Lightning conductor on Cockermouth church

This week's Lower Sixth homework asks students to estimate the resistance of the lightning conductor on Wigton church. Here's the one at Cockermouth. If you enlarge the first picture you can see it snaking up the right hand side of the tower. The second view, from the bottom of the tower, shows how it then heads down to disappear into the Earth. To estimate the resistance, we need the dimensions of the conducting strip. So how wide and deep do you think it is? And looking at the spire, how many metres tall would you say that the building is? Good estimation skills are important in physics and engineering. I usually start by imagining how many people stacked on top of each other would reach the top, and work to an over-estimate that the people are two metres tall...

Physics on the TV and radio

Give the X-Factor a miss this week. Saturday night is physics night!

Channel 4: 8pm. Stephen Hawking has an hour on his theories of the universe.

However, if you are feeling very grown up, you could listen to Radio 4. Same time (8pm) they are doing an hour on Richard Feynman. He's my favourite physicist - a genius but also deeply unconventional. Hopefully they'll have some stories about his often bonkers life. But you could catch this on the i-player later...

I'm not the only one

Hopefully, if you click on the picture you should be able to read the letter entitled "There's a fault with power and the story". It's from The Cumberland News letter page this August. The journalists used the wrong units for power and energy. Tsk! Tsk!

A trip to ring the bells at Cockermouth

In the holidays I went down to ring the bells for a wedding in Cockermouth. This grave stone was outside the door to the bell tower. It turns out that Rev Fearon Fallows who died in 1831 was the "Astronomer Royal to His Britannic Majesty at the Cape of Good Hope". He was also a Fellow of St John's College Cambridge and FRS. FRS means "Fellow of the Royal Society" and is an honour awarded to the very top scientists in the UK. Our own Harry Elliot was FRS. So this was the grave of a distinguished physicist by the look of it, confirmation that we do live in a great area for physics. The top of the grave stone has an interesting early map of the world. I've also added some views most of you won't have seen of Cockermouth from the roof of the church beside the bell tower.

A trip to the south

We went on a tour of the south last week. It involved passing through the Watford Gap services on the M1. These have huge cultural siginificance because they are said to be the place where the south starts. They are actually nowhere near Watford, being just north of Northampton. The north/south thing is a bit odd here in Wigton, where almost everywhere in England is south of us.

We were struck by the amount of traffic and general busy-ness in the south. There is a constant hum of traffic noise in many places. These photos were taken at 11am on a Monday morning. Look at the difference in the people heading north (towards us in the second photo) and south. I stood on the bridge and counted 40 cars going north in 1 minute. That's probably about 3000 people an hour moving at what is not a particularly busy time in that direction...

Sundial

I went to Amble in Northumberland. Next to the harbour is this large modern sundial. The notice explaining sundials is very interesting. It explains why a sundial doesn't show perfect clock time. Part of that follows on from my previous post which noted that true sun-highest-in-the-sky midday is different in Wigton compared to London. This display panel also explains that the height of the sun in the sky (time of year) has an effect too. Click on the picture to enlarge it.

Climate change on Panorama

Last week's Panorama programme on BBC1 was about the science of climate change. Now Panorama is a far more tabloid style programme than was the case when I used to watch it 30 years ago. However, I was interested that the supposedly disagreeing scientists all seemed to beleive that the world is warming. The only people who didn't believe in global warming were members of the public. Small sample size, for sure, but interesting none the less. The controversy amongst the scientists seemed to be the validity of the "hockey stick" global temperature graph.