The Magic Television

In 1990 I moved house in Nottingham from Carlton to Mapperley and four years later I decided to move my television to a place in the southern corner, with a plain wall on the left and a bay window on the right, looking south west across Porchester.

One night I was watching the telly when ......... 

 ...... I suddenly realized that it was in virtually the same place in the room as in my previous house (apart from a fireplace on the left wall), with an open view across Carlton Valley on the right. Well, it didn't quite occur to me like that, but rather I felt I was in the old house. Outside of the room was not my Mapperley residence but the one-time Carlton home, with its little L-shaped hallway leading off to two bedrooms, bathroom, kitchen, and front door. The lay-out of my present house was totally different, but hard as I tried to remember what it was, I couldn't, and my mind seemed to be locked inside the old house. It was as if moving the TV into that position had triggered an old memory circuit in my brain. After several minutes the Mapperley house returned.

Many years later I moved house again, to the Isle of Skye, and after the passage of two winters, in a room looking 36 miles across to the Outer Hebrides,  ......

 ...... I once again shifted the TV into a corner, this time with the wall to the left having a fireplace, as in the old Carlton house, but the wall to the right of the TV being just a plain wall. As I was watching, the wall to the right dissolved, for tiny flakes of time, revealing a huge landscape, like lightning flashes in the mind illuminating a long forgotten world still existing somewhere deep in a memory, hidden in a tiny cupboard of proteins and lipids.

Human cannonballs - painting the sun

Not everyone seems to be aware of the fact that, if you live in the northern hemisphere at around the latitude of Europe, as you look southwards the ground under your feet is moving at around 700-900 mph (1125-1450 kph) towards the left or east (at the equator the speed is 1036 mph). One might ask why, if one jumps 6 inches, the ground doesn't suddenly go tearing by at hundreds of mph, enabling one to travel huge distances in a second, though not entirely without risk of collision. I guess it must be because it takes a while for one's own 700-900 mph momentum to be dissipated by the friction of the atmosphere. Perhaps the only way to view the ground moving at 700-900 mph  towards the east would be to travel at 700-900 miles towards the west (in a very fast aeroplane). One would then effectively be stationary with respect to a line between you and the centre of the Earth, but not geostationary. Disregarding the normal thermally generated winds, the atmosphere must also be dragged around with the rotating earth, otherwise we would be facing quite a stiff easterly breeze.

So, what would happen if, say, a huge meteor was to strike the Earth a glancing blow with such as force, at such an angle, and in such a direction as to stop the planet spinning without actually destroying it? There would of course be a fair bit of damage and stuff but, ignoring all these side issues, I wonder what would happen to me if I was standing outside my house when the meteor struck. My weight would immediately increase by 0.3% as the gravity-countering effect of centrifugal force disappeared, but most noticeably I would be propelled at an initial speed of 700-900 mph in an easterly direction. Obviously the overall weather conditions and the wind direction would have some influence, but I assume there would be some vertical dimension to my trajectory which might save me from colliding with any earth-bound obstacles (though many of these might also have taken to the air) and perhaps I would survive if I landed in the Narrows of Raasay rather on than the island of Raasay itself, which is about 8 miles away; or would I proceed a further 8 miles to the mainland of Scotland? It's the sort of question that appears on school applied maths papers. Another such question might be "Would it be possible for people to lose weight if millions of them at the same time were to run in a westerly direction in order to speed up the easterly spin of the Earth, thus increasing the centrifugal force, thereby countering the effect of gravity? If so, derive the relationship between the depth of tread on the runners' shoes and their weight loss".

Hoping to miss the "passing place" sign and the island of Raasay, 8 miles away in the distance.

One thing that surprises me is that when people travel to the southern hemisphere, they don't return saying "You won't believe this; when you look at the sun it doesn't move from left to right but from right to left". I would find that quite mind blowing, but no one seems bothered.

Back in the northern hemisphere, as we look southwards towards the sun, we are not only spinning to the left at 700-900 mph, but we are also moving around the right side of the sun at 67,000 mph (or the left side when viewed from the southern hemisphere). Tomorrow, 21st June, will be the summer solstice, when the northern end of the Earth's tilting axis is lined up with and pointing towards the sun. I've often thought it would be nice to see something different on the sun in the different seasons so we would know where we were in space. We could be, for example, be looking at a yellow segment during the summer, a russet-coloured one in autumn, blue in winter, and white in spring. But if it was theoretically possible to paint these colours on the quarters of the sun it would be no use as the sun rotates on it own axis at 4400 mph (6875 kph) (counterclockwise, i.e., left to right, when viewed from our northern hemisphere), so we'd just see the colours going round and eventually mixing because the sun rotates faster at its equator than at its poles. Besides, with a sun photosphere (visible surface) temperature of 5500degC and a coronal temperature of 2 million degC, there would be significant health and safety issues, the need for technological advances in the areas of heat-resistant paint and paint brushes, and the problem of how to manoeuvre paint brushes that are nearly 93 million miles (150 million km) long. Although the brushes wouldn't weigh anything they would have quite a lot of inertia to overcome.

