James Lovelock

I have been reading this book. James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis has been one of the more controversial theories in recent years. He claims that the whole Earth acts as a living organism and regulates the conditions on the planet to ensure the continuance of life. I still find it hard to accept in full but there is now irrefutable evidence that living organisms do have a sizable effect on the atmosphere and thus affect the living conditions. I changed my mind on Lovelock after watching a BBC4 profile of him. He invented the detector that enabled the hole in the ozone layer to be found. He clearly believes in science done by making observations. This is important.

Campaign for mass

Further to my post last autumn about the Campaign for Mass, imagine my horror when my wife pointed this shocker out to me over the breakfast table. Any fool knows that if it is measured in grams it must be mass. Perhaps they could state the weight of the cereal as 4.5Newtons...

Cyclopedean rock formations

The Cairngorm Mountains are made of granite. This is an intrusive igneous rock that solidifies over millions of years underground, the magma having never made it to the surface. Then over the millenia, the rock layers above wear away. What happens is that the release of the pressure that the rock was feeling when it was formed causes it to expand. The expansion causes it to split vertically and horizontally. This means that many granite rock formations look like they are made out of regular blocks. Some people used to think they were built by an ancient civilisation of giants. The name "Cyclopedean" comes from the giant Cyclops in Greek mythology. I have actually only ever heard it applied to the mountains on Arran. The prominent lumps of hard rock left exposed on the horizon are called TORS in Devon. You can see them clearly along the horizon in the picture of Beinn Mheadhoin. If you can't pronounce the Gaelic, go to http://www.munromagic.com/MountainInfo.cfm/13. If you click the loudspeaker, it will say it for you.

Cairngorm weather station

The top of Cairngorm mountain, the sixth highest on these islands, turns out to have a weather station feeding data to Heriot-Watt University weather station in Edinburgh. Now I need to look up the data!

The Curious Incident again

Last December I wrote a bit about the book "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time" by Mark Haddon. It is written from the point of view of a boy with Asperger's Syndrome. He sees things from a very different point of view. I like his views on time. He explains why he needs to have timetables, so that he knows exactly what is going to happen and when it is going to happen. Not knowing scares him. He says:
"Because time is not like space. And when you put something down somewhere, ... you can have a map in your head to tell you where you left it.....And a timetable is a map of time, except that if you don't have a timetable time is not there like the landing and the garden and the route to school. Because time is only the relationship between the way different things change, like the earth around the sun ... and it is like west or nor nor-east which won't exist when the earth stops existing and falls into the sun because it is only a relationship between the North Pole and the South Pole.."
I think this is very profound physics. This is dedicted to those who write that "time slows down" when a crumple zone crushes up in a crash!

Lightning conductors

One of the great things about being a bell ringer is that I get to up the church tower. You get the best view of Wigton from the top. Notice the thick metal strip running down from the spike at the top. It's a lightning conductor. It goes all the way down the outside of the tower and is then concreted into the ground. The idea is twofold:
1. If lightning does strike, the massive current is carried down the metal, which has a much lower resistance than the masonry. This stops the masonry overheating and the mortar being broken.
2. It actually deters lightning. If the cloud has a large positive charge, it attracts electrons, which are negative, up from the ground to the tip of the spike. The large concentrated charge ionises the air molecules and then repels negative ions up to the positive charge. This neutralises some of the charge, making lightning less likely.

Basalt dykes

This photograph is of an igneous dyke on Anglesey. Molten magma must have forced its way sideways between existing layers and then solidified. The way that molten magma moves under the surface of the Earth is very much to do with physics. It is due to convection cycles in the mantle. I was interested to note that in Brian Cox's series on the Solar System, he attributed the loss of atmosphere on Mars to the cooling and solidifying of its molten core.