It appears there is a human being watching.
Hello human being, I'm the Doctor!
Ah, you've heard of me?
Well I do travel all of time and space and seen wondrous things and scary things as well.
Let me tell you about the things you should be scared of.
Actually it's just me Martin doing a bit of cos-play.
Give us a thumbs up if you're a Whovian like me as well.
It is of course Doctor Who's 50th anniversary so for Head Squeeze I thought I'd look at
some of the recurring monsters on Doctor Who.
Which do you think is the scariest?
Well, keep that in mind as I look with some science which ones you should be scared of.
Let's start with the weeping angels, they're almost as old as old as the universe, that's
13.8 billion years by the way.
And they have an ingenious defence mechanism.
When they're not being observed they move quickly and silently.
But when they are being observed, they quantum lock, turning themselves into stone.
And this is actually very similar to the quantum zero effect, when a normally unstable particle,
when continuously observed, won't actually decay.
Essentially, its normal evolution is frozen.
This actually taps into the weird things about the microscopic world, that the act of observing
something actually changes its state.
But this is also a massive problem.
What counts as an observation?
If you go by the original so-called Copenhagen interpretation, then it's all down to a human
being.
But then you get the absurdities such as Schrodinger's Cat where you have something both as big and
normal as a cat being both dead and alive at the same time.
While this is a problem we still yet haven't yet fully resolved, quantum decoherence could
provide an answer.
This removes that strict boundary between experiment and observation.
And it's everything in between that gives you that apparent change of state.
In fact it's a really nice way of just generating the familiar everyday work around us from
the weird quantum world that.
Of course, it's built up of.
So how does this apply to the weeping angels?
Well essentially everything counts as an observation, even an air molecule bouncing off them so;
surely they'd be stone all the time.
Then again our understanding of quantum mechanics could change in the future.
Next up it's the cyber men.
Cybernetically augmented humanoids, that suppress emotions and want to cyber-convert you into
their ranks.
Now the original cybermen suffered a massive weakness to gold.
Some say that's because its non-corrosive nature would block up their respiratory system
when inhaled.
But then again, things like gold coins, gold tipped bullets, and even a golden ticket spelled
their downfall in some episodes, which makes me think that there is an adverse chemical
reaction going on.
This is actually really surprising because gold isn't very reactive at all.
In fact it's right at the bottom of the reactivity series of metals.
This is because its unpaired electron that it needs to get rid of in order to react is
actually at a lower energy level than some of its paired electrons.
So whilst gold would like to get rid of that unpaired electron it can't because it would
make those paired higher energy electrons unstable.
So if the cybermen are reacting so badly to gold it makes me think that some part of them
must compose of a super strong oxidising agent, when then would readily react with anything
else, iron, aluminium, hydrogen gas, that's a massive weakness in my books.
Of course a discussion of Doctor Who's monsters has to include the daleks!
Genetically mutated creatures integrated into a tank like robotic shell.
It's this shell that makes them so deadly, that and their determination for extermination.
Because it's heavily armed with a plunger, don't laugh, it can crush man's skulls, and
of course a death ray.
Now death rays or directed energy weapons as they're known outside of science fiction
are in fact real.
In fact US Navy's laser weapon system, works against drones.
A laser produces highly focused light waves which mean it's extremely accurate.
By bombarding a target with the photons of light you can heat it up and can cause it
to oblate, catch fire, or just generally cause damage.
The thing is though is that it takes a lot of power, one reason being because of dust
in the atmosphere.
These will heat up before the light even gets to your target.
Then again this is a problem we have overcome of course because we have real laser weapons.
But they're not really like the Dalek's death ray.
There's no beam of light, there's no x-ray flash, in fact the object of the target just
catches fire just from a point and then everything goes up in flames.
It turns out that these directed energy weapons are actually really economical compared to
the likes of missiles so they're not only cooler they're cheaper per shot as well.
I hope you Doctor Who fans enjoyed that but if you're more of a trekkie why not check
out if we can build the Star Ship Enterprise by clicking here or to see my favourite head
squeeze videos click my sonic screwdriver.