Filling Morecambe Bay with a bath tap

We found this claim at the Leighton Moss RSPB reserve. I have filled a 1.5 litre kettle in 10 seconds tonight using a bath tap. 20 million years is 6.3 x 10^14 seconds. That would mean 9.5 x 10^13 litres of water. There are 1000 litres in 1 cubic metre. This means 20 million years would be 9.5 x 10^10 cubic metres. On  my map, it seems to be 20km across Morecambe Bay from Barrow to Fleetwood. Let's say that Morecambe Bay is a 20km x 20km square which is 400 x 10^6 square metres. Hence in 20 million years, Morecambe Bay would be filled to a depth of 237 metres. That sounds unlikely. Suppose we said 2 metres depth - that would be 200 000 years. Still a long time.

Saddle Yoke: experiments with an electric fence

We went to Under Saddle Yoke near Moffat to find another marmot. We had to cross an electric fence below Saddle Yoke. Mrs B suggested testing the electric field with a compass. I was unable to get a shock from the wire but companions attested to the fact that it was live. The photo below shows the compass held a decent distance above the wire. It points correctly north and south.

Held close above the wire, it lines up with the wire.

 Same when held close below the wire.

Maxwell's Right Hand Grip Rule would suggest that the compass should be perpendicular to the wire and in opposite directions above as below. The lining up with the wire could be that the wire is ferro-magnetic and has induced magnetism from the compass, thus becoming an opposite poled magnet itself and attracting the needle.

Sundial at Bosworth

Like the sundial on Guernsey, this one casts its shadow over the historical events that happened at that particular hour. I have measured the angle of the gnomon and got 53 degrees. The angle should be the same as the latitude of the place. The nearby town of Market Bosworth has a latitude of 52.6 degrees!

Richard of York Gave Battle In Vain

The Bosworth battlefield is one of the most iconic places in Physics as a result of the mnemonic for remembering the colours of the visible spectrum: Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain. I liked the joke doing the rounds when the discovery of the remains of Richard the Third was announced: that physicists were renaming the colour violet as lilac so that it would read Richard Of York Got Buried In Leicester. The idea that there are actually seven colours is merely a convention. There are as many shades as you want. I read that Newton chose seven because the number had religious significance for him.

Y Boulder and finding a marmot

We went looking for one of Trail Magazine's Marv the Marmot mascots as part of their Everest Anywhere campaign. http://www.livefortheoutdoors.com/everestanywhere/ We found it hidden at the Y Boulder in Mosedale near Wasdale Head. I'd never heard of this remarkable rock but it is a named feature on the OS map. So how did it end up with a Y shaped crack in it? At first I thought it must be a glacial erratic. Mosedale is a classic hanging valley carved out by a tributary glacier. It is U-shaped in section and there is a waterfall at the end down into the main valley. Glaciers pick up and deposit rocks. But this rock is very square edged. That doesn't sit well with transport. We looked at the slope around and above. Scree above is created by freeze-thaw cycles. Solid H20 takes up more space than liquid because the bond angles force it open. Thus freezing of water in cracks tries to push rock apart. I didn't think lumps this big fell off crags but then I remembered that there is a lump said to be the size of a bungalow about to fall from Castle Rock of Triermain. My guess is that this rock fell from the crag above and cracked for that reason.

Heavy chain mail at Bosworth battlefield

The museum at the Bosworth battlefield had a dressing up section. We found the chain mail very hard to lift. I had no idea that it was so heavy. They had even hung one example on a spring balance. It was 8.5 kg.

Clock chimes in the Chatsworth Hotel, Worthing

The clock chimes are cylinders that are hit. They are the ones at the back. A stationary wave is set up in the air in the pipe. It has an anti-node at each end. This is a point of maximum oscillation. The node is in the middle. Thus each tube contains half a wavelength. The longest pipe was about 50 cm long so the wavelength is 1m. Using the wave equation, wave speed = frequency x wavelength, then frequency = 330/1 = 330 Hz assuming the speed of sound to be 330 metres per second. This is definitely in the audible range for humans which goes as low as 20 Hz. 330 Hz is G#. The next whole tone up would be F# which is 372 Hz giving a wavelength of 88 cm and pipe length of 44 cm. A pipe that is 6 cm shorter seems reasonable looking at the picture.

So is it all right to go by car?

We found this data at the Centre for Alternative Technology. It is clear that in terms of carbon dioxide, two people in a car match up well against public transport. It doesn't include data on other issues which might change the balance.

