Block 1: ‘Water for Life’ seemed fairly innocuous; it was all about water (which I now know can exist as a liquid, a solid, or a gas - it’s all down to the density of the particles), with particular reference to rainfall, camels, cacti & sweat; there was rather a ‘Blue Peter’ feel about the practical work we had to do: construct a rain gauge, using an old tin can or other suitable container to measure the rainfall in your garden over a given period – but, having to contend with containers that blew away, containers that split when the water froze, a drought (in the middle of winter!), and other variables meant it wasn't as straightforward as it sounded. We also had to do some cooking: potato crisps in the microwave; I don’t think they were intended to turn out as crisps – the ideas was to measure the amount of water that evaporates out of a well-cooked (but not necessarily incinerated) potato.
So, there were some sums involved, but they weren’t too painful (the pain came later!); we learned how to make unimaginably large numbers look infinitesimally small, using powers (not the Austin kind) - I got in a helluva tangle working out which way to move decimal points, until I discovered the Metric Staircase (there's a link in case you, too, have always wondered); and being told that a sum such as ‘1 +1 = 2’ is actually an equation, made the prospect of future equations far less scary! But most of the maths in this block rang a few bells from my school days, and I at long last found a way of remembering which axis is which on a graph: ‘x’ has a wide bottom, so goes ALONG the bottom, ‘y’ is tall, so goes UP the side of the graph – wow, maybe I am cut out to be a scientist after all!
There was also an introduction to the water cycle (and no, it’s not an aquatic bike), which made me think about more about personal water consumption; apparently, 65% of the human body is water, so how come we don’t ‘slosh’ as we move?
So block 1 was mainly easy peasy; having received my first posting so early, I’d finished it almost before it was due to start - and the mark I got for the assignment had me clearing a space on my mantlepiece for a future Nobel prize for science! 92%
Block 2: ‘A Temperate Earth?’ was all about climate; not just today’s weather, but the climate over the history of Earth, and ways we can deduce patterns of climate change; we even got to play with a climate model on the interactive CD Rom. In view of current concerns over global warming, it all seemed very topical, and it was good to have more than a clue about the greenhouse effect, carbon emissions, and the like, when they kept being discussed on TV - and I felt positively brainy when I was able to explain a bit about the albedo effect to people! I know I shouldn’t have, but I’m afraid I found learning about glaciers just as boring as I did at school (maybe I’m still traumatised by the geography teacher from hell?); I felt pretty smug though, when we watched things like Time Team, and I understood all the talk about carbon dating (which is NOT a night out with a lump of coal). Pollen graphs were fascinating - it blew my mind away to find what can be learnt about patterns of climate change, just from a giant ice pop (or core, to use the technical term)!
The ‘leaky tank analogy’ was a bit of a puzzle to me, but it kept cropping up, so I knew it must be important; it was my first introduction to positive & negative feedback, which keeps rearing its ugly head no matter what course I’ve since done, so a jolly good job I stuck at it! In this instance it was to do with solar radiation (at least, I ‘think’ that’s what it was about – but don’t quote me on it), which led nicely on to Global Mean Surface Temperatures; but of far more fascination to me was learning about urban heat islands, and understanding why it’s so much colder out here in the stix than it is in the big city! The leaky tank made more sense in relation to the water cycle, and why what goes up must come down.
What else came up in this block? Well, there was the atmosphere and the stratosphere; a bit more maths – pressure and density, and an understanding of what causes altitude sickness. And then there was the carbon cycle, which definitely gave me twinges of environmental guilt; it took millions of years to accumulate all the carbon that ‘was’ locked into the Earth, and yet man is consuming it like there’s a limitless supply, causing it to become trapped in the atmosphere where it’s a major suspect in global warming.
So, already I’m learning things I never expected to, and finding myself thinking about things to which I’d never given much thought before. Maybe I’m becoming a ‘proper’ student? My mark for the assignment would certainly suggest so: even though this was one of the less enjoyable blocks for me, covering things that had never been top of my interest list, I still managed to get 75%!
