Walking

Well this week on the whole has certainly seen an Indian summer and the forecast for the weekend form temperatures to hit the mid twenties centigrade

I was mostly stuck in the Office for a good part of the day, but decided to take a good stroll this morning from Teynham to Sittingbourne in the glorious sunshine. It took just over 45 minutes to get to the traffic lights at the top end of East Street, just before the Wetherspoons pub.

Tomorrow I will head of towards Faversham but will probably use public transport to get there as it is a bit further and no footpath on part of the journey. In general I don’t mind walking when the weather is lovely and will do it again next week, weather permitting.

Two Horizons

Downloaded and watched a couple of Horizon programmes during the week and both looking at the universe from asking how big the universe is to how small the universe is. The first programme looked at the large scale of the universe and attempted to answer the mind-boggling fact that we may not be the only universe and that we live in a multiverse. These other universes being in their own bubbles and impervious to our senses.

The other programme looked at the universe on the small scale from the initial big bang and attempted to answer what is the smallest constituent of matter. What are the fundamental particles? Is the quark the most fundamental , and if not what strange vibrations make up the quark. This has lead to the idea of string theory that all the fundamental particles are just tightly wound strings of different vibrations. And then perhaps there is a limit to how small things can get, the so called Planck length. Nothing can be smaller than this Planck length.

Fascinating, mind-boggling, exciting and just the kind of science programme I love to watch.

Book 54 - George Smoot "Wrinkles In Time"

George Smoot "Wrinkles In Time" (Abacus)


 


Enjoyable and mostly non-technical account of Nobel prize winner Smoot & his various teams' attempts to unravel some of the mysteries of the Big Bang. Scientific discovery is popularly conceived of as consisting of epiphanic Eureka moments, but Smoot's book shows how some of the most significant advances are made through decades of painstaking, repetitive work and innovation.