I think the best solution would be to construct around the sun a massive lantern, made from four segments of heat-resistant coloured glass. We would then get different wavelengths of light from the sun at different times of the year, which would be brilliant, especially if this meant different sky colours; blue is cool but tangerine or lilac could be nice for a change. It might, however, be slightly more practical to build a lantern around the Earth and this concept could prove useful in around 1. 8 billion years time when, some currently estimate, the Earth might begin to become uninhabitable, certainly for humans, as the sun, growing steadily in luminosity, starts to strip away water and atmosphere from the planet. It is, of course, speculated that the human race will be extinct well before this, so no worries.

Who wears short pants?

According to the Oxford Dictionary of English the word "pants" means "underpants" in England, but where I come from, south west Lancashire, it has, or at least had, the North American meaning, namely "trousers". We also had the concept of "short pants" which most young lads wore and which reached down to about knee level. Nowadays however, "short pants" seem to have disappeared and most kids apparently wear "trousers".

It was something which took place at around year three in the boys' grammar school in the 1960s, when it became apparent that more and more of one's class mates were coming into school wearing long pants, stretching all the way to the feet, which were apparently called trousers. One felt under significant social and psychological pressure to go along with this trend, as short pants were now labeling one as childish and a bit daft. I remember feeling quite reluctant to undergo this transformation, viewing long pants as somehow a conformist affectation, not to mention cissy looking. So I felt a right twerp and extraordinarily conspicuous when one day I travelled in on the no. 96 bus and traipsed into school, wearing long pants.

Of course, one soon acclimatized to this new way of being and the thought of wearing short pants became utterly ludicrous. It shows how malleable the human mind is and how conformity within one's own particular niche is such an all powerful aspect of our psychology.

The traumatic short-to-long-pants transition seems in retrospect to have been a right of passage, a symbolic acknowledgement of leaving behind childhood and shuffling on uncertainly into the dismal and scary world of adults.

Sneaky Sunset

In the mid-summer of 2013 at Uigshader, near Portree, which is at the same latitude as the southern suburbs of Gothenburg, I watched the sun setting over the Outer Hebrides, leaving a pink glow as I went to bed about midnight. For some unknown reason I got up and looked out through the window at about 2 a.m. and noticed that the pink glow hadn't disappeared below the horizon but was still there, only it had moved so that it was silhouetting the Trotternish Hills to the north. The sunset hadn't set; it was journeying eastwards, via the north. It seemed as if the sunset was hiding behind the hills and sneeking towards the east where it intended to ambush and disable the sunrise before it rose, and to take its place, fulfilling a lifelong ambition of becoming a rising star and monopolizing the entire sun setting-rising market.

Dream Talking

I'd always assumed that the characters in one's dreams talk as in normal life but I recently discovered that this isn't actually so, at least not in my dreams. One needs some degree of lucidity in dreams in order to have any objective awareness of what is actually going on at that moment in time and last year it did slowly come to my notice that the "dream characters" didn't really seem to be saying anything. And I remember that on one occasion I went so far as to confront one of these characters with a direct question and awaited a response. He or she seemed to make a significant effort to speak but all that came out was mumbles, grunts, and a few distorted words in no meaningful order. What I concluded was that the brain isn't capable of giving independent speech to dream characters and that any sort of "speech" that one appears to encounter in dreams, probably including one's own utterances, is just made up of thoughts, in the same way as thoughts in the form of mental verbalizations seem to accompany most of our waking hours.

I can, of course, only speak for my own brain and I've since come across the idea that Wernicke's area in the brain may not be functioning in dreams. Damage to this part of the brain can produce the speech disorder Wernicke's aphasia.

The Little Bang

Although 2 days ago scientists announced the first evidence supporting the expansion of the Universe from less than the size of a sub-atomic particle to the size of a grapefruit very, very shortly (10^-32 seconds) after the Big Bang, a recent Horizon programme on BBC Four suggested that the generally held opinion now is that the Big Bang was preceded by something else. The idea I found most interesting was put forward by Roger Penrose. My understanding of what he said may be wrong but this is how I saw it. The Universe currently appears to be expanding at an increasing rate and if this continues for, I'm not sure how long but let us say, many trillions of years, then eventually all matter will disappear and only photons of light will remain. In the absence of matter, space and time can no longer exist, which means that all the energy in the Universe will be contained in an infinitely small space (i.e., no space) and outside of time. Well, that seems rather a high concentration of energy and it wouldn't be surprising if at some point out of time it went pop, in a tiny little bang that actually turned out to be rather big. However, it appears that the first particles of matter, quarks (and antiquarks), were only formed after the Universe had reached the size of a grapefruit which would mean that time and space were created in the absence of, and therefore existed in the absence of, matter and that appears to contradict what happens at the "end" of the Universe. So I've probably gone down the wrong mind corridor somewhere. I'm only doing this to exercise the old neurons in the hope that while they're buzzing the Alzheimer's plaques will have less chance of getting a hold.