Block 3: ‘The Earth and its place in the Universe’ - or possibly ‘Space, the final frontier’ ….. eek, not my cuppa tea at all; I mean, there’s just so much OF it, isn’t there? But already I was discovering not just science, but also that nothing was in the course without a purpose; the OU were proving themselves very clever at weaving a web, demonstrating how interconnected all of the science disciplines are. Anyway, I needn’t have panicked, cos there were only a few chapters on the Solar System, and I did learn a very useful memnomic for remembering the names of the planets in order of distance away from the Sun: My Very Easy Method Just Speeds Up Naming Planets = Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto – there, a successor to Patrick Moore has been unearthed! The downside was that it was a very neat lead-in to some rather perplexing maths: Newton’s laws on gravity & acceleration, but I cheered up when I found out that this kinda maths would be more necessary if I was planning to study fizzix (yuk) rather than biology.
Newton’s Law of Gravity brought us back down to Earth by chapter 5, but the rate of acceleration was such that by chapter 8 we had plummetted straight through to the centre of the Earth, to have a look at the dynamic processes going on (a very long way) beneath our feet resulting in volcanoes and earthquakes, and being responsible for many topographical features of our planet. Tragically, within months the whole world had heard of plate tectonics, but at this stage they were news to me. I was fascinated to learn that our continents began life as one vast supercontinent, called Pangaea – but it made sense of something I’d often wondered about: how neatly the Horn of Africa slots in between North & South America; believe it or not, the UK was once close to the Equator, whilst the countries we now think of as hot were down near the South Pole - and talking of Poles, the Earth’s polarity has switched at random intervals over millennia, so that four million years ago your compass would have told you that you were at the North Pole when you were really at the South Pole! How confusing is that? Well it confused the hell out of me, but did help to explain how palaeogeologists have managed to age rocks; as the rocks formed (from the molten magma in the Earth’s core), metallic elements in them recorded the polarity of the time, and also the latitude they were at when they ‘came to light’. So geomagnetism can tell us how far a rock (or a tectonic plate) has travelled from the place of it’s origin, and can help to calculate the rate at which the plates are moving - thanx to sea floor spreading, the North American and the Eurasian plates are moving apart at the same rate as my fingernails grow, which makes it even less likely that I’ll ever be able to afford to fly across the Atlantic! There were some fantastic CD Rom activities to go with this; I took a virtual dive to the ocean floor, and toured around the mid-Atlantic ridge: ‘wow’ barely covers how awesome it is down there – there are valleys at the bottom of the sea that are deeper than the highest mountains on our land!
A bit of geology rounded off block 3, with an introduction to the Rock Cycle (which is not the same thing as listening to a bit of head-banging music to take your mind off the pain of using your exercise bike!). It’s all a matter of ‘what comes up must go down’, and vice-versa; magma from the Earth’s core spews out of volcanoes, or oozes up between the tectonic plates (which is how they get forced apart), forming igneous rocks; but at the same time, the opposite edges of those plates are being subsumed back towards the core, to be recycled as new igneous rocks. Erosion can ultimately turn igneous rock into sedimentary rock, and either kind can become metamorphic rock if it is subjected to sufficient heat and/or pressure.
So block 3 started out looking dodgy, but in the end I loved it; even now, I’m sure some of my facts are a bit shaky, but I can’t have got too much wrong, cos I scored my third-highest mark for this assignment - an astounding 86%!
