Bang Goes The Theory (2009) s01e08 Episode Script
Episode 8
On tonight's show, l conduct some serious scientific research.
Liz tries to answer the nature versus nurture debate and Jem tries to power a helicopter with a microwave oven.
That's Bang Goes The Theory, putting science to the test.
Hello and welcome to Bang Goes The Theory.
Science doesn't get any more tricky than the hunt for dark matter.
Basically, Newtonian physics is in trouble.
Dark matter.
The missing chunk of the universe is one of the biggest questions in science.
So big that it needs cosmologists, JOBs, parachutes and one gullible presenter to explain it.
Nice forehand Until recently, the way the universe worked was so simple you could explain it all with a bat and ball.
According to Newton, the Earth wants to whizz off into space but the gravity of the sun pulls it back.
The result is the two forces balance each other out and the earth orbits nice and steadily around the sun.
So, thanks to a bit of clever maths from Sir lsaac, that's space sorted.
And his laws didn't just apply to our solar system.
lt's how the whole universe is supposed to work.
So we thought, until we invented some very big telescopes and began to look at some distant galaxies.
What we found was that they behaved a bit like our solar system, with all their billions of stars orbiting around the centres of their galaxies.
But then we realised that the stars on the edge were misbehaving.
They were going too fast.
Let me illustrate, with the help of a cosmologist called Dr Kukula and a very big digger.
So, you're at the centre of our galaxy, yeah? l'm the black hole at the centre of the galaxy.
OK, perfect.
lmagine l'm a star right at the edge of our galaxy and l'm sort of spinning round.
How fast exactly am l travelling? You're probably moving at about 70 or 80,000 kilometres per hour.
- Quick-ish? - Pretty quick, yes.
All right, start your engines.
What this test represents is the forces on a star spinning around the centre of its galaxy.
Aaaaaaagh! OK, so far so good.
Just like in the ball game, l'm being held nicely in orbit by gravity.
Woooooagh! So what's the problem? When astronomers measured the speed of stars whizzing around the centre of their galaxy, they found that the stars were just moving too fast.
l'm a star, going too fast! They couldn't see enough stuff in the rest of the galaxy to provide the gravity you'd need to hold the stars in their orbit, so they should just go spinning off into space.
Argh! (GARGLES AND OOUGHS) Here's what l don't understand.
Because stars are still travelling at this amazing speed and they're not flying off and being ejected into deep space like that.
No, they're not, they seem to be orbiting quite happily around the galaxy.
So it must be something else? There is something missing and this is what we call dark matter.
lt is what we need to provide the extra gravity to hold the stars in their orbits.
And so we need to find out, otherwise we'd have to rewrite the laws of physics and we would really rather not have to do that.
Scientists have been looking for those strange particles of dark matter for years now and they have found nothing, absolutely nothing.
So, does this mean the scientists have made this dark matter stuff up? Well, no.
Because it interacts with almost nothing, we'd only know if a particle of dark matter was anywhere near us if it hit the centre of an atom that we just happened to be watching.
And how likely is that? To paraphrase my hero Douglas Adams, writing on the nature of matter, the chances of this happening are very small.
Roughly comparable to that of dropping a ball bearing at random from a cruising 7 47 and hitting, say, an egg sandwich.
l didn't have a ball bearing, so l thought l'd use myself.
OK, let's go! Woaaaaah! We think of things as solid, but at the atomic level, they're really not.
lf our egg sandwich was the size of an atom's nucleus and l was a dark matter particle, then pretty much all the ground you see beneath me would be space, which l would whizz straight through.
But l'm going to do what dark matter particles can't do - l'm going to aim straight for the nucleus.
There it is -- egg sandwich, 12 o'clock! Oh! Oh, close! Look at that, we were right on it.
l reckon, with a couple more goes, we will nail that.
l love that film, l absolutely love it.
But do you know what? l know he cheated and used a dummy Dallas on the JOB.
l built the release rig.
And it's a good thing he did cheat.
Watch this.
OK, well, let's get back to Newtonian physics for a bit, shall we? All right, we're going to test gravity.
Now you probably think of gravity as a force that makes things fall, like the apple on Newton's head.
But gravity is actually a force of attraction between two objects of mass.
The fascinating thing for me about gravity is, even though we understand it, we can make great mathematical predictions about what it's going to do, we don't really know how it happens.
