In praise of seasons

Costandina returned home on Friday for her Easter Term break and will be with us for nearly a month. These Uni students have it easy - I mean that's not a break that's a sabattical! It will however be lovely to have her back home and have a full house again.

The clocks have also gone forward this weekend and it finally feels that Spring is on its way. The short dark days are the worst part of Winter for me. What I like about this time of year is how quickly the days change. Each day seems noticeably longer. Then we get this big push forward when the clocks change and lo and behold we are out of Winter's dark grip.

I mustn't speak to soon though as there is a severe weather warning in place for northern England next week - heavy rain rain and sleet/ snow. Charming! Hopefully it will stay up north where it belongs

We are busy planning a weeks holiday at the end of May and discussing where we might go in Summer. The heating has been turned down now that it is a balmy 7oC and we no longer have to take scarfes to work. Soon it will be t-shirt weather.

That palpable sense of change is one of the things I really like about living a bit further away from the equator than sunny Melbourne. London is 51oN whereas Melbourne is only 37oS. Even Hobart is only 42oS and the southern tip of New Zealand is only 46oS. The tip of South Africa is only 34oS. In fact you have to go to the very bottom tip of South America to the most southern point of Argentina to get an equivalent position to London. It makes a big difference

This marker of time passing is more important I think than many people give it credit for. One of the important roles that weddings and funerals play is as an opportunity to get together with distant family and mark how you and they have changed. You notice it more at these events because you don't see your cousins and nieces everyday. They are suddenly older, taller, more grown up.

So too we measure the passage of time by the seasons. Its not quite that "I did that three winters ago" but perhaps just that the passing of another year is more marked when it is clearly delineated by whatever is ones favourite seasonal change - the coming of spring or perhaps the colours of Autumn.

The importance of the seasons has long been celebrated in England (and Europe presumably) with ceremonies to mark the the Equinoxes and Solistices (what is the plural of those words??). The Harvest Festival is still celebrated in some counties. This occurs on the Harvest Moon or full moon closest to the Autumnal Equinox. Mind you we dont get a public holiday unlike the American Thanksgiving Day holiday.

Mind you a google of topics like equinox and solstice festivals does bring up a strange amalgum of the esoteric, the pagan and the plain old nutters. Tree huggers and unreconstitued hippies who should by now know better are there in force but so to are the Chaos theory advocates and Gaia supporters. Should we so choose we may avail ourselves in mid June of the Equinox Festival. A quick glance at the list of performers says it all - http://www.equinoxfestival.org/performers.html.

Then again there is always that old stalwart - Galstonbury or the pagan celebrations at Stonehenge on the 21 June. The running battles between the middle aged pagans trying to get over the fence and up to the rocks of Stonehenge and the mildly amused police trying to stop them makes watching the news on 22 June highly entertaining.

Did you know that the first (or only) full moon in June is called the Honey Moon. Tradition holds that this is the best time to harvest honey from the hives. This time of year, between the planting and harvesting of the crops, was the traditional month for weddings. This is because many ancient peoples believed that the "grand [sexual] union" of the Goddess and God occurred in early May at Beltaine. Since it was unlucky to compete with the deities, many couples delayed their weddings until June. June remains a favorite month for marriage today. In some traditions, "newly wed couples were fed dishes and beverages that featured honey for the first month of their married life to encourage love and fertility. The surviving vestige of this tradition lives on in the name given to the holiday immediately after the ceremony: The Honeymoon." Bet you didn't know that

One for the trivia buffs

The next in my series of what connects disparate items concerns the Chilean earthquake some weeks ago, Scottish mariners and 18C English literature. Alternatively it would be the connection between the Juan Fernadez Islands, Selkirk and castaways. The answer as you all know is of course Robinson Crusoe.

Written by Daniels Defoe in 1719, Robinson Crusoe is sometimes described as the first English novel. An instant classic it remains in print to this day. Few however would know that it's full title is The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, where-in all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pyrates. Written by Himself.