Block 4: ‘Unity within diversity’
Ah, this is more like it: a flick through the book shows pictures of a frog, a fish, and a strawberry plant, so maybe we’ve at lasted reached the biology? Well yes, there is 'some' biology here: an introduction to cells, both plant and animal, some stuff about cellular respiration and reproduction, but, it’s a skinny little book anyway, and these only take up the first half. After that it’s more ecology than biology – something I’d heard of but knew very little about, and very interesting it was too. We met evolution, natural selection, classification (domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species), breeding strategies (involving strange new words like semelparity and iteroparity), and there were some fantastic CD rom activities, one on the Galapagos Islands and Darwin’s finches (it drove my cat wild hearing birds chirping out of my laptop!), and another on the ecosystem of a woodland: this introduced us to food pyramids, food webs, and the energy flow of food through the trophic levels of a particular ecosystem. There were some very complicated calculations involved in working out the gross primary product from energy transfer of solar energy through a food pyramid which started with an oak leaf and ended with a sparrohawk; I got there in the end, and came up with a really fascinating piece of information (grin): it takes 170 thousand oak leaves, travelling via 1,350 winter moth caterpillars which in turn travel via 66 great tit fledglings, to feed one solitary sparrowhawk chick from when it hatches until it’s ready to fly the nest – wow, how useful is that little snippet? But, knowing what I now know about the intricate balancing act taking place every day between species, I do now find myself looking at the countryside through new eyes!
Somewhere around now we had two more experiments to do: the first was a ‘field trip’ where we had to find and adopt a local holly bush, and then keep a regular eye on the leaves for signs of holly leaf miner caterpillars …. not sure what we were supposed to do next, as the bush I ‘adopted’ fell victim to council clearance! The other experiment cleared up the mystery of the tomato soup: early in the course we had received a list of equipment which we should have available for future use; the list read very much like the preparations for a gigantic Blue Peter project (except there was no sticky-backed plastic on it), and included: a candle, some string, a light bulb, soda crystals, vinegar, a kettle, and a can of tomato soup … this last was the cause of much debate in the virtual student common room, and we concluded that perhaps it was for a midnight feast at the end-of-course party. Well, we were wrong. We had to decant the soup into a clean container (which we had first measured to calculate the volume), and then cover it with cling film; next we had to calculate the volume of air left in the container once the soup had been added, and then we had to wait ….. until an (un)healthy layer of mould spores had grown on top of the soup. In theory, this would allow us to calculate the number of mould spores present in a given volume of ‘fresh’ air; the only problem was that, apart from a meagre streak of slime which looked for all the world as if somebody had sneezed in the soup (well I did have a cold at the beginning of the experiment), my soup didn’t grow! I peeped at it, I peered at it, I even talked to it, but there were no furry bits, no fungus, in fact my soup was no fun at all! I do share my home with a cleanliness freak who bleaches the kitchen worktops daily, so my tutor and I had to conclude that I would never be a candidate for ‘How clean is your house?’, and he gave me some specimen figures to work with.
Because book 4 was so skinny, it was combined with the next, even skinnier book, for the assignment:
Book 5: ‘Energy’
The thinnest book of the course, but do not be deceived, because innocuous it was not! The law of conservation of energy states that: ‘In any process, the total amount of energy is always constant’ and ‘Energy can neither be created nor destroyed’, but we soon found that what energy can do is to be converted into a different form: so solar energy from the Sun (which is the ultimate source of all energy on Earth) can become chemical energy, kinetic energy, gravitational energy, sound energy, internal energy ……. trying to get my head around electrical energy very nearly short-circuited my brain, but it was interesting to find out why my hair sometimes sticks to the hairbrush. There were new symbols to add to a growing list we were supposed to be able to use appropriately – they were all Greek to me! And the maths was becoming ‘challenging’, especially when we revisited our old friend Newton, this time learning his laws of motion.
So book 5 was the first real physics I'd encountered; the main thing it taught me was that I do not like physics. Since the assignment also covered book 4, I hoped I’d done enough to pass - I’d sweated buckets over it, so reckoned I deserved at least an average mark, but I was gobsmacked to receive a stonking 85%!!!!
