Watching the Wind on Loch Keose

The wind gusts were stirring up dark patches on the loch. These must be tilting the water in a direction that reflects less light in my direction. Then these sections moved as coherent wholes down the loch. They can't have been moving as fast as the wind itself.

Branching time lines

These apple trees at The Newt reminded me of branching lines that form in the time dimension as a result of decision making. Schrodinger's Cat is a famous example. Opening the box can be said to start two lines - or some would say two parallel universes. One would have the cat alive and the other dead. This branching is one way to get round the Grandparent Paradox and allow time travel.

Roman pottery

We had a brilliant pottery demonstration at The Newt. The potter explained that the minerals in clay can become aligned under pressure to form cleavage planes - this is what happens when slate is formed. This wouldn't be good in pottery so the point of working the clay on the wheel is to make sure the crystals don't form cleavage planes. 

Magnets

We had fun with this train set. We were trying to see how far apart the magnets needed to be before the V and the A attracted each other. It was about 1cm.

Amazingly, when the A was pulled to the V, it fired the locomotive away from the front. It turns out that the loco and the front car have same magnetic poles and are weakly repelling. I'm not sure how they can actually hold together but the impact of a push from the back fires the loco from the front.

Water jets

This feature at The Newt has jets of water being fired from the toads when sensors are triggered.

The sensors are located in recesses and seemed to be sensitive to light, or rather, the lack of it. If it were an LDR, dark would mean high resistance so could change a logic gate. The jet sprayed as soon as the sensor was covered. It wasn't triggered on the release back into light. It occurred to me that there would be a problem with this at night so either there is an overall timer or I am wrong and it is about beam breaking.

Changing wavelengths

When I was young this pylon at Barrow AFC used to house the flood lights. Now it houses mobile phone aerials. It still houses electromagnetic waves but the wavelength has increased from visible to radio wave.

Fish out of water

This amazing set-up at The Newt got me thinking. How did they get the water into the rectangular tank and to stay there? If I were doing it on a smaller scale in the lab, I'd have the rectangular tank inverted, fill it to overflowing with water, seal it, flip it over and into the water, then remove the seal.