Bad Science - 2 - D:Ream, Things Can Only Get Better

"Things can only get better 

Can only get, can only get 

They get on from here 

You know, I know that 

Things can only get better"

D:ream, Things Can Only Get Better

In 1994, D:ream sang that "Things can only get better...", this is excusable as a catchy line in a pop song but in their midst was the man who would later become the high priest of physics - Dr Brian Cox.

As Dr Brian well knew things can, quite literally, only get worse. Due to a thing called entropy, given the symbol, S.

Entropy is a measure of the disorder of a system and for any closed system, the higher the entropy the higher the disorder. 

So for a closed system like the universe, total entropy must always increase, in other words, disorder can only increase, so things can only get worse.

Did the D:ream lead singer know any better? Did the D:ream lead singer care? I suspect not, after all, this was his one shot fame.

On the other hand Dr Brian, the beautiful smiling face of popular science, definitely knew better but as he was consigned to plonking away at the keyboards in the background (he is barely visible in the video above; and if you look at the picture below, it is not hard to see why the camera didn't focus in on him, he is on the far right) I suspect he didn't really have a say in it.

Brian Cox (far right) then... 

                                                    

  ....and now

So Brian, things don't get better, they invariably get worse, except for haircuts, which do appear to have improved over time.

Bad Science - 1 - Busted, Year 3000

"I've been to the year three thousand
not much has changed but they lived under water,
and your great great great grand daughter,
is pretty fine"

Busted, that multitalented boy band from the early 2000s may not have really thought their lyrics through when they wrote this song abut time travel but their sloppiness regarding their exploits in the future really grate on me. The chorus (above) has two signficant inaccuracies, lets handle them one at a time.

"...your great great great grand daughter, is pretty fine" - Lets think this through, assuming that the great, great, great grandfather in this song was 25 when the song was released (about 2003), and assuming that he had a child at 30 and that all his descendants had children at 30. That would mean he would become a grandfather at 60, a great grandfather at 90 etc. So that his great, great, great grandaughter would have been born when he was 120 in the year 2098. She would have hit 25 in 2123. In which case in the year 3000 she will be 877 years old. Not an age at which most women are generally regarded as "pretty fine"

"...not much has changed but they lived under water..." - Now, I am not an expert on underwater life but I am pretty sure that if we did live underwater you couldn't describe it as "nothing much has changed". In fact I can barely think of any bigger changes than living underwater. If life underwater was like life above water then fish would look much more humanoid then they do.

Busted thanks for the catchy tune but next time think through your lyrics