Continue reading »]]> I’ve not blogged about the events in Wootton Bassett over the past few years, in part because I’ve taken a stand (similar to many in our town), that what we do is a personal response to the fallen members of our armed forces as they are repatriated through RAF Lyneham.

Today, the town has been granted Letters Patent from the Queen, and officially becomes Royal Wootton Bassett, in recognition that of the many that gather on the streets to offer our respects to those who have offered the ultimate sacrifice for their country. This really came about because of an accident of geography, and the close links that the town has had for the base at RAF Lyneham over the years. Indeed, a lot of ex-service personnel have retired to the town.

The process started when an RAF Hercules C.130 aircraft of 47 Squadron, based at Lyneham, crashed in January 2005 on active service over Iraq. Since many of the people who work at Lyneham live in the local area, nearly everyone knew someone who was directly or indirectly affected by the crash, and the town gathered to support their friends and families. This occurred before we moved to the town.

Normally RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire is the main location for passenger movements, but when that was closed temporarily in the September 2005, to allow upgrades to the runway. During this time most operations were moved to RAF Lyneham, along with the repatriation of the bodies of the fallen from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The first repatriations through the town were low-key affairs, with no formal organisation, just an awareness by those older members of the local Royal British Legion of hearses passing through the town, and the recognition of the service given by the servicemen within.

This grew to a more formal recognition of the repatriations, with an informal network of phone calls and discreet displays in certain of the shops on the High Street of the times of the next repatriation. Those that were on the High Street at the time stopped what they were doing, and stood in silence as the cortèges stopped at the War Memorial.

The repatriations through Wootton Bassett finished in June 2011, as the last flying squadron left RAF Lyneham and moved to RAF Brize Norton. Repatriations moved there as well, with the first repatriation occurring on the 8th of September 2011, through the town of Carterton in Oxfordshire.

The solemn respect that has been offered without any reference to the politics one way or the other for the deployment of our troops abroad. The quiet dignity in which every one in which those in the town who gather on the High Street as the cortèges pass has now become world-wide news.

Today we’ve been recognised by the Queen (and country) for this task, which by accident of geography, we’ve been able to carry out for the 355 servicemen and women who’ve passed through our town. I’d hope that others would have done the same, and will continue to do the same.

In the light of that, our town coat of arms has been changed, and we’ve lost a gold diamond from the below the chevron, and have instead, gained a royal lion, there instead. A fitting mark for the loss of all those diamonds in our armed forces who are prepared to give the ultimate sacrifice in service of their country.

Continue reading »]]> It all started with a discussion around the tea-table a few days ago, about the fact that a lightyear is a measurement of distance and not of time, because a light year is the distance traveled by a photon over the period of a year. (d=s*t for those who like the maths, or the area under a speed-time graph). Then someone else remembered that 2008 is a leap year, and contains an extra day..
So the question is does light travel slower on leap years?
Here I set out to prove that it does.

So let’s take a look at this more closely..
Firstly a light-year is a measure of distance, so this is a fixed length (since it’s based on SI units), and can be represented by d. Secondly we have a value t that represents the time this takes (1 year). Finally we have a c that is a representation of the speed of light. So we take our old d=s*t equation, and juggle it to get . Then we plug in our variables instead, so we have .

Now this is where we need to look more closely at the problem, since a year is not a standard length. Every four years we have an extra day added to cope with some differences in measurement of astronomical (sidereal and solar, I believe) time. So in effect we are doing this calculation over four years, but with two differing values of t, for three years and for the leap year. This will give us two values of c, for non leap years, and for leap years.
A quick search of wikipedia shows that d is 9,460,730,472,580,800 m
We also have two values of t, which is 365 days, and of 366 days.
We’ll convert the time into seconds (so it’s an SI unit), using the 60*60*24 (seconds, minutes, hours) or 86400 seconds a day. is 31,536,000 seconds, and is 31,622,400.

So what are the speeds of light?
So quickly plugging the values into my calculator, gives a result of 9,460,730,472,580,800 / 31,536,000, or 299,997,795.3 m/s.
Similarly produces a result of 9,460,730,472,580,800 / 31,622,400, or 299,178,129.192 m/s.
This looks right, since a leap year is longer than other years, and light would therefore have to travel slower to cover the same distance.

How can we check this?
A physicist might do this with a torch, a tape measure and a stop watch, but since we are good mathematicians, we check the results, by seeing if we can use these answers to get back to the original figures, but by using a different question.
Since we know the ratio of the lengths of time, we should be able to use the ratio of the speeds to reproduce this.
i.e. . If we juggle this to get a value on one side, we should get
So here are the numbers… (299997795.3/299178129.192) * 31,536,000 which produces an answer of 31,622,400. So this is self-consistent at least, as 31,622,400 is the number of seconds in a leap year, exactly the number we’re looking for.

So how much slower is light in a leap year?
Well, that’s easy, we simply boil down the ratio of , or . Lo and behold, it becomes , or 99.726776% of the speed of light in other years.

So doesn’t this make life complicated?
The short answer is yes, it does, so science has conveniently forgotten the fact that the speed of light is variable (it tends to conflict with some of Einstein’s theories), and has instead chosen a different method of approximating the speed of light. This basically amounts to creating an average speed over four years, or 1461 days. Doing this calculation, we have . Which gives the following math to calculate. ( 4 * 9,460,730,472,580,800) / ((3 * 31,536,000) + 31,622,400) This equates to 299,792,458 m/s, which is the average speed of light often quoted by scientists. Astronomers also fudge the time, by creating the Julian year, which comprised 365.25 days (and a smidgen) to make the calculation consistent.

I’ve heard that the speed of light is slower in denser environments, could this be a reason?
It’s a well known fact that if you increase the density of objects, light slows down as it passes through them. This is especially true for black holes, which have infinite density, and light never makes it out, as it slows to a stop. However even I have to admit that the notion that the universe becomes more dense to slow light for a period of time every four years is preposterous!}

So just remember, that even though the scientists would have you believe that c is a constant, it isn’t!

Continue reading »]]> or rather not, since the we’ve now had the house re-wired over the past couple of weeks. So all the old wiring in the original house has been removed, and replaced with new stuff, which now has good earthing, is colour-coded correctly to new standards. This means that the lighting ring with no earth is gone, the sockets no longer crackle as they now have good insulation and connections, and the frankenstein-style fusebox has been replaced by a new one.

Andy from Eleko has had his van on the front drive for awhile, and now it’s not there any more.. Hooray! Now we only need to fix the holes in the walls .. I feel like getting plastered later!

Continue reading »]]> Karen has prepared the cupboard with a lick of paint, and now it’s time to put some stuff back under the stairs.. but firstly we need to get some power there.

Which gives us a long saga about the merits of converting a garage into a room (that was done sometime ago, but it seems to have been redone since). And in the redoing, there is a services cupboard with gas and electric meters and fuse boxes, etc. This is done all nice and shiny with special wide-opening door hinges and such. And a chipboard floor, to keep all the dust out.

However as is becoming apparent, things are never quite what they seem. The floor is just big enough to fit under the door frames, and so can’t be lifted out. And the cables that need to be repositioned for the power can’t be moved until the floor is lifted. And one side is wedged under the gas main that means you can’t jiggle the thing out.

Still the front panel of the cupboard that provides the bar to shut the doors against has screws on it, so perhaps it undoes, and frees things up? Well the screws come out.. but the rest is glued..

Time for a large hammer me thinks..