Don’t worry, there is no math involved whatsoever!
Astrophysics — when many people hear that word they run and hide. It sounds incredibly complicated. However, Stephen Hughes from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), wrote a book called Gastrophysics that explains complicated astrophysics concepts using very simple food recipes.
“Many people automatically think astrophysics is too difficult to understand so they're reluctant to try,” he said. “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.”
Hughes perfected his cooking based teaching over the last decade, and he has even used his most popular recipes on his science and engineering students at QUT.
“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,” Hughes said.
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The book explores gravity, why stars twinkle, black holes, the outer reaches of the solar system, exploding stars and much more. Gastrophysics is definitely not a proper cookbook, but it does include a few dishes that illustrate astrophysics principles — and they probably taste really good too.
For example, one of the recipes is called Hubble Damper — a type of bread originating from Australia. When the dough rises, the raisins in the dough move further and further apart 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,” said Hughes.
Another recipe is the black hole pizza that has chillies of increasing heat toward the center — illustrating the accretion disc of a black hole, which is a disk of material emitting energy as it falls into a black hole. The gases closest to the black hole are much hotter than those along the outer edge because of the black hole’s increasing and immense gravitational pull.
The book also contains some very simple experiments that you can do at home, including using a bowl, plastic wrap and chocolate balls to explain how gravity manipulates time. In addition, it contains information on the solar system’s planets, and some of the discoveries from New Horizons.
You can download the book on iTunes, and if you do — Hughes would like to hear from you. “I’d love to receive feedback from readers about how ‘digestible’ the book is.”
Bon appetit!
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