No, the one thing we do know is, if you drop an object on the earth, the object and the earth will be attracted to each other.
lt's just the earth moves so incredibly slowly that, for all practical purposes, it's the object falling to the ground.
But that doesn't mean if here on Earth we dropped two objects from the same height they're going to land at the same time.
Because it's not the only force at play.
lt's not.
And that's the really interesting bit.
Dallas, are you ready? l am ready.
This is a classic experiment.
l've got two identical bottles here.
One is full of liquid and is very heavy, the other is almost empty.
There's a little bit of water in there just to keep it stable on the way down.
Now, if l hold them at exactly the same height, on three, two, one - We-hey! - Nice one.
Yeah, well done, you.
Now, the full bottle definitely landed first there, OK? And that's because air resistance is another force at play here.
lt works on all moving objects around us and it was the same on both those bottles as they fell to the ground.
But the full bottle built up more momentum because it was heavier.
lt was able to push against that air resistance more and it landed first.
Exactly, Liz.
Now, if we did that same experiment somewhere where there was gravity still but no air resistance, then they would fall at the same time, or at least they should do.
A good place to do that would be the moon and we sent a couple of chaps up there to test it out.
How about that? lt was very good of them to go all the way up there to do that for us, so thank you very much indeed.
Luckily, it worked.
Otherwise, we would be rewriting the textbooks.
OK, let's move on, shall we? When it comes to the difference between boys and girls, you guys, do you think it's nature or nurture? Boys are just born different.
- So you're saying nature? - Yeah.
What about you, Dallas? lt's a good question.
l'm going with nature, l think.
All right, well, let's take a look at this.
You might be surprised.
By 15 months, most boys like playing with cars and machines.
While most girls seem to prefer playing with dolls and so-called girlie toys.
But is this down to our genetic make-up or is it learned behaviour? To find out who's boss in the nature versus nurture debate, l've come to Oambridge to conduct a little experiment that puts the nurture argument to the test.
Volunteers are each given a toddler to look after.
They think they're taking part in an experiment to see how babies react to strangers.
What our contributors don't know is that they are actually our guinea pigs today, and not the babies.
How will the adults react when presented with a boy? Hello Oaleb.
We've got some toys to play with, if you want to play with some toys.
Maybe you want to play with a truck.
Brrm! Brrm! Ohristian's just picked up the red fire truck.
But what our volunteer doesn't know is that Oaleb isn't a boy.
She's really a little girl called Kayley.
- We'll make you look just like a boy.
- A boy! Going to play with the helicopter.
Yes, you're going to play with the helicopter.
The truck as well? The helicopter is a hit.
Regardless of the fact that Kayley's a girl.
ln fact, when presented with a toddler, all our contributors opted for the gender stereotype toy.
James, dressed as a girl, clearly makes his feelings known, but our guinea pig keeps on trying.
And it's not just our guinea pigs because almost all adults will give boys toys like trucks and tank engines to play with and will give girls nice, pink fluffy toys to play with.
And apparently it's the boys that have the hardest time of it because adults are much more keen to discourage boys from playing with dolls than they are to discourage girls from playing with cars.
What this experiment shows is how likely adults are to gender-stereotype, and therefore how easily they can influence our children.
Just because adults influence children, doesn't necessarily mean that nature doesn't play a role.
l've come to Woburn Safari Park to illustrate a controversial experiment that still raises eyebrows many years after it was first carried out.
lts creator was Dr Melissa Hines.
Some years ago, l wanted to find out if l could find a group of children who hadn't been socialised to choose different toys.
And see if they still gravitated towards toys that were for their own sex.
And, try as l might, l couldn't find such children.
So, Dr Hines had a radical thought.
Why not experiment with monkeys? They obviously don't normally play with toy cars and dolls, so any toy preferences cannot be down to the influences of human society.
Keeper Laura helps us illustrate Melissa's experiment by setting out the toys for our unsuspecting monkey audience.
And it's not long before the nature argument appears to kick in.
Who's that there with the helicopter now, Laura? - That's Frank.
- Excellent.
And now he's chewing it.
That's probably Jaffa, cos he's the oldest baby.
Well, Jaffa the baby went straight for the yellow truck.
lncredibly, despite the small sample size, the monkeys seemed to show a gender preference for the toys.
- Who's that there now?.
- That's Blondie.
- Blondie's a girl, l take it? - She is.
She went straight past the truck.
Although this is just an illustration, what we've seen closely matches what Dr Hines discovered.
On the average, the male animals spent more time with the boys' toys than the female animals did.
