Another New Year

So, it’s been over a year since I posted anything on this blog and much to my amazement, I got an email the other day from someone enquiring whether I was going to post any more. The answer is a definite “maybe” ;).

A lot has happened since my last post – I’ve moved house and sort of settled in (I still have stuff in boxes which need unpacking, but that’s the story of my life). I’ve also gone from being a somewhat resigned single person to being a very happy partnered person :). My health has deteriorated somewhat, but my dad is still plodding on, much to his doctors’ surprise. He has been on weekly treatment in the “big smoke” for the last year, which means mum, dad and I all share the driving there and back each Friday – very tiring for all of us and I’m hoping to be able to get the odd week off now that they’ve found a local community group which can provide a driver sometimes.

Unfortunately, one of the casualties of these changes has been any sort of formal studies. My enrolment in Physics lapsed in the first half of last year and for the first time in my life, I actually have a piece of paper with a Fail grade against my name, due to the fact that I didn’t complete it :(.

However, as the year 12 students were finishing high school last year and applying for university studies, my “itch” to study resurfaced and I started investigating what was available at the local university – I’m now just a 30 minute highway drive from a regional university. To my surprise, they have a Tertiary Preparation Program which is available free of charge to potential students. So, I’ve applied for and been offered a position in their Bioscience unit – it’s a mix of chemistry and cell biology which provides the background needed for their undergraduate courses in chemistry and cell biology (surprise, surprise!!). It requires attendance at a 3 hour weekly workshop for the semester, so it should be a good test of whether I can actual study by attending a university or not. I’m hopeful that I will be able to, but not at all confident given how much I’ve been struggling health-wise recently – we shall see.

One of the other changes that has happened, partly as a consequence of moving further away and partly for other reasons, is that I have stopped attending the church I had been a part of for some years. In recent weeks, my partner and I have been investigating Quakerism and tomorrow will attend our second meeting – also a 30 minute or so highway drive away. The older I get, the less I’m liking any sort of formal religion or strict “set of beliefs” and the more questions about what I believe I have. For a few years now, I’ve been comfortably living with very few answers, so the Quaker line of “come visit us, we have questions for all your answers” is very appealing.

So, will I post again before next year – well, I’m planning to – I’m hoping to keep a record of the books I read this year and also to try and document my studies once they start – and, as before, to write about interesting things I discover as I journey through life – no promises, though …

The Twin Towers

The story was told in church this morning of how the Twin Towers used to be the first sign that ships' captains saw as they approached New York. They provided direction which was comforting (though scarcely necessary in these days of plentiful navigational instruments and charts). Now, the towers are no more and that man-built source of security is forever gone.

Maybe I’m stretching the analogy a bit but somehow that seems a picture of my life and it provides me with a hard-to-learn lesson. Very few things in this world can provide a true sense of security, certainly not those things that are man-made. Wealth, possessions, family, friends, health, etc, etc – all can be gone in the blink of an eye (just ask Job of Biblical fame). The only things that can’t be taken away are those things I carry inside me that endure regardless of circumstances.

So, I wrestle with the Christian message of a God who is love, yet whose presence I rarely feel – and I struggle somehow to connect with the sense of hope that would allow me to say with Job “though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him” (Job 13:15, KJV). All the time knowing that the answer is simply to “cease striving and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10a, NASB).

Poor neglected blog .... again ....

Once again it's been ages since I've posted anything here. This time I have what I consider to be a good excuse - in the last six weeks I have gone from vaguely thinking that it's time I moved house to somewhere less isolated (ie which doesn't require a 30 minute drive to get to any social contact I'm interested in), all the way to having signed a contract on a house elsewhere, packed a whole heap of stuff and being set to move in about three weeks time. It's been quite a journey for both me and my parents starting with the day when one of us mooted the idea that it might be better if we were geographically closer.