Tiny windows

 Above is Hugh Miller's birthplace. Two hundred years ago the houses were built with small windows so as not to lose heat easily.

The same was true 40 years ago when the Wates Homes house was built as the best insulated house in Europe. It is still there at the Centre for Alternative Technology. The centre now points out that improvements in window insulation mean that it is now a bad strategy. Big windows allow in sunlight for passive solar heating. It is crazy to shut out that free energy.

Centre for Alternative Technology: Rheilffordd Clogwyn

The cliff railway at the Centre for Alternative Technology near Machynlleth is amazing. The two cars are joined by a large cable which is wound around a large drum to provide braking. The cars cannot move independently of each other. The blue compartment in the top car is filled with water from a reservoir until that car is heavier than the lower one. Gravity means that the top car will fall and it will drag the lower car up. At the start of the day when people are predominantly going up the hill more water must be put into the tank than later in the day when people start going downhill.

Fractured rock at Lacy's Caves

Lacy's Caves are by the River Eden at Little Salkeld. They are carved into soft desert sandstone laid down when Britain was at the same latitude as the Sahara Desert. The sandstone is so soft that you can rub grains off with your hand. At first I thought that the harder layers may just have been laid down at different times but then I noticed that they weren't layers at all and in fact intersected each other in a check pattern. They must be fractures caused by some sort of shearing earth movement. The fractures would then fill with some sort of hot mineral salt solution. The water evaporated leaving the harder mineral layers to resist erosion better than the surrounding sandstone.

Brilliant programme about James Clerk Maxwell

We found this wonderful programme about James Clerk Maxwell http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06rd56j His home and grave are only about 90 minutes from Wigton. Yiu have about a month to watch the programme.

Cawfields and the revolving sky

The Dark Sky Park feature at Cawfields Quarry on Hadrian's Wall shows how the sky rotates during the seasons. Notice that the patterns have moved by 90 degrees every quarter of a year. 

This is because the Earth has moved to a different position relative to the Sun. The constellations revolve every night because of the turning of the Earth about its axis. But these pictures are all set for roughly the same time at night so it rules out the spinning of the Earth. The sign is clever because it is a rectangular box that rotates to give you the season that you want.

Angular width of a rainbow arc

This rainbow over the sea seemed very wide so I though to measure it with my little finger. If my finger is 1 degree wide, then it looks as though the width is about 1.5 degrees. I need to go away and do the maths for the refraction of the red and of the violet and find the difference. Newton was apparently the first to do this getting about 1.5 degrees but realised that the rays from the Sun came parallel from a point source not from a disc so it is really just a fraction over 2 degrees. http://www.datalyse.dk/Rainbow/history.htm

Brockram conglomerate at Long Meg

We went to look at the Long Meg stone circle. The stones represent a variety of rock types. Two were of the local conglomerate type rock called Brockram, a breccia made of large clasts. My geology teacher once took me to a quarry near Appleby of this rock having first taken me up to the limestone up at Great Asby Scar. He said that when our continent was at the latitude of the Sahara, weathering produced big chunks of limestone. These were then washed a mile or two down wadis during floods and then nestled amongst sand to form a desert sandstone. The clasts are angular and large because they have not been transported far. You might want to try https://www.bgs.ac.uk/downloads/start.cfm?id=2894

Hayeswater Gill Hydro is finished

I posted about this 2 years ago when it was being built http://wigtonphysics.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/building-hayeswater-gill-hydorelectric.html I've been back and it is finished. I was right about the head. I had it as 200m and it is stated as 180m. 850000 kWh divided by 250 houses is 3400 kWh per house or 9 kWh per house per day.

Crash barrier end terminals

I've seen these from the car as they have been introduced in the UK over the last decade but I managed to get up close at this one beside Thirlmere. I had imagined that the end plate would have been on some sort of compressible piston, but that isn't the case. It seems that the car crumbles the steel frame, ripping the steel and thus dissipating the car's kinetic energy. The wide end of the crash barrier spreads the force over a bigger area so there is less pressure and the end of the barrier is less likely to puncture the passenger compartment. There is a steel cable behind the first sections of the barrier. One source said it is to keep the end section in tension during a side impact. I couldn't figure out the mechanism. Sources included https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_barrier#Barrier_end_treatments and http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/publications/fulltext/design/RoadsideSafety/ImpactHeads.pdf