And the female animals spent more time with the girls' toys than the male animals did.
As if to prove the point, whilst our backs were turned, there's been a bit of monkey business.
Took baby, took baby out of the bag! True to form, Gara has gone for a girlie toy.
- Where'd she get the toys out? - They were in the bag.
- That's so incredible.
- Let's look.
This is amazing.
We were focusing on all these monkeys but behind the truck we left a bag of unused toys.
Gara, a female macaque, went into the bag, rummaged around, and stole this pink, cuddly monkey toy and ran up the tree with it.
That is so cute.
That was brilliant.
Here's my question, though.
l can understand why girl monkeys want to play with dolls and the like but what is it about things like helicopters, trucks, cars that is so attractive to boy monkeys? Good question.
lf this is part of our evolutionary heritage, then all this would have started before there were vehicles around.
Exactly, yeah.
Scientists think it's down to males being attracted to things with moving parts, like mechanical objects, to motion, basically, and that's why you saw the monkeys there spinning the wheels.
But where are we, then, with the nature/nurture debate? ls there conclusive evidence either way? Well, the classic scientific view was nurture.
lt plays a huge part on your preferences like we saw in the film, but more recent research has shown that nature plays just as big a role, so l'm sorry to sit on the fence with this, but it actually is a big combination of the two.
- That's OK, that makes sense, l think.
- Yeah.
Talking of monkeys spinning wheels, Dr Yan is having a little bit too much fun.
l've challenged these people to try and see if you can make yourself spin on the chair.
ln fact, try it at home.
Feet off the ground, and you're not allowed to push off anything.
lt's harder than you might think.
You're putting your feet on the ground, though! So l reckon, with a bit of scientific know-how, we should be able to do better.
This is just a normal bicycle wheel.
lf l make it spin fast, in fact, really, really fast then l'm giving it lots of spinning momentum and now, watch what happens.
Whee! Just what we couldn't do before.
Whee! - Right.
- Oh! That feels really weird! Try turning it the other way.
Whee! lt actually illustrates one of the most fundamental principles of the universe.
When l change the wheel's direction spin, it changes my direction spin.
That's because it's giving me some of its momentum.
lt seems really weird, because we're not used to it.
We don't normally move spinning objects about like that, but scientists and engineers use it quite often in things called gyroscopes.
Whoa There we go.
There's been an awful lot of research recently into new sources of energy.
l felt l had to get in on the action.
- Funny that.
- Mm.
There's actually a vast amount of invisible energy consistently beaming through the air around us.
Radio waves off masts, like that over there.
Television signals off similar masts.
Even microwaves sending information to our mobile phones.
ln fact, the rays of the setting sun over there.
They're all examples of one special kind of wave - the electromagnetic wave.
lt should be possible to harness the energy from these waves, and there is a way of extracting electricity directly from electromagnetic waves by using an aerial, or a piece of wire.
l've attached my length of wire to a small LED, and my source of electromagnetic waves is a standard OB radio.
When l press this transmit button, l'm going to start sending out some pretty low-power radio signals, but if l've got the length of my wire right, l should be able to convert them into enough electricity to light this LED.
lt seems unlikely, but here goes.
Yes! Look at that! This is Honestly, it's not attached to anything at all.
There is no electrical source going in here, just what l'm making from the radio waves.
But a little OB radio is never going to get a helicopter off the ground.
l need a source of electromagnetic waves with more power.
Luckily, in the workshop, l've got one that can melt glass.
lt's a microwave.
This is only four watts.
But, this has got 1 ,000 watts of microwave power.
Now l need to convert it into a giant energy transmitter, a sort of microwave ray-gun, and, like anything involving ray-guns, this is dangerous work.
Any of that could kill you.
Even though this microwave is unplugged, the electrical charge is still in there.
That means it can give you a massive belt that could kill you any time.
And that is the magnetron, where the microwaves are actually produced.
So, really, never take these things apart.
Now for the fun bit.
l'm making a funnel to concentrate the microwaves in one direction.
There's easily enough power focused through this to fry my eyeballs.
Wow! l hope l've done the right thing here.
ln the wrong hands, that could be described as a microwave death-ray.
ln the right hands, hopefully it's a device for beaming invisible power.
l would dearly love to turn it on here and now, but l can't because (a) it's utterly illegal and (b) it could not be more hazardous.
But l OAN turn it on here.
