unobtainium

‘Unobtainium’ is a fictional term used to describe a material that’s super rare, expensive or impossible to get hold of. The term dates back to the 1950s, and is believed to have originated in the aerospace engineering community. Engineers used it as a joke to describe materials that had perfect properties but were impossible or impractical to get hold of with current technology – like something that’s lightweight but incredibly strong or resistant to damage. As you can probably guess, it’s derived from the word ‘unobtainable’.

‘Unobtainium’ turns up in science fiction a lot, although I’m not completely convinced that the writers/directors are always in on the joke. The most famous one is probably from CGI snooze-fest Avatar, where unobtainium is a highly valuable mineral mined on the moon Pandora. It also turns up in The Core, a terrible 2003 sci-fi starring Hilary Swank and international treasure Stanley Tucci (both of whom should know better, frankly). In that film it’s a material used to construct a drilling machine that can withstand the extreme conditions in the Earth’s core. Why do they need to build that? Well, because the Earth’s core has stopped rotating, causing chaos on the surface including people with pacemakers suddenly dropping dead, and lightning strikes causing Rome’s Colosseum to explode. Ah, okay then.

The Core has the dubious accolade of having got almost all of its science completely wrong. Here are just a couple of examples:

• if the Earth’s core did stop spinning, we’d have no protection from solar radiation and would all cook to death (which would have been a very short, and probably better, film)

• the movie’s scientists constantly refer to the Earth's ‘electromagnetic field’ when, in reality, the Earth has a magnetic field, which is quite different

• when our hastily assembled team of random heroes reach the centre of the Earth, they communicate with their commander using a radio. This would be completely impossible because the ground would block the signal

• when the drilly-ship thing is drilling through the Earth to the core, it’s going straight down. But the writers seemed to forget about gravity, as the people inside it still manage to walk back and forth between different parts of the ship, when they should in fact be climbing.

This is just the tip of the bad science iceberg – The Core’s science was so inaccurate that it led to the creation of The Science & Entertainment Exchange, a programme that connects entertainment industry workers with scientists and engineers to promote better science in movies and television. Wow.

(With thanks to my friend Abby for suggesting this as a word of the week.)

amateur

You know what an amateur is. Someone who’s not a professional, or who isn’t very good at something. These days ‘amateur’ has a bit of a negative association, and we even use it as an insult for something or someone that’s a bit crap – ‘the writing was rather amateurish’ or ‘what a bunch of amateurs’, for example. But, it actually has a sweet little backstory.

‘Amateur’ originates from the French word, ‘amateur’ (bet you couldn’t have guessed that), which itself comes from a Latin word, ‘amator’. ‘Amator’ means ‘lover’ or ‘one who loves’. That comes from the verb ‘amare’, which means ‘to love’, and is where we get words like ‘amorous’, ‘enamoured’ and ‘amiable’ from.

So why does ‘amateur’ relate to love? Because historically, an amateur was someone who took part in something just for the love of it, not for any money or kudos. Of course, we do still use ‘amateur’ in this way, but it’s been rather overtaken by the more negative meaning. Shame.

There are lots of famous amateurs throughout history who’ve done amazing things without any formal or professional training. Here are just a few of them.

Hedy Lamarr – she got all the good genes, didn’t she?

Hedy Lamarr

Known for her acting skillz in Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s (she was promoted as the ‘world’s most beautiful woman’ by Louis B Mayer), Lamarr co-invented an early version of frequency-hopping spread spectrum communication. Before you say ‘so what’, know that without this technology we wouldn’t have many modern wireless communications including wi-fi, Bluetooth and GPS. Which means I, for one, would be constantly lost. This was despite Hedy having no training in engineering.

Roger Bannister

Roger Bannister was a medical student and an amateur middle-distance runner. On 6 May 1954, he became the first person to run a mile in under four minutes, something most people thought was impossible at the time. He did all of that while studying to become a doctor and without a professional training regimen. Bannister went on to become a neurologist and Master of Pembroke College, Oxford.

Philo Farnsworth

At the age of 21, while labouring on the family farm, the excellently named Philo Farnsworth developed the first fully functional all-electronic image pickup device (AKA a video camera tube) and the first fully functional and complete all-electronic TV system. His innovations laid the groundwork for modern TV (thank god – otherwise what would we all point our living-room furniture at?). And, you’ve guessed it, he didn’t have any training in this field (only in actual fields, hahaha). Oh, and if you didn’t know that but his name sounds a bit familiar, it might be because the ‘Futurama’ character Professor Farnsworth was named after him.

Well, now I feel like quite the underachiever.

bug

I happened to be watching a bit of Countdown the other day (I definitely wasn’t skiving) when this came up in Susie Dent’s origins of words segment. And it was such a good story I had to share it. So, of course you know what a bug is. But in this case the bugs I’m referring to aren’t the insect-y ones, but the defect-y ones – like software or engineering bugs. ‘Bug’ in this sense is probably older than you think (turns out technology has been not working properly for a really long time), and goes all the way back to the 1870s. It probably came from the Middle English word ‘bugge’, meaning a bogeyman or goblin, which is also where we get ‘bugbear’ from (a previous word of the week).

Up until the 1940s, the word ‘bug’ in this context was really only known by by engineers, programmers and the like. That’s until Grace Hopper came along, computer pioneer and all-round amazing human woman. After serving in the American Navy, Hopper joined the Harvard Faculty at the Computation Laboratory where she worked on the Mark II and Mark III computers (used for ballistic calculations and other very complicated computer-y things). There was an error in the Mark II which operators traced to a moth trapped in a relay – an actual real-live bug in the system. It was logged in the log (obviously) book by one William Burke as ‘First actual case of bug being found’ (you can see the actual moth below, which is now in the Smithsonian Museum). Hopper loved to tell the story, popularising the term so much that we all use it today.