Don’t put astrophysics in the too-hard basket – put it in the kitchen.
QUT’s Dr Stephen Hughes has written an e-book that uses simple kitchen cooking and appliances to explain complex cosmological concepts.
Aimed at armchair astronomers, Gastrophysics is refreshingly free of mathematics.
“It’s been a stellar year for space science, with two lunar eclipses, our first-ever landing of a robot on a comet and humanity’s first trip to Pluto,” Dr Hughes said.
“Sadly, though, many people automatically think astrophysics is too difficult to understand so they’re reluctant to try.
“But it’s amazing how easily you can become fascinated with the Universe and its workings when they’re explained in terms you can relate to.
“One of my favourite gastrophysics experiments is Hubble Damper – the raisins in the rising dough expand away from each other in the same way that the galaxies are travelling away from each other.
“It’s a surprisingly accurate analogy of the expansion of the Universe. For example, two raisins stuck together don’t move apart because there’s no dough to push them apart. This is exactly what happens with galaxies that are close together.”
Dr Hughes, an astrophysicist with QUT’s Science and Engineering Faculty, has been testing his kitchen cosmology on his students for the past decade, and writing his book for the past three.
It is packed with experiments, photographs and videos that explain concepts like:
- Black hole accretion discs – using a pizza with chillies that are progressively hotter the closer they are to the centre.
- Convection cells on the Sun’s surface – boiling water and oil together.
- Gravity and gravity wells – dropping chocolate balls onto a salad bowl that is covered with plastic wrap.
- The seasons – rotating a hand held above a BBQ hotplate.
The book also contains easy-to-digest information on the solar system’s planets, from Mercury to Pluto, and discoveries from the New Horizons flyby of Pluto in July this year.
For Dr Hughes, the e-book is as much a personal educational experiment as it is an astrophysics explainer.
“I’ve always been interested in drawing connections between terrestrial physics and celestial physics because people often find it easier to understand things happening on Earth - what they can easily see and touch,” Dr Hughes said.
“I’d love to receive feedback from readers about how ‘digestible’ the book is.”
Gastrophysics is available on iTunes.
Media contacts:
Kate Haggman, QUT Media, 07 3138 0358, kate.haggman@qut.edu.au.
After hours Rose Trapnell, 0407 585 901.
