Sunday, October 30, 2011

A Good Definite Maybe

It must be rough being a scientist. First, believing in anything has to be somewhere between problematic and impossible and second, it’s a business where (surprise!) your whole life’s work having been based on a presumption that turns out to be wrong gets thrown out the window. Ouch.

We all know what happened to “the world is flat” theory. The smug have had a good laugh over it. Fast forward to Einstein’s theory of relativity which sets the maximum speed limit in the universe at 300,000 km per second or, the speed of light. Over the nearly hundred years the theory’s been around we’ve done all kinds of experiments proving it. This is it. We are smart. E=mc2.

But then…

Last month the folks at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) dropped a bombshell. They’ve been beaming subatomic particles known as neutrinos from their facility outside Geneva, Switzerland to another in the Italian mountain Gran Sasso (or Great Pebble, a rather conservative choice of reference for the usually sensuous Italians), and measuring their speed with great care. Lo and behold, the little things are traveling, “at a velocity 20 parts per million above the speed of light.” * Skeptical, CERN has repeated the experiment some 15,000 times and exhaustively checked for errors. So far it looks like the 300,000 km/sec speed limit is no longer valid and others in the scientific community are scurrying to either refute or establish the finding.

Looking out the window, the world appears not to have changed. Photons, neutrinos and FedEx trucks are zooming around, business as usual. So what’s the big deal? For the most part I don’t know, but the discovery does put a fly in the murky ointment of time. According to the theory of relativity, time, going forward, slows down as we increase our velocity and eventually at the speed of light stops. Ok, I sort of got that. Presuming this part of the theory holds, CERN’s finding implies it is possible that time travels backwards. At least for the neutrinos in question.

Oh yeah… time traveling backwards. Like the world being round, at first it would be a bit of a stretch. The movie Time Bandits suddenly becomes a documentary and some day as we listen to President Lincoln give his Gettysburg Address, we may muse over the so passé notion time only goes forward.

Gordon Bunker

* http://public.web.cern.ch/press/pressreleases/Releases2011/PR19.11E.html

Friday, October 21, 2011

The, A, New Leaf


A few weeks ago I was corresponding with a GTI buddy about reprogramming the headlights in my car and somehow we got sidetracked to the new Golf R coming to the U.S. next year. It’s easy enough to get jazzed about another 50 horsepower and all wheel drive. I offered encouragement that he buy one – this after all is what car friends are for – but he said he’d just traded his VW on a Nissan Leaf, and I noted didn’t exactly gush with enthusiasm about the transaction.

To go from a GTI to a… Leaf? My heart sank to the bottom. What could be next for the poor S.O.B.? Trying out for castrato?

But then driving in town recently I saw a Leaf (certainly didn’t hear it), and as luck would have it we were headed in the same general direction so I had a chance to study it a bit. Much to my surprise it looked like a real car; of course it is a real car as opposed to an illusionary car but still it surprised me. It made its way in traffic rather peppily and I even found its bulbous butt kinda cute. The “Zero Emission” sticker, well, ok… but have you hung around a coal fired power plant lately? The sticker is misleading and has to go.

In the mean time, big oil in Montana and North Dakota is big news and a report from NPR states the U.S. is sitting on an estimated 2 trillion barrels of crude, making the Middle East and North Africa’s combined 1.2 trillion look rather ho-hum. With BMW, Ford and Mitsubishi all coming on line with mass market electric vehicles next year, who knows? Timing is everything and there’s nothing worse than bad timing.

I’m most definitely not trading in my GTI any time soon - 39 mpg at 65 mph thank you Volkswagen - but I am going to drive a Leaf just for the heck of it. Before they blow away.

Gordon Bunker

photo thanks to ecoautoninja

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Limmer Boots


My mother once said if you can count your true friends on one hand you live a very fortunate life. On about finger number two of my second hand I count my Limmer boots (the previous six spots are occupied by people) and so, I am indeed blessed. Over a span of twenty six years they have served me through thick and thin on hiking adventures in all conditions in every mountain range of the continental United States. Every time I slip my feet into them and lace them up they feel just right, snug and good. It’s a funny thing to consider inanimate objects as friends, but in this case it’s as close a description as any of my feeling toward these boots.

Yesterday R and I went on a short hike in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to enjoy the brief and intense display of fall foliage. Entire slopes of the mountains forested in aspen are ablaze in yellow. Every hike with R is special; like me she loves to be in the mountains and comes into a natural peacefulness and stride on the trail. This hike was particularly special in that it was the first wearing her new Limmers. R has never before had a pair of boots like these.

She literally sprinted up the steep slope into the aspens. Gone was the fatigue from boots with thin soles transferring uneven surfaces into the feet. Saved was the energy spent anticipating twists and slips coming down hill in boots with little support and grip.

Taking a moment now to think of other objects as friends, there are only a couple which come to mind – a Sabatier kitchen knife, a Starrett carpenter’s square, each have been with me for the better part of thirty years – and like the Limmers their value lies in the commitment to craft made by their makers. This is immediately apparent handling these objects, and they are as much a pleasure in use today as when new… perhaps even more so.

It was a treat to watch R yesterday as she experienced the dimension a fine pair of boots adds to hiking. It appears she and her Limmers are going to be friends, for many years I hope.

Gordon Bunker