Block 6: ‘Our world and its atoms’
Yikes, this was a FAT book, and crammed with information I was desperate to know and to understand: it was the chemistry book. Several of us students concluded that, unfortunately, it was not the best-written book of the course:* it introduced some of the concepts in a rather confusing order, so that for instance, stuff you read in chapter 1 wouldn’t actually make sense until you’d read some more stuff in chapter 5, which would then be contradicted by something in chapter 8 …. and it wasn’t until you reached the final chapter (14) that it all came together. The subject matter was also very complex, so that I felt I needed at least twice the allotted time to grasp it all; even those who had studied chemistry at GCSE or A level found it a hard slog, so this was the time that people began to lose any time advantage they had gained by coasting through some of the earlier books - but we all felt better when we realised that not only was this a hugely complicated subject, but that the level of study had actually stepped up a pace now as well.
*I recently heard a rumour that this book was being re-written, so perhaps future students will have a slightly easier time of it?
But, I mastered molar calculations (thanks to a wonderful little book (see link), and learned that a molar mass isn’t necessarily something your dentist would be interested in; I gained a thorough understanding of the periodic table, and when some more fizzix (yuk) snuck in towards the end of the book, it wasn’t quite so scary, as I could see that this was leading me to an understanding of how atoms make friends (or not) with one another to form molecules. I even learned not to be afraid of equations, and found that I could actually balance them! I also ‘just about’ grasped the principles of the gas laws - but not without forming a grudge against Messieurs Avogrado, Gay-Lusac, Boyle, and Charles, who, together with Mr Newton, were conspiring to give me such grief!
So from this point on I began to feel that I was having to run to keep up; I ended up skimming through some of the book in order to concentrate on the areas that were relevant to the assignment, and don’t feel that I did all of it justice; in fact, I keep telling myself that ‘I really must’ go through that book again, at my leisure, just to make sure I’m not missing out on anything vital …. whoever would’ve thought the day would come when I could contemplate reading a textbook for pleasure? Certainly not my old school teachers! And wouldn’t my science teacher, who had insisted that I give up all but biology from age 14, have been astounded at my assignment score?
But not half as astounded as I was when I heard that I’d got whopping 89%!!!!
Block 7: ‘The quantum world’
Arghh, now here be monsters - fizzix at its scariest and most incomprehensible! But luckily for me, we had reached a stage in the course where there was some flexibility: there were four more assignments, out of which we only had to do three (and would in fact only be marked on the first three submitted even if we did them all). Although there was a certain amount of overlap in subject matter, each one was weighted in a particular direction, and, depending on which avenue we intended to pursue in our future studies, we could choose which one to skip: either biology, chemistry, geology, or fizzix …. hmm, it was a tough decision to make, but the mere word ‘quantum’ struck fear into my heart, so I didn’t have to think about it for very long!
This meant that I only had to read the first five chapters of the book - the rest being reserved to be read in combination with book 11 (‘Universal Processes’) by those masochists who actually liked fizzix. But even five chapters were almost more than I could stomach, and most of it passed in a confusing blur; hardly surprising, cos the language itself sounds so nonsensical that it’s like entering a parallel universe, and I swear that the whole field of quantum fizzix is simply the product of some very overactive imaginations - well, they do say that genius is next to madness (to any ‘serious’ scientists that may stumble across this – "only joking"!).
Anyway, from what I could gather, the quantum world has ‘generations of matter’, and even its very own vocabulary, most of which sounds plain daft: first we have quarks, which come in six flavours; but rather than, say, raspberry or chocolate, these flavours are called ‘up’, ‘down’, ‘top’, ‘bottom’, ‘charm’, and ‘strange’ – all very strange if you ask me, and nothing very 'charming' about any of em! And, it gets even stranger: you can’t have just one flavour, you have to have a pair, called either a baryon or a meson. Living next door to the Quarks are another family, called the Leptons, who come in another set of flavours: electrons (ah, I’ve heard of those!), muons, or taus, but even the boffins appear to have briefly run out of imagination here, cos the other three members of this family share the same names, but with ‘neutrino’ attached to the end – perhaps they are Icelandic, and ‘neutrino’ is the equivalent of attaching ‘-son’ to a name? As if that lot weren’t confusing enough, there’s yet another tribe, apparently at war with the Leptons, cos this lot are all called ‘anti-‘ the other lot, so we now have antineutrinos etc, not forgetting the antielectron, who is puzzlingly called ‘positron’ (perhaps the black sheep of the family?). Curiouser and curiouser …..