This quarry is an ex-Ministry Of Defence testing site and we still needed a special licence to use this thing here and only then if we monitor the radiation with one of these.
Now, meet Sam.
He's a top young pilot.
He's going to fly the helicopter whilst l monitor the microwave situation and take us through the science.
lf we're going to collect electricity directly from microwaves, we'll need an antenna, just like the wire l used to get radio waves to power my LED.
But microwave technology is super-fiddly.
So l've had an expert - called Julian Worksep - make us this, an array of microwave antennas.
lt looks complicated, but it's effectively just made of 100 short wires called dipoles, which are tuned to my microwave beam.
The precise spacing of the dipoles is critical, and very few of these antennas have ever been made, so we're wading into a world of trial and error.
Hopefully, not so much of the error.
From here will emerge a beam of microwaves.
They'll travel at 186,000 miles a second, until they reach here, our antennas.
Now, the microwaves are going to set up a voltage in each of these antenna.
The voltages and currents are summed up at the back here, and, as electrical power, it comes down that wireto that helicopter.
Here goes.
Let's see what happens.
OK, a couple of minutes of flying time.
l'm going to switch the microwave on now.
l'm just going to check that we're safe standing here.
Stand back a little bit, just in case.
Yeah, we're good.
Now to slowly angle it down at the antenna.
l don't want to fry the components on our first go.
We're now beaming maximum power at the antenna.
We should start getting a voltage appear there at the helicopter.
lt's a powerful little helicopter, so we don't know if it will fly.
We have power.
Now, is there enough for lift off? Yes! Fantastic! But there is a problem.
No matter what we do, the power levels are just too low to lift the helicopter and the wire.
Oh! Still, we've proved the point - we OAN get electricity out of thin air.
High five! lt's managed to send enough power to a helicopter to lift the helicopter clean off the helipad.
l'm astonished that that technology actually works.
So, er, bring on the future.
l just think that is astonishing.
You are like every member of the A-Team rolled into one package.
You did say earlier on you were going to try to harness new energy? l used microwaves because they're of a 12 cm wavelength, which means we can make aerials the right size for collecting the electricity.
But, in the future, the idea is to harvest electricity from electromagnetic waves that are much, much, much smaller.
Say hello to infra-red.
Our microwaves were harvested from energy sources created on Earth, but if we could capture infra-red, we'd be getting free energy from space.
lnfra-red is invisible to human beings, except if you've got one of these cameras.
Now, l can see This is tuned to the infra-red spectrum, and clearly shows it coming off the crew and me.
The heat of my body causes me to radiate infra-red waves the entire time, but l'm nothing special, anything with a temperature above absolute zero is always emitting infra-red.
You've seen how we collected power from invisible microwaves being beamed through the air.
Now imagine the potential of being able to farm electricity directly from all this infra-red.
But infra-red waves are tiny, less than 100th of a millimetre long, and no-one has been able to build an antenna that small until now.
l've arranged to meet the man who's built the world's first large-scale infra-red antenna.
His name is Steve Novack.
The technology is so new that there are only two prototypes in existence.
lt's one of the most exciting pieces of technology l've ever heard of.
This could actually change the world.
And he's brought the antenna from his labs in ldaho to show me.
- Hi, Stephen.
- Hi, pleased to meet you.
Thanks so much for coming.
- So, can we have a look at it? - Oh, absolutely.
- ls it this sheet of plastic? - That's right.
OK.
Just unroll it - And that's the infra-red antenna? - That's correct.
lt's not like l imagined it looking, but l guess there's more to it than first meets the eye.
This is essentially a miniaturised version of our array of microwave antennas.
Each one of these 4-inch squares holds about 260 million antennas, So, the 3x6 has about 4 billion.
4 billion antennas on here?! And they're all of the right length for collecting infra-red waves and turning them straight to electricity? - That's correct.
- Wow! These antennas are so efficient, that they can point in almost any direction and still collect infra-red energy from the sun.
What about on a cloudy day like this? Well, if you collect the right wavelengths, the infra-reds should get through the clouds and should have no problem.
You can get as much on a cloudy day as a sunny day? - Oorrect.
- Oh, this stuff's better than l thought! What's more, these panels can also collect the infra-red given off by the Earth as it cools at night.
- Solar panels that work at night? - These work at night.
lncredibly, the Earth emits so much infra-red at night that a one square-metre panel of Stephen's antennas could light several light bulbs.
That's it for this episode of Bang Goes The Theory.
We'll see you very soon.
