please? No, Lee is a man.
l walk like a man? Oan l just try one more thing, just really, really quickly? A little scientific experiment? What are you doing? Have a look at this.
Oh.
For goodness sake! Dallas! That's really annoying they had to cut that bit out.
Do you see what happens when you mess about? At least John Oleese has a little bit of competition there.
True.
One of the things we want to do every week on this show is to attempt an overambitious and foolhardy experiment - and the man in charge of that is Jem.
- Oh, yeah.
Yep, this week l intend to take this fairly unimpressive piece of kit and turn it into a weapon that could do what the big bad wolf never could - blow down a house of bricks.
Now, l know this is basically a tube with a hole at one end and rubber at the other.
But here's the basic idea, if l tap it, ever so gently, it produces beautiful little smoke-ringed vortices.
They remain very stable as they travel through the surrounding air.
- Nice, eh? - Look at that! Yeah.
This is a lovely bit of aerodynamics.
As the blast of air emerges from the tube it gets wrapped up into this doughnut shape.
That doughnut shape is able to transfer the energy of the blast incredibly long distances.
- l love it.
- lt is good.
But it's not great.
What l want to do is make that bigger, faster, stronger and a whole load more powerful.
Smoke rings might seem like a pretty gimmick, but they're actually a fascinating piece of aerodynamics.
What happens is a blast of air gets dragged back at the edges and folds itself into an incredibly stable swirling doughnut.
lt's just, how do l get that to happen at explosive speeds? My challenge is going to be to create a vortex with a really powerful explosion.
That means the air forming it will be travelling faster than the speed of sound, which totally changes the way it behaves.
lf l'm going to do it with a big explosion, l fancy trying to understand a small explosion first.
That's why l'm using the bursting of a balloon.
But producing even a small vortex ring with an explosion isn't easy.
Nothing.
That suggests to me there is no vortex coming out of that, that's just a turbulent tumble of air, absolutely no ring-shaped vortex.
Plan B.
l've discovered a neat trick.
Adding a barrel to the same piece of kit seems to smooth out the air flow, producing that all-important vortex ring.
Although we couldn't see it, l'm convinced that that was a vortex ring.
Now, l've just got to scale it up to as big an explosion as l can handle.
What l'm aiming to do is turn those delicate little smoke rings into high-speed battering rams.
After hours of experimentation, l think l've discovered the perfect design for what, when scaled up, will become my massive vortex canon.
This is the final prototype for our vortex canon.
lt's powered by a mixture of air and one of the most explosive gases on earth, acetylene.
l make the explosive gas mix by injecting acetylene through this little hole in the back.
l then ignite it by creating a spark between these two screws.
But the key is this conical barrel here.
lt allows the expanding gases to expand in a smoother, more controlled way, just the best conditions to create the most stable vortex ring possible.
That's the theory, but let's try and put it to the test and knock over this bottle from 20 feet.
l've calculated l need 125mls of acetylene in here to produce the perfect mix.
When this goes, it will produce a supersonic shockwave.
The thing is, can my barrel turn that into a ring-shaped vortex? Here goes.
Whoa! Err, yes! Pretty good, but l promised l was gonna knock down a pile of bricks.
l'm going to scale up the prototype by more than 150 times.
And if it works, we might just be able to see a vortex ring.
lt's something l've never tried before and l'm not sure if it will really work.
So, let's just hope the late nights are going to be worth it.
That is one of the trickiest builds l've ever attempted.
lt looked hard.
ls it gonna work? You'll have to wait until later in the programme, but l am gonna show you something else.
Do you want to see another kind of vortex, this one from nature? Yeah.
Are you ready? Yeah.
l'm gonna show you a home-made tornado.
Let's go! Here is a good fact for you, when you think of tornados, you probably think of the big twisters in the American Midwest, but there are actually more reported tornadoes in the UK per square kilometre than there are in America.
They're just less big and impressive.
We don't mind a bit of a challenge, so, right here, we've got our own home-made tornado machine.
ln a real tornado, it's just a spinning mass of rising air.
So to cause our air to spin, we rotate this mesh and to get it to rise, we set fire to it.
Have you any idea what you're doing, Jem, or are you just making this up as you go along? lt looks too home-made, l know what you're saying.
lt'll be fine.
l'm definitely not fire retardant today.
- l've got loads of hairspray in my hair.
- That was your choice.
l'm just letting you know.
- You'll probably be OK.
- You promise? That's it.
Now it's alight, the heat from the fire is causing that spinning column of air to rise.
Just like in a real tornado, that rising spinning column of air sucks in cold air at the base.
Now here that cold air feeds the flames and makes the vortex even more intense.
That's good actually.
lt is beautiful.
Great.
l love it.
