Arrow of Time in Wigton churchyard

 

For the first time ever I went into the secret garden behind the church. It turns out that there are some memorials on the outside of the church down there with musings about the nature of time. I assume that the quiver full of arrows represents the "arrow of time". This is a good bit of physics. Unlike any other concept in physics like for example forces, which can act equally well forwards or backwards, time only goes forwards. This is now usually explained as a consequence of entropy. We are headed from order to disorder, when averaged out across the universe.

An interesting wordsearch

 

This was in the Daily Express. I was very pleased. I'd never heard of Svedbergs. It is a non-metric way of measuring the size of particles based on their sedimentation rate.

Less evidence of desert sands in Wigton

 After finding lots of evidence of desert-blown sands in stone of a similar age in Ardrossan, I had a look at the sandstone blocks in Wigton. Most of them are structureless like the one below.

But I did find this one which has horizontal layers on top of slanted layers that might come from small dune fronts.

This amazing sundial is in the gardens at RHS Rosemoor. The curved lines are to cope with the different height of the sun in the sky at different times of year. There is a line for every 15 minutes. I was there at 12.15 BST.

Notice that there is a scale above it.

The top scale is consulted between winter solstice and summer solstice. The lower scale is for the second half of the year. Not sure why that is. Notice also that the other side of the stone is for the afternoon.

 

How long does it take for the disc of the Sun to disappear?

 

I was stood on the beach at Croyde hoping to see the Green Flash at sunset. It occurred to me to time how long it took from the bottom of the disc touching the water to the top of the disc finally disappearing. The Sun subtends an angle of 0.5 degrees at the eye. 360 degrees of rotation in 24 hours means 15 degrees per hour or 1 degree of movement every 4 minutes. (The true answer needs to take into account that the Earth is moving around the Sun as well as spinning on its axis. I have simplified it down) Anyway, that meant the Sun should disappear in 2 minutes. I timed 3 min 30 seconds. That couldn't be explained by the reason given above. Looking it up online, it says that the time depends on how far away from the Equator you are and what time of year. It seems to be that 2 minutes would be fine on the Equator at a time when the Sun is going down perpendicular to the horizon. But that isn't the case in the UK so the Sun must be moving diagonally across. I need to think about how that makes the angular movement different for a circular object.

New style of electricity pylon

 

We spotted the new-style electricity pylons from the M5 near Bridgwater. It turns out that the change has been made to make them less of an eyesore - they are much shorter than previous pylons. Read about it here.

Partial eclipse

 I set up my telescope in Wigton to project the partial eclipse at about 10.15am. It was even more impressive in Penrith an hour later. Obviously not visible to the naked eye but it was hard to tell if the noticeable dimming was due to the moon or the high cloud - or both!