- Shall we say goodbye? - Let's say goodbye - Bye! - See ya!
Liz tries to answer the nature versus nurture debate and Jem tries to power a helicopter with a microwave oven.
That's Bang Goes The Theory, putting science to the test.
Hello and welcome to Bang Goes The Theory.
Science doesn't get any more tricky than the hunt for dark matter.
Basically, Newtonian physics is in trouble.
Dark matter.
The missing chunk of the universe is one of the biggest questions in science.
So big that it needs cosmologists, JOBs, parachutes and one gullible presenter to explain it.
Nice forehand Until recently, the way the universe worked was so simple you could explain it all with a bat and ball.
According to Newton, the Earth wants to whizz off into space but the gravity of the sun pulls it back.
The result is the two forces balance each other out and the earth orbits nice and steadily around the sun.
So, thanks to a bit of clever maths from Sir lsaac, that's space sorted.
And his laws didn't just apply to our solar system.
lt's how the whole universe is supposed to work.
So we thought, until we invented some very big telescopes and began to look at some distant galaxies.
What we found was that they behaved a bit like our solar system, with all their billions of stars orbiting around the centres of their galaxies.
But then we realised that the stars on the edge were misbehaving.
They were going too fast.
Let me illustrate, with the help of a cosmologist called Dr Kukula and a very big digger.
So, you're at the centre of our galaxy, yeah? l'm the black hole at the centre of the galaxy.
OK, perfect.
lmagine l'm a star right at the edge of our galaxy and l'm sort of spinning round.
How fast exactly am l travelling? You're probably moving at about 70 or 80,000 kilometres per hour.
- Quick-ish? - Pretty quick, yes.
All right, start your engines.
What this test represents is the forces on a star spinning around the centre of its galaxy.
Aaaaaaagh! OK, so far so good.
Just like in the ball game, l'm being held nicely in orbit by gravity.
Woooooagh! So what's the problem? When astronomers measured the speed of stars whizzing around the centre of their galaxy, they found that the stars were just moving too fast.
l'm a star, going too fast! They couldn't see enough stuff in the rest of the galaxy to provide the gravity you'd need to hold the stars in their orbit, so they should just go spinning off into space.
Argh! (GARGLES AND OOUGHS) Here's what l don't understand.
Because stars are still travelling at this amazing speed and they're not flying off and being ejected into deep space like that.
No, they're not, they seem to be orbiting quite happily around the galaxy.
So it must be something else? There is something missing and this is what we call dark matter.
lt is what we need to provide the extra gravity to hold the stars in their orbits.
And so we need to find out, otherwise we'd have to rewrite the laws of physics and we would really rather not have to do that.
Scientists have been looking for those strange particles of dark matter for years now and they have found nothing, absolutely nothing.
So, does this mean the scientists have made this dark matter stuff up? Well, no.
Because it interacts with almost nothing, we'd only know if a particle of dark matter was anywhere near us if it hit the centre of an atom that we just happened to be watching.
And how likely is that? To paraphrase my hero Douglas Adams, writing on the nature of matter, the chances of this happening are very small.
Roughly comparable to that of dropping a ball bearing at random from a cruising 7 47 and hitting, say, an egg sandwich.
l didn't have a ball bearing, so l thought l'd use myself.
OK, let's go! Woaaaaah! We think of things as solid, but at the atomic level, they're really not.
lf our egg sandwich was the size of an atom's nucleus and l was a dark matter particle, then pretty much all the ground you see beneath me would be space, which l would whizz straight through.
But l'm going to do what dark matter particles can't do - l'm going to aim straight for the nucleus.
There it is -- egg sandwich, 12 o'clock! Oh! Oh, close! Look at that, we were right on it.
l reckon, with a couple more goes, we will nail that.
l love that film, l absolutely love it.
But do you know what? l know he cheated and used a dummy Dallas on the JOB.
l built the release rig.
And it's a good thing he did cheat.
Watch this.
OK, well, let's get back to Newtonian physics for a bit, shall we? All right, we're going to test gravity.
Now you probably think of gravity as a force that makes things fall, like the apple on Newton's head.
But gravity is actually a force of attraction between two objects of mass.
The fascinating thing for me about gravity is, even though we understand it, we can make great mathematical predictions about what it's going to do, we don't really know how it happens.
No, the one thing we do know is, if you drop an object on the earth, the object and the earth will be attracted to each other.
lt's just the earth moves so incredibly slowly that, for all practical purposes, it's the object falling to the ground.