Anyway, by religiously following the examples in the book, I managed to calculate the energy level of a hydrogen atom (at least, I ‘think’ that’s what I was doing) – wow, at this rate I’ll be splitting the atom in a matter of weeks! Albert Einstein deserves a mention here, and I'll just say that I don’t hold any grudge against - in fact I'm proud to report that, at the time we covered it, I was actually able to follow his famous 'E=mcsquared' equation, but don’t ask me to explain it now! Hmm, that’s quite enough of fizzix thank you very much.
So, no assignment to tackle yet – at least, not until I’ve tackled the next book ...
Block 8: ‘Building with atoms’
Ah, this is more like it - chemistry again! Book 8 helped to make sense of much that had left me puzzled in block 6, and also began to draw together the strands from other books - so I had a lot of ‘eureka!’ moments. First though, a brief revisitation to the inner workings of the atom …. which was ok, cos I was beginning to see the relevance of all that suffering I’d gone through with the quantum stuff: it’s the configuration of electron shells which helps us to predict how atoms will react together to form chemical substances. We learnt that you can tell a lot about an element according to its position in the Periodic Table: each ‘group’ (or column) has its own characteristics, whilst the position in a period (row) can tell you how many shells it has - and more importantly, how many electrons in its outer shell. Apart from the noble gases, all atoms have an incomplete outer shell, and the poor things find it awfully draughty, so they’re keen to pair up to form a molecule - either by sharing an electron between them (covalent bonding), or else by pinching an electron off another atom (ionic bonding). It’s the ability to gain or lose electrons which makes atoms chemically reactive - and makes those noble gases such snobs; oxygen, on the other hand, is a bit of a tart: it’s so desperate to fill its outer shell that it’ll react with pretty much anything – and if it can’t find a suitable mate, then 2 oxygen atoms hold hands to form a diatomic molecule (O2) until something better comes along. A molecule, by the way, is ‘the smallest particle of a substance that can take part in chemical reaction’, and to split it further would result in a completely different substance with different properties.
Anyway, next comes some more sticking together - so more bonds to learn about: hydrogen bonds and London interactions (which are nothing like watching ‘Today in Parliament’), until you end up with a molecular or ionic compound. Chemical reactions involve the making and breaking of bonds, and: ‘During a chemical reaction, matter is neither created nor destroyed’ – but an awful lot of other things can happen, all involving the conversion of energy from one form to another. If it’s an exchange of heat energy that’s going on, then it’s an exothermic or endothermic reaction; and then there’s oxidation & reduction (which always happen together), equilibrium reactions, plus lots more I’ve either forgotten or never understood. And there was the sorting out of molecular & structural formulae for the products of all these reactions, plus mole calcutions to work out the quantities of expected products: if you have one mole of anything, you will have 6.023 x 1023 (Avogadro's Number) of particles, so it’s a ‘simple’ matter of sussing out how many particles each element can have (based on RAM and RMM numbers from the Periodic Table) - but the equations weren’t scary at all, just damned complicated!
We also learned about the nitrogen cycle, and a whole host of other things besides: the pH scale, acids, bases, alkalis, functional groups, the interactions between them all … not forgetting gases & their own complicated set of rules (the gas laws, at least one of which was most definitely sod’s law!).
So block 8 contained one helluva lot of information, some of which I’m still not sure I’ve completely got to grips with (and so may have misreported); but, I must’ve grasped enough, cos I got 84% for the assignment
n.b. by this stage, the book/block numbers and assignment numbers had got slightly out of synch, so this was actually TMA 6.
