My understanding of biology, anatomy and physiology were all I needed in the science department to make my career in health and to be quite honest, after a vague grasp of why baking powder makes your baking rise and the need to cream your butter and sugar together well to make your cakes light and fluffy, I didn’t understand the physics and chemistry thing at all.
Periodic tables! (We could do with a few period tables around here but periodic ones?) E=mc² Did I ever understand that? Not a chance but apparently, E represents energy, m represents mass, and c² is a very large number, the square of the speed of light. See! Still none the wiser but as you’ll know, I woke the other week fretting about the Large Hadron Collider and the fact I am not so sure it’s a great idea to have all those particles, whatever they are, smashing at great speed, in to each other, along 70 odd miles of tunnel on the Swiss, French border. So imagine my joy to discover the experiment was switched off almost as soon as it was switched on because a faulty electrical connection apparently melted and caused the breakdown of the, the world's new highest-energy particle smasher. Blummin good job if you ask me! So it’s going to take 2 months to sort it out then! Could they make that 30 years? I might mind a bit less; if I were to disappear in to a black hole when I am 77 then I do at my tender age of 47.
Anyway what with the Credit Crunch, Christmas and the Collider all destined to be in full swing around December, I am anticipating an interesting start to the New Year! Ho! Ho! Ho!
Now, as I was saying, I have never been one much for understanding physics or chaos or quantum theory, so imagine my shock at lying in bed the other morning, after himself had climbed out of bed and was hogging the bathroom, drowsily dozing, in a state of semi wakefulness and half sleep, to realise that suddenly, I understood gravity!
Absolutely yes, it makes perfect sense! – I have accepted that the faster something moves or spins the heavier it becomes. If I drop a coin on to a table top it’ll bounce and settle. If I spin on its edge, apart from appearing to look like a complete orb, it holds fast to the table top all the time it’s spinning. If I drop a conker (fruit of the Horse Chestnut Tree for those who haven’t a clue what I am on about) on your head, it’ll hurt. If I hurl it at your head, it’ll hurt more because the impact between your head and my conker will intensified by the fact my conker is heavier the faster it moves, and so if I swing it around in a halo fashion holding the string aloft above my head and then wang it at yours you are going to bruise baby!
So I am lying there having all these cathartic moments and I realise that the earth is actually spinning really fast and because the faster something moves the heavier it is – the more difficult it is for anything on earth to float away from the surface, and the more likely it is to stick to the surface it is standing on – rather like my coin on the table top.
There you go, GRAVITY explained!
Now why couldn’t they explain that to me at school or any time since?
But more importantly, AND THIS IS THE REALLY GOOD BIT, I now understand with complete clarity, that I am not 14 stone at all! I am just moving very fast and this makes me heavier.