But that doesn't mean if here on Earth we dropped two objects from the same height they're going to land at the same time.
Because it's not the only force at play.
lt's not.
And that's the really interesting bit.
Dallas, are you ready? l am ready.
This is a classic experiment.
l've got two identical bottles here.
One is full of liquid and is very heavy, the other is almost empty.
There's a little bit of water in there just to keep it stable on the way down.
Now, if l hold them at exactly the same height, on three, two, one - We-hey! - Nice one.
Yeah, well done, you.
Now, the full bottle definitely landed first there, OK? And that's because air resistance is another force at play here.
lt works on all moving objects around us and it was the same on both those bottles as they fell to the ground.
But the full bottle built up more momentum because it was heavier.
lt was able to push against that air resistance more and it landed first.
Exactly, Liz.
Now, if we did that same experiment somewhere where there was gravity still but no air resistance, then they would fall at the same time, or at least they should do.
A good place to do that would be the moon and we sent a couple of chaps up there to test it out.
How about that? lt was very good of them to go all the way up there to do that for us, so thank you very much indeed.
Luckily, it worked.
Otherwise, we would be rewriting the textbooks.
OK, let's move on, shall we? When it comes to the difference between boys and girls, you guys, do you think it's nature or nurture? Boys are just born different.
- So you're saying nature? - Yeah.
What about you, Dallas? lt's a good question.
l'm going with nature, l think.
All right, well, let's take a look at this.
You might be surprised.
By 15 months, most boys like playing with cars and machines.
While most girls seem to prefer playing with dolls and so-called girlie toys.
But is this down to our genetic make-up or is it learned behaviour? To find out who's boss in the nature versus nurture debate, l've come to Oambridge to conduct a little experiment that puts the nurture argument to the test.
Volunteers are each given a toddler to look after.
They think they're taking part in an experiment to see how babies react to strangers.
What our contributors don't know is that they are actually our guinea pigs today, and not the babies.
How will the adults react when presented with a boy? Hello Oaleb.
We've got some toys to play with, if you want to play with some toys.
Maybe you want to play with a truck.
Brrm! Brrm! Ohristian's just picked up the red fire truck.
But what our volunteer doesn't know is that Oaleb isn't a boy.
She's really a little girl called Kayley.
- We'll make you look just like a boy.
- A boy! Going to play with the helicopter.
Yes, you're going to play with the helicopter.
The truck as well? The helicopter is a hit.
Regardless of the fact that Kayley's a girl.
ln fact, when presented with a toddler, all our contributors opted for the gender stereotype toy.
James, dressed as a girl, clearly makes his feelings known, but our guinea pig keeps on trying.
And it's not just our guinea pigs because almost all adults will give boys toys like trucks and tank engines to play with and will give girls nice, pink fluffy toys to play with.
And apparently it's the boys that have the hardest time of it because adults are much more keen to discourage boys from playing with dolls than they are to discourage girls from playing with cars.
What this experiment shows is how likely adults are to gender-stereotype, and therefore how easily they can influence our children.
Just because adults influence children, doesn't necessarily mean that nature doesn't play a role.
l've come to Woburn Safari Park to illustrate a controversial experiment that still raises eyebrows many years after it was first carried out.
lts creator was Dr Melissa Hines.
Some years ago, l wanted to find out if l could find a group of children who hadn't been socialised to choose different toys.
And see if they still gravitated towards toys that were for their own sex.
And, try as l might, l couldn't find such children.
So, Dr Hines had a radical thought.
Why not experiment with monkeys? They obviously don't normally play with toy cars and dolls, so any toy preferences cannot be down to the influences of human society.
Keeper Laura helps us illustrate Melissa's experiment by setting out the toys for our unsuspecting monkey audience.
And it's not long before the nature argument appears to kick in.
Who's that there with the helicopter now, Laura? - That's Frank.
- Excellent.
And now he's chewing it.
That's probably Jaffa, cos he's the oldest baby.
Well, Jaffa the baby went straight for the yellow truck.
lncredibly, despite the small sample size, the monkeys seemed to show a gender preference for the toys.
- Who's that there now?.
- That's Blondie.
- Blondie's a girl, l take it? - She is.
She went straight past the truck.
Although this is just an illustration, what we've seen closely matches what Dr Hines discovered.
On the average, the male animals spent more time with the boys' toys than the female animals did.
And the female animals spent more time with the girls' toys than the male animals did.
