Do You Know We're Going Backwards?


Good day yesterday. A day out with Wife and Kinder plus TV about Stephen Hawking in the evening. My wife was expecting this to be boring but was pleasantly surprised which resulted in the plaintive cry of why wasn't science like that when she was at school. She did pester me with a question about why time slowed down for a moving observer but a simple, understandable explanation was beyond me at 11:00 at night. I tried the old light-ray-in-a-moving-railway-carriage stuff but wasn't quite up to the explanation. My daughter did actually pre-empt this earlier in the day when she wondered why were moving backwards relative to a ruddy great lorry in the outside lane though I resisted any attempt at explaining further.

The best book I have ever found for explaining the stuff about Mass, Length and Time is Albert Einstein and his inflatable universe which is from the Dead Famous Series done by the same people who do the Horrible Histories. All those Relativity books seem to skip over how the equations (The Lorentz stuff) relate to the real world but this book doesn't and for the first time I really felt I knew how it all worked even if it still seems totally against experience. Science should be fun.

Off to give blood this morning. I have just found out that it has been moved from the school across the road to the pub which of course opens up the possibility of a request for an cool, Iron-Replenishing glass of Guinness though this is probably not very likely.