- Essentially, you're a fire-starter.
- A twisted fire-starter.
Maybe just some kind of scientific prodigy! One of the things we want to do is explain the science behind the headlines and also meet some of the scientists who are making them.
Liz went to meet someone, who l think it's fair to say, divides opinion.
Oh, yeah, a lot of people have a serious problem with what this guy is doing.
He thinks his work is absolutely essential, he also thinks he might just have the answer to our planet's energy crisis.
Take a look at this.
l'm heading to possibly the most controversial research facility in the world.
Now l can't tell you exactly where l'm going, because a lot of people are dead set against both what is going on out there and the man who runs the entire operation.
Oraig Venter was one of the first people to decipher what makes us people, and not, say, dolphins or seaweed.
He jointly sequenced the human genome, the complete set of genes that is unique to humans.
And Venter is now taking that genetic research one step further, because he wants to create new forms of life.
For some, Oraig Venter holds the answers to our world's future.
But to others, he's Frankenstein, a scientist playing God.
We're trying to understand basic life by learning how to now write the genetic code.
So we start with the digital code in the computer and four bottles of chemicals and we actually build the DNA molecule from scratch.
So, you're designing a genetic code on the computer and then you're actually making it in the laboratory? Exactly.
l'm sure some people will be very scared of that notion? Some people prefer to live in a cave and work with whale-oil lamps.
ls there any danger that in the future they will harm the environment, or harm us, because they're not ''natural living beings''? lf irresponsible scientists design things to go into the environment, yes, l think that is always a potential danger.
One of the rules that we're trying to establish is that nobody makes anything that can survive in the environment on its own.
To help in his quest for new life, Oraig Venter is taking his boat, Sorcerer ll, on a hi-tech mission around the world.
Oombing the depths, the controversial millionaire scientist hopes to find unknown species, whose unusual genes could be the basis for new synthetic life.
So, do you reckon there are, like, many new species just on this filter paper alone? - 85% of what we find is totally new.
- That's pretty incredible.
So it means there will be lots of new ones here.
Fantastic.
- And thousands or millions of new genes.
- That's amazing.
We've discovered now about 20 million genes.
So before we started the expedition, there were only about a million known to science.
20 million genes already you've discovered, just from the ocean? Just from these filters off this boat.
So the majority of genes known to science came from this vessel.
Now, the big question is, why is he doing this? Knowledge and science is not just a nice thing to have, it's an absolute necessity now.
We have 6.
5 billion people on the planet.
ln 40 years, there's gonna be nine billion people.
We can't provide food, medicine, clean water and energy for the 6.
5 billion.
We have to have new science, new knowledge to be able to survive.
The controversial scientist even claims his new life forms could be the answer to the world's energy crisis.
These are the organisms that capture OO2 back from the atmosphere.
These are the organisms that make the oxygen that we breathe.
Some of these same organisms could be the solution for future energy, new ways to capture back OO2, new ways to make fuels, instead of burning oil and coal.
Now we can genetically modify to have them do that process much more efficiently.
Obviously, there will be people who are saying you are playing with life here.
You're making new synthetic organisms, is that really moral? lt is absolutely moral.
lt's immoral not to do this work, because it's such a dire consequences if we don't have some new solutions.
Why, in your eyes, is this the only way forward? Why is it, clearly, just the way to go? lt's not the only way forward, but biology is the only one that's truly scalable in a short period of time to have a big impact.
lt's not often you meet a man who literally could change the world and this kind of research is truly revolutionary.
Like him or loath him, Venter is pushing the boundaries of science and with it may just shape the future of our planet.
That was such an interesting film.
Having met him, are you a fan, do you think, of what he is doing? l'm really fascinated by the whole subject.
There's no doubt the implications for medicine and science are huge.
Essentially, natural selection is all about selecting for the useful genes, geneticists are speeding up that process.
When you think about it, it's already happening with selection for more productive cows or bigger and better crops, but what they're doing now is taking that technology and pushing it even further.
So they're cherry-picking genes from different organisms, placing them all into a new organism that they have created, so they're essentially creating new life forms.
Exactly, that's the thing l think that some people are gonna get a bit scared about? Yeah, of course.
But we've got to know about this stuff, because it is happening now.
People like Venter are changing the face of science literally as we speak.
Exactly.
Now, there's a fourth member of our team, Dr Yan, but as you can see, he's not here.
So vast is his intellect we couldn't actually fit him into Bang HQ.
Yes, indeed.
That's why instead we've sent him on a one-man mission to bring science to the high street.
- Apparently, he can cook.
- Oh! The question is how on earth do you fry an egg over a stove, if you haven't got a frying pan? l'm not entirely sure what to do with that, but we'll leave it for a little bit and see what happens! - That's not too bad.