As if to prove the point, whilst our backs were turned, there's been a bit of monkey business.
Took baby, took baby out of the bag! True to form, Gara has gone for a girlie toy.
- Where'd she get the toys out? - They were in the bag.
- That's so incredible.
- Let's look.
This is amazing.
We were focusing on all these monkeys but behind the truck we left a bag of unused toys.
Gara, a female macaque, went into the bag, rummaged around, and stole this pink, cuddly monkey toy and ran up the tree with it.
That is so cute.
That was brilliant.
Here's my question, though.
l can understand why girl monkeys want to play with dolls and the like but what is it about things like helicopters, trucks, cars that is so attractive to boy monkeys? Good question.
lf this is part of our evolutionary heritage, then all this would have started before there were vehicles around.
Exactly, yeah.
Scientists think it's down to males being attracted to things with moving parts, like mechanical objects, to motion, basically, and that's why you saw the monkeys there spinning the wheels.
But where are we, then, with the nature/nurture debate? ls there conclusive evidence either way? Well, the classic scientific view was nurture.
lt plays a huge part on your preferences like we saw in the film, but more recent research has shown that nature plays just as big a role, so l'm sorry to sit on the fence with this, but it actually is a big combination of the two.
- That's OK, that makes sense, l think.
- Yeah.
Talking of monkeys spinning wheels, Dr Yan is having a little bit too much fun.
l've challenged these people to try and see if you can make yourself spin on the chair.
ln fact, try it at home.
Feet off the ground, and you're not allowed to push off anything.
lt's harder than you might think.
You're putting your feet on the ground, though! So l reckon, with a bit of scientific know-how, we should be able to do better.
This is just a normal bicycle wheel.
lf l make it spin fast, in fact, really, really fast then l'm giving it lots of spinning momentum and now, watch what happens.
Whee! Just what we couldn't do before.
Whee! - Right.
- Oh! That feels really weird! Try turning it the other way.
Whee! lt actually illustrates one of the most fundamental principles of the universe.
When l change the wheel's direction spin, it changes my direction spin.
That's because it's giving me some of its momentum.
lt seems really weird, because we're not used to it.
We don't normally move spinning objects about like that, but scientists and engineers use it quite often in things called gyroscopes.
Whoa There we go.
There's been an awful lot of research recently into new sources of energy.
l felt l had to get in on the action.
- Funny that.
- Mm.
There's actually a vast amount of invisible energy consistently beaming through the air around us.
Radio waves off masts, like that over there.
Television signals off similar masts.
Even microwaves sending information to our mobile phones.
ln fact, the rays of the setting sun over there.
They're all examples of one special kind of wave - the electromagnetic wave.
lt should be possible to harness the energy from these waves, and there is a way of extracting electricity directly from electromagnetic waves by using an aerial, or a piece of wire.
l've attached my length of wire to a small LED, and my source of electromagnetic waves is a standard OB radio.
When l press this transmit button, l'm going to start sending out some pretty low-power radio signals, but if l've got the length of my wire right, l should be able to convert them into enough electricity to light this LED.
lt seems unlikely, but here goes.
Yes! Look at that! This is Honestly, it's not attached to anything at all.
There is no electrical source going in here, just what l'm making from the radio waves.
But a little OB radio is never going to get a helicopter off the ground.
l need a source of electromagnetic waves with more power.
Luckily, in the workshop, l've got one that can melt glass.
lt's a microwave.
This is only four watts.
But, this has got 1 ,000 watts of microwave power.
Now l need to convert it into a giant energy transmitter, a sort of microwave ray-gun, and, like anything involving ray-guns, this is dangerous work.
Any of that could kill you.
Even though this microwave is unplugged, the electrical charge is still in there.
That means it can give you a massive belt that could kill you any time.
And that is the magnetron, where the microwaves are actually produced.
So, really, never take these things apart.
Now for the fun bit.
l'm making a funnel to concentrate the microwaves in one direction.
There's easily enough power focused through this to fry my eyeballs.
Wow! l hope l've done the right thing here.
ln the wrong hands, that could be described as a microwave death-ray.
ln the right hands, hopefully it's a device for beaming invisible power.
l would dearly love to turn it on here and now, but l can't because (a) it's utterly illegal and (b) it could not be more hazardous.
But l OAN turn it on here.
This quarry is an ex-Ministry Of Defence testing site and we still needed a special licence to use this thing here and only then if we monitor the radiation with one of these.
