Science Ain't So Bad

BOR-ing!

MISTER ScienceAintSoBad explains “time”

I am often asked to explain time.

If I can get off the hook with “It’s what the clock says”, we’re done here. Otherwise?.

Here’s the thing. Lots has been written about this. It get pretty deep out there, believe me. We humans figured out how to count time by using something that moves continuously and uniformly such as the moon traveling around the earth as a proxy for time.  Twice as far meant twice as much time had gone by. Distance traveled equaled time. It’s the idea behind  clocks (the old fashioned kind) where the hands rotate around the face of the clock and time is marked off along the edge.

You can see that this doesn’t tell us a thing. What does uniform mean?

It has been suggested that time represents a change in “entropy” (how much is left of the way things were ordered or “wound up” when the universe started). If that’s true, time started when the universe started. But maybe time stretches out beyond the end of the universe and before the beginning. Maybe there was time before “the first second”.

I’m not supposed to say that, am I?

We’re still unraveling that mysterious first fraction of a second of the “Big Bang” when, supposedly, there was infinite density. Few physicists believe that there was any such a thing. Getting smaller than the “Planck length” ( 10 to the minus 35 meters) may not be physically possible. So something else might have happened other than a so-called singularity. Maybe there were events “before”. Before? Doesn’t that mean there was time?

Some say that there is an illusional quality to time. That we perceive something that isn’t there. That the physical world is sliced up into very small “ticks” making the time dimension granular instead of continuous. All that was, and all that will be, is captured in each of these ticks like frames in a movie film.

I could go on and on but I’m afraid I will mislead. This is a lovely and fascinating area for discussion, but I shouldn’t take take up your valuable time for this. The subject goes deeper than my own brain goes.

Here is an article in Wired Magazine  – an interview with Sean Caroll by Erin Biba.

Your ideas are welcome. Maybe you know more than me.

It wouldn’t be hard.

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The drawing is by me.

SHAKY

IT’S THE FIRE!

Remember the great San Francisco earthquake?

If you were living in southern california in 1906 you do.

It was as bad as it gets. We didn’t know how to build earthquake resistant buildings back then. Plus a lot of structures had been thrown together during the gold rush a few decades before and were cheezy to start with.

The shaking due to the quake was bad but the fire? That was unbelievable!  

Once the fire broke out, fire fighting equipment couldn’t get through the rubble strewn streets. Not that it would have mattered since there wasn’t any water in the mains.  The fires burned for days. When they were out, the smoke remained in the air. They said it would never go away. They said the air had changed – that sunlight would never look the same again. 

Eventually, the air did clear and return to normal but hundreds of thousands of people had to live in shelters and tents until  they found new homes.

The city recovered. It took years.

Much was learned from the San Francisco disaster. Building codes are much better. Engineers now know how to design a building that can “ride out” the typical movements of an earthquake and the building codes ensure that this knowledge will protect against future quakes.

However, if the gas lines go, it won’t matter.

There are a lot of gas lines.

Will there be another “great fire”? There have been plenty of earthquakes in California since 1906. Some were strong. One had a magnitude of 7.5.

There were no firestorms.

Maybe some of this was luck because – you know what? –  although shutoff valves have been installed, a lot of them are manual. PG&E tells us to keep a 12 to 15 inch wrench around in case it is needed in an emergency. That seems a little ridiculous, doesn’t it? Go find the stupid wrench during a quake?

Where the hell did I put my wrench?

Indescribable

There are also automatic shutoff valves. That’s the right way to handle things, isn’t it?  They activate when there is enough seismic activity or when there is a rupture in a gas line causing a large increase in the flow of gas. MISTER ScienceAintSoBad likes that idea and gives P&G’s new automatic valves a ScinceAintSoBadRating of 10. 

These automatic valves are installed when there’s new construction or when there are major alterations.

Great to hear.

In the meantime, those living in older buildings that haven’t been renovated had better not forget where they put that dopey wrench.

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The drawing is mine and the photograph (courtesy of Wikipedia) is in the public domain.