First of all I must thank colleagues in the UCL Chemistry Department for hosting the experimental work, especially Andrea Sella and Crosby Medley; I also thank Rosie Coates, Steve Bramwell, Mike Ewing, and Graham Hogarth for theoretical advice and practical help. The funding for this work came from a grant from the Leverhulme Trust and the ESRC, which supports the multidisciplinary research programme on the nature of evidence, under the overall direction of Philip Dawid.

I could not (and would not) have done anything in terms of recording, editing and presentation of the experiments in this paper without the help and encouragement of Joe Cain. For the recording and streaming of the video clips, I thank the UCL Multimedia section, especially Matt Aucott and John Conway, for their genuine interest in this work, as well as their technical expertise.

And I cannot thank Rachel Griffith enough for her invaluable help with the creation of this website while she was the MAPS Faculty Information Systems Officer.

I also thank Becky Higgitt and Miguel Garcia-Sancho for helpful feedback on the design of this paper (although I have not been able to implement all of their good ideas); Prof. Joe Wolfe and Prof. Frank P. Incropera for scientific advice and permission to refer to their works; and Gretchen Siglar for putting up with my obsession with boiling.

Various other friends and colleagues came to witness the experiments and helpfully reassured me that I was not going mad. Audiences at many places including the following gave helpful reactions: UCL Lunch Hour Lecture, the 2005 HSS Annual Meeting in Minneapolis, the Institute of Physics "Physics Update" at the University of Reading, BURPS at Balliol College Oxford, and Kingston Grammar School.

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