My smart meter

I was bought a discount smart meter last year. It sits on my desk at home so that I can tell when Mrs B puts on the kettle in the kitchen! The kettle was on when the photograph was taken. Can you see how I know that? For me the most interesting thing has been to quantify the number of kWh used every day. In our house it is about 8 kWh at the moment so I suppose saying an average of 10 kWh might be a good ball park figure for attempting to answer questions like "how many kWh does Wigton use in a day?" I suspect that is an un-Googleable question so you'll have to fugure it out for yourself.

The Horizon programme

Hmm. The previous post didn't publish and stayed as a draft, so none of you will have been able to read it. Hope you had a good Powers of 10 day - do watch that 10 minute film from the web link.

Monday's Horizon documentary about what happened before the Big Bang is very good.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00vdkmj/Horizon_20102011_What_Happened_Before_the_Big_Bang/

I thought that the most useful bits were at the end when they bothered to get away from the maths based theorising and actually talked about finding experimental evidence to back up the claims.

Various things

Can I remind you to celebrate world Powers of 10 Day on Sunday?

http://www.powersof10.com/



Also next Tuesday 9pm BBC2 there is a Horizon documentary about what happened before the Big Bang. The idea is that there was a multi-verse and our Universe happens to be one of squillions out there. This means that the statistical fluke that brought life would have to happen so eliminating the need for God to start the Universe. You get rid of God by invoking squillions of Universes that we can't touch. Make your own mind up - see what evidence they give.



Yesterday 12 Nobel Prize winners wrote to The Times to protest against the immigration cap because it would have stopped the UK winning a lot of Nobel Prizes, including this year's Nobel Physics Prize.

Pink moon

I took this picture earlier in the summer. When the the moon is low down in the sky, the light from the moon comes through the atmosphere at an oblique angle. This means that it travels a longer distance through the air than if it had hit straight on. The light hits tiny particles in the air it is scattered. The short wavelength colours at the blue end of the spectrum are scattered first leaving the redder colours to reach us. Hence the moon looks pink. Incidentally, they say that the moon looks bigger when it is nearer the horizon but that this is an optical illusion.

The future of physics in the UK

The Institute of Physics is concerned that physics needs adequate funding in this climate of cuts. I do believe that physics is vital for the future of the country. People who have studied physics will be responsible for providing energy and for the innovative technology that can earn the country billions. Being very careful not to make this column party political, I wanted to comment on what I heard on the business news on Radio 4 this morning. A representative of the business community was saying that the cap on non-EU nationals being allowed to work in the UK was having a big effect. I woke up when she mentioned the energy provider EDF. This is the reason: As physics has been allowed to run down as a subject in this country, we have begun to rely on hiring physicists from abroad. At the moment, strong nations for training physics are Russia, China and Japan. They would be affected by the cap. From my point of view I think the country needs to decide one of two ways:
1. Do we give up on physics because no one here is interested and just hire physicists from the east?
2. Do we decide that hiring from abroad is a bd thing but then work hard to boost physics in this country?
Answers on a postcard... However, I need to make time to write to my MP to air these concerns.

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...