Now, meet Sam.
He's a top young pilot.
He's going to fly the helicopter whilst l monitor the microwave situation and take us through the science.
lf we're going to collect electricity directly from microwaves, we'll need an antenna, just like the wire l used to get radio waves to power my LED.
But microwave technology is super-fiddly.
So l've had an expert - called Julian Worksep - make us this, an array of microwave antennas.
lt looks complicated, but it's effectively just made of 100 short wires called dipoles, which are tuned to my microwave beam.
The precise spacing of the dipoles is critical, and very few of these antennas have ever been made, so we're wading into a world of trial and error.
Hopefully, not so much of the error.
From here will emerge a beam of microwaves.
They'll travel at 186,000 miles a second, until they reach here, our antennas.
Now, the microwaves are going to set up a voltage in each of these antenna.
The voltages and currents are summed up at the back here, and, as electrical power, it comes down that wireto that helicopter.
Here goes.
Let's see what happens.
OK, a couple of minutes of flying time.
l'm going to switch the microwave on now.
l'm just going to check that we're safe standing here.
Stand back a little bit, just in case.
Yeah, we're good.
Now to slowly angle it down at the antenna.
l don't want to fry the components on our first go.
We're now beaming maximum power at the antenna.
We should start getting a voltage appear there at the helicopter.
lt's a powerful little helicopter, so we don't know if it will fly.
We have power.
Now, is there enough for lift off? Yes! Fantastic! But there is a problem.
No matter what we do, the power levels are just too low to lift the helicopter and the wire.
Oh! Still, we've proved the point - we OAN get electricity out of thin air.
High five! lt's managed to send enough power to a helicopter to lift the helicopter clean off the helipad.
l'm astonished that that technology actually works.
So, er, bring on the future.
l just think that is astonishing.
You are like every member of the A-Team rolled into one package.
You did say earlier on you were going to try to harness new energy? l used microwaves because they're of a 12 cm wavelength, which means we can make aerials the right size for collecting the electricity.
But, in the future, the idea is to harvest electricity from electromagnetic waves that are much, much, much smaller.
Say hello to infra-red.
Our microwaves were harvested from energy sources created on Earth, but if we could capture infra-red, we'd be getting free energy from space.
lnfra-red is invisible to human beings, except if you've got one of these cameras.
Now, l can see This is tuned to the infra-red spectrum, and clearly shows it coming off the crew and me.
The heat of my body causes me to radiate infra-red waves the entire time, but l'm nothing special, anything with a temperature above absolute zero is always emitting infra-red.
You've seen how we collected power from invisible microwaves being beamed through the air.
Now imagine the potential of being able to farm electricity directly from all this infra-red.
But infra-red waves are tiny, less than 100th of a millimetre long, and no-one has been able to build an antenna that small until now.
l've arranged to meet the man who's built the world's first large-scale infra-red antenna.
His name is Steve Novack.
The technology is so new that there are only two prototypes in existence.
lt's one of the most exciting pieces of technology l've ever heard of.
This could actually change the world.
And he's brought the antenna from his labs in ldaho to show me.
- Hi, Stephen.
- Hi, pleased to meet you.
Thanks so much for coming.
- So, can we have a look at it? - Oh, absolutely.
- ls it this sheet of plastic? - That's right.
OK.
Just unroll it - And that's the infra-red antenna? - That's correct.
lt's not like l imagined it looking, but l guess there's more to it than first meets the eye.
This is essentially a miniaturised version of our array of microwave antennas.
Each one of these 4-inch squares holds about 260 million antennas, So, the 3x6 has about 4 billion.
4 billion antennas on here?! And they're all of the right length for collecting infra-red waves and turning them straight to electricity? - That's correct.
- Wow! These antennas are so efficient, that they can point in almost any direction and still collect infra-red energy from the sun.
What about on a cloudy day like this? Well, if you collect the right wavelengths, the infra-reds should get through the clouds and should have no problem.
You can get as much on a cloudy day as a sunny day? - Oorrect.
- Oh, this stuff's better than l thought! What's more, these panels can also collect the infra-red given off by the Earth as it cools at night.
- Solar panels that work at night? - These work at night.
lncredibly, the Earth emits so much infra-red at night that a one square-metre panel of Stephen's antennas could light several light bulbs.
That's it for this episode of Bang Goes The Theory.
We'll see you very soon.
- Shall we say goodbye? - Let's say goodbye - Bye! - See ya!