- Would you eat it? l'm not too sure about that! Do you want me to show you a different way of doing it? - Yeah, go on, then.
- You can do it with paper.
l'll show you.
l've got the Daily Mirror, here if you want.
Yeah, go on, l'll do it with The Mirror.
l want to see this, man.
- You think it'll just burst into flames, right? - Yeah.
Burning is just a chemical reaction.
lt takes a certain amount of heat to get the reaction going.
That's because it takes energy to break apart long molecules like those in paper.
ln fact, it takes quite a lot of heat energy to make paper spontaneously burst into flame.
lts ignition temperature, as it is called, is about 232 degrees centigrade, that's Fahrenheit 451 .
So, if l just put some oil in and treat this like a frying pan, like you would any other normal frying pan.
Put an egg in it.
So, do you think it will burst into blames? You're burning the paper.
l thought the paper would go, boom! l trained as a chef for 20 years, this is the first time l've ever seen this.
lt's bubbling.
Look at that! lt's cooking.
Yeah, it's frying, look.
Yeah.
lt's cooking.
Perfect.
Well, the egg is absorbing the heat and keeping the paper below that critical ignition temperature, but it's still quite hot, enough to fry the egg.
- Shall l give it a try? - Yeah.
- That's amazing, how that's done that.
- Oh, you are clever, you.
There you go.
l'm quite hungry, actually, l haven't had any lunch, yet.
That's not edible! l wouldn't! Mmm, really nice.
OK.
Hmm, that is delicious, actually.
Mmm, fine.
l'm going to give that a go! Right now, l'd' like to drag you back to my world, a world obsessed with vortex canons.
Phew! Here it goes.
'My prototype vortex canon' (BANG) '.
.
blew a bottle into a bin from 20 feet, 'but l've been working day and night to go a lot, lot further 'and do something that this country has never seen before.
' l've taken a huge risk and scaled it up.
What l'm hoping to do is produce a vortex ring so powerful that it creates a visible ring in the still air around it.
An enormous amount of thought and experimentation went into creating this - a vortex canon.
A one-litre explosion goes off in here, it drives high-speed gas down there and a perfect ring vortex emerges from here.
We love it, but not as much as this - 150 litres of exploding acetylene and oxygen comes down here, 12 feet of steel barrel, and emerges there, at a three-foot aperture as a perfect vortex ring.
l hope.
Now the power of this is an unknown quantity, but here, in this quarry, we're going to do a whole series of experiments and find out just what we've made.
The ultimate challenge is to produce a visible doughnut of air so powerful that it will do what the big, bad wolf could never do - take out of wall of bricks.
But just like in the fairy tale, we'll start with something a bit lighter.
According to legend, a really good blast of air should be able to bring down a house of straw.
Let's see how it goes with an explosively generated vortex ring.
Here goes, this is the gas.
'lt's the first time it's ever been fired 'and with 150 litres of one of the world's most explosive 'gas mixes in there, 'l'm not even sure that this is really a safe place to stand.
' Seems about right.
l'm going to need these, l reckon.
Here we go.
Three, two, one OH, YES! 'Oall me hopeful, but there was definitely something there, 'but was it a vortex ring?' Filmed at 1 ,300 frames per second, there is no doubt, but the ring you can see is not a smoke ring.
lt's formed by the pressure drop within the vortex, condensing the water out of the damp air above the lake.
A 200 mile an hour cloud.
Ho-ho-ho! Bring on the sticks and bricks! Three, two, one Yes! Fantastic! Well, it makes mincemeat of a house of sticks.
Bring on the bricks! Even in fairy stories, they couldn't get a blast of air to knock down a house of bricks.
We're heading into the world of the unknown a bit.
So we're going to experiment.
We'll try changing the elevation on it, changing the gas mix, to see if we can get a perfect gas mix, that's just the right amount of molecules of acetylene, reacting with just the right amount of molecules of oxygen.
So there's no passengers in there, it's got to be all explosion.
Let's see how that goes.
Three, two, one HEY! Yes! That's incredible! That was amazing.
l so loved your reaction at the end of that.
That ring looked so perfect, honestly, you'd think it was a special effect or something.
l've got to say it was frighteningly real.
Loads of people didn't think it was going to work and l was utterly overjoyed when it did.
l can tell you were a real happy bunny about that.
On that heroic note, it is time for us to go, Bye! Bye.
Now you're going to have to put your ear plugs in because it is amazingly loud.
- Ok, hang on, hang on.
- Ready.
- Yeah.
- Ok, ready.
Right, it takes a couple of seconds for it to go, you ready? - Yeah.
- Threetwoone (LOUD EXPLOSlON) Oh my life.