On Reflection

Every time I visit a motorway service station, a thought occurs to me and I say I must blog that. Unfortunately I never remember it – until now. I am afraid that the thought is sparked by the strange curvy-conical device which sits over the drain holes of the urinals. Now I am not 100% certain of the function of this device but I assume it is meant to avoid splashback and is specially designed so that any fluid flow directed at it will bounce off it away from any user. In best James Burke mode I made a connection with something which I think is rather similar. Years ago, when I was space mad, I read The High Frontier by Gerald K. O’Neill which detailed a very practical plan for setting up colonies in space. These often involved long cylinders, shielded from solar radiation but with large transparent strips designed to let in light reflected from giant mirrors arranged outside. This light was then further reflected off a strange curvy-conical device to illuminate the interior of the colony where the living areas were arranged on the inner surfaces of the cylinder. I can find plenty of pictures of the outside of these colonies but nothing showing this weird, internal mirror.

This of course makes me very sad, that a concept designed with high, human aspirations in mind has, albeit through convergent evolution, cropped up to prevent embarrassing staining to trousers. This is the way of the world these days. Prompted by a minor rant from my wife regarding us being slaves to technology, I was thinking about how we now spend so much time designing things to improve our ‘systems’ in society and I found my self in best Grumpy-old-man style, wondering how we managed before all this. We seem to spend so much time writing stuff to record how bad we are, how we are doing and then not spending time in making those bad things better. We are always told we must have a plan for achievement but no one is ever jumped on to ensure that those plans are followed. The only important thing is the report that tells us how things are going. Maybe a good telling off would be appropriate but that does not fit with the modern view. I’d be much happier being shouted at than being ignored I think. Unless of course, the economy is a sort of bloodless version of the war in nineteen-eighty-four, something to keep the plebs happy and unrevolting.

I did have so much structure to this discussion but I just can’t be bothered any more which makes me a part of the problem. Anyway, news that the Universe may be a trillion years older than we thought is in the papers today, so my (and all human) significance just got less by a factor of … er … lots and lots. The idea of many big bangs one after the other, is not new. I have read about it many times, once at least in God and The New Physics by Paul Davies, the author of my current reading – The Last Three Minutes. This has just reached a chapter regarding the possibilities for the running down of the universe if it was given enough time. For what could be a dull science book, the view of the whimpers at the end of the universe is quite an artistic read. Eventually everything will run down to nothing but the sequence of events is far more complex than just a gradual darkening of things as they disperse to dead matter distributed as gas throughout space. Black Holes swallow things and get bigger but then shrink due to Hawking Radiation, some gas gets sucked in but some just disperses. What happens to all those neutrinos? Not something I will have to worry about though I expect the Government have a report to measure the effect on the economy. Maybe they will have a plan in place for what to do in the event of the completion of the entropy cycle. Crisis! What Crisis?