So now I'm tired from packing, both excited and apprehensive about moving and nervous about trying to sell this place - believe me when I say moving house and chronic fatigue syndrome do not go well together. Thus today is a rest day, when apart from a few necessary chores I have allowed myself to "waste" time surfing the Net, watching television, etc - this is distinct from those days when such activities provide necessary breaks between packing boxes, cleaning rooms or organising the myriad of things involved with a move.

Unfortunately one of the first casualties of all this extra activity has been my Physics studies which haven't been looked at for over a month. I had almost finished the first half of the course and was just getting set to register to sit the exam in November when all this started - now I am very grateful I don't have to be trying to study for an exam on top of everything else. But the physics books have not yet been packed and will be taken up to the new place in my car so they are readily accessible once I'm feeling up to it again.

Natural selection and cosmology

I’ve just finished reading a book called “COSM” by Gregory Benford. The story is about a universe which is created by accident in a particle accelerator and which manifests in our universe as a small shiny ball – COSM is a truncation of cosmos. Benford is a physicist and the ideas that he has in the book are based on ideas which have actually appeared in physics papers.

Apart from the whole concept that it might be possible to create a universe by smashing together particles at high energy, which is fascinating in itself, he also briefly mentions the idea that if universes can effectively create other universes then the evolutionary concept of natural selection may apply to them. So, the reason that our universe seems to be so finely tuned for life is that those universes which are favourable for the existence of intelligent life are more likely to “reproduce” (since said intelligence may create other universes by design or accident), similar to the Darwinian concept of biological evolution – I guess that could make our “God” a physicist in another universe !!!

Of course, it still doesn’t address the question of how the first universe happened, which seems to “mirror” the problem in biology of how the first living thing appeared.

The relevant articles are “Is it possible to create a universe in the laboratory by quantum tunneling?” by Alan Guth and co which appeared in Nuclear Physics, B 339, p 417 in 1990 (I can only find the abstract online) and one by Edward Harrison which appeared in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 36, pages 193-203 (which I can’t even find the title of). There is however a Popular Science article on the whole idea written by Marcus Chown here.

Geostationary satellites

I just completed one of the questions in the physics assignment I’m working on and was convinced I must have the wrong answer. The question involved finding the height at which a geostationary satellite orbits – ie one which orbits the earth in 24 hours thus effectively remaining stationary above a point on earth.

Now I’ve see heaps of diagrams of satellites in orbit where the earth covers most of the diagram and the satellite orbits are circles seemingly just above the earth’s surface, so I was expecting an answer which was small in comparison to earth’s radius. What I got was an answer that is some five and a half times the earth’s radius – so I drew a rough scale diagram and it looked nothing like what I expected.

After some research on the Internet I discovered that those diagrams I was used to seeing were of satellites in Low Earth Orbit (just above most of the earth’s atmosphere at between 300 to 1000 kms) and that a geostationary satellite really does orbit at nearly 40,000 kilometres above the earth’s surface.

Somehow it annoys me to realise I have reached my early forties without knowing this – almost as much as it did when I learnt a year or so ago that the earth’s magnetic field is produced by the rotation of its molten core, but that’s another story.

Google Earth

Having read about it a couple of times, I finally decided to download Google Earth today - you need a broadband connection, Windows XP and a computer that's not too old (my two and a half year old laptop managed just fine). Unfortunately I live too far outside the main metropolitan area to get much detail of my place at this stage, but I spent a couple of interesting hours sight-seeing - try Table Mountain in Cape Town, South Africa. I'm sure there's a lot more to the program than I've found just through trial and error and it will be interesting to explore it further next time I feel like "travelling".

New physics blog

Sean Carroll of Preposterous Universe fame has started a new group blog at Cosmic Variance with 4 other physicists - 2 of whom I am pleased to say are women - another one to add to my regular reading list, I think.

And while I’m mentioning regular reading, it has been remiss of me not to mention Quantum Hobby, a blog by an amateur scientist looking to teach himself graduate level quantum mechanics – an ambitious and admirable goal that I wish him all the best with.