Now that is a title!

Think about how long ago 1719 was. Defoe was a direct contemporary of Sir Isaac Newton and was writing barely 50 years after the Great Fire of London. Charles Dickens would not be born for another hundred years. It would be more than 50 years before James Cook would set sail and 70 years before the French Revolution. London at the start of the 18C was indeed a very different place than today


Popular folklore has it that the inspiration for Defoe was the story of Alexander Selkirk who was castaway on the Juan Fernadez Islands off the Cilean coast from 1705 until 1709. The Wikipedia entry for Robinson Crusoe however casts doubt on whether this was in fact the true inspiration and lists a range of other castaway possibilities.

Whatever the truth, it didn't stop the islanders of the Juan Fernandez archipelago renaming their main island Robinson Crusoe Island 50 years ago and it was these self same islands that suffered from the tsunami generated by the recent Chilean earthquake.

I was touched by the storey that ran in one newspaper over here of Martina Maturana, a 12 year old girl who lives on Robinson Crusoe Island along with 650 other hardy souls.

It was Martina who peered out her window when she felt the tremor and noticed the boats in the harbour bobbing violently in the water. Her father, the community Policeman, was busy on the phone so she decided to run down to the village square and ring the emergency bell. The bell alerted the villagers who stumbled out of their home in the night to find out what the problem was only to be hit minutes later by a 20m wave crashing through the little harbour and racing 300m into the village killing 8 locals and injuring 8 others.

Naturally she is a hero but the islanders are furious that the tsunami warning system failed to work. "We can't depend on a little girl" as one commentator put it

There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom

It has been a while since I posted and I thought it was time I raise the intellectual credentials of this blog. So I thought I would start off by posting a blog that links the American crime series Numbers, Chaos theory and physics in the 60's. The common denominator in all of the above is of course Richard Feynman. You all knew that didn't you.

Those who may have read James Gleick book on the emergence of Chaos Theory (Chaos Theory, The Making of a New Science) will know of course know of Gleick's admiration for the work of Mr Feynman. The American crime series Numbers is also fond of quoting Feynman at suitable moments as they break off into their wizzy let Hollywood explain particle physics to you kind of way.

The Wikipedia article on Feynman describes him as perhaps the most famous scientist in the 60's. Famed as a lecturer and teacher of the highest calbre, the book of his lectures (The Feynman Lectures on Physics) is still in print and is regarded as one of the most accessible undergraduate textbooks even today.

He was also regarded as an eccentric and free spirit. He was a prankster, juggler, safecracker, proud amateur painter, and bongo player. He liked to pursue a variety of seemingly unrelated interests, such as art, percussion, Maya hieroglyphics and lock picking. 

An all round Renaissance man, he was also a scientist of the highest calibre. He got a perfect score for his Princeton University entrance exams and in 1965 he won the Nobel prize for Physics.

He was however also deeply involved in life and was as far from being locked away in an ivory tower as it is possible to imagine. His junior role on the Manhattan project that developed the atomic bomb during WWII is one example. Another was his role in 1986 on the Rogers Commission into the Challenger Space Shuttle Disaster just 2 years before his death in 1988

He was perhaps one of the first true popularisers of science. He had a reputation for taking great care to make his explanations of complex mathematics and physics accessible and understandable even to undergraduates, that being his test of whether a topic was understood. To espouse a philosophy that sought to be both at the "top table" so to speak in his field and actively contribute to "deepening" the understanding yet still make diligent efforts to include all in his endevours and broaden their understanding speaks volumes for the man

The name of this blog is the name of a lecture that Feynman gave in 1959 which became famous as one the intellectual origins of nanotechnology. I think it is rather wonderful that one can find these sorts of things on the web; not just the "someone said something about something" type of information but the primary source material too.

http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html

A clue to how prescient Feynman was is given by the fact that the prize Feynman offers in his lecture was claimed just 11 months later in November 1960. Read the terms of the challenge again and think about what wasn't available in 1960!