Come Shine but NOT Rain!

NB - ANOTHER subjective post - I shall have to curtail this annoying habit!



Well, the chap on the left had it "right" tonight!

His name is Marcos Baghdatis and he is from Cyprus. His tennis game has now won him a place in the Final of the Australian Open Tennis Tournament.

However, not before high drama.



In the final set, serving for the match, something even more incredible happened.

Rain interrupted play on a Tennis stadium with a roof.

Allow me to repeat that.

RAIN interrupted play on a Tennis stadium with a roof.

One of the most expensive and luxurious stadia in Tennis History, the Rod Laver Arena, in Melbourne Park, Australia, equipped with a retractable roof, had to halt play because the roof was open and nobody noticed that rain was imminent.

The rain drenched the central portion of the court.

Now, indoor courts are designed to be just that - INDOORS. This one, however, has a roof which can be opened to the summer (daylight) sky.

At the most crucial point in the match, the weather people were obviously watching The Match rather than the clouds, because the heavens opened and rain stopped play - on an INDOOR court!

What must poor little Michaella Krajicek be thinking?


(This post is unrefined - It stil needs vernacular adjustments. Does not say what it needs to say yet.)

Come Rain but NOT Shine!

NB This post is purely subjective



Isn't it ironic, that rain can halt play in a tennis tournament, but extreme heat cannot?

Granted, at the Australian Open this year, they have an Extreme Heat policy, which means play is halted if the temperature gets too high.

However, it obviously didn't work for poor Michaella Krajicek, right, who was forced to retire from heat exhaustion today.

Strikes me as wholly unjust when, if rain falls, play is halted, even though there is no danger to the players' health, yet, in extreme heat, play continues, despite the fact it is not the ability to play that is hampered, but the players' health.

Today , Ms Krajicek had to play until she fell ill, when play should have been stopped because of the heat by the Tournament Referee, Peter MacNamee.

On her doctor's advice, she was forced to choose not to play, the result being a forfeit, ie she lost the match.

No match , as far as I know, has ever been forfeited due to the effects of mere rain.

Such "weatherism" should be outlawed!

On Firmly Inedecipherable Prepositions of Mathematics and Related Systems

For those who like logic paradoxes, this one is a beaut, Bruce. It is called

THE PARADOX OF THE UNEXPECTED HANGING.

It concerns a condemned prisoner and his Judge. The man, already sentenced to death by hanging, is told two things by the Judge.

1) “You will be hanged at noon on one day of next week, Monday through Friday.”
2) “The execution will be a surprise to you: You won’t know the day of the hanging until the executioner knocks on your cell door at 1155 on the day of the hanging.”

In his cell, the prisoner reflects thus:

“I can’t be hanged on Friday, since by Thursday night I will know that I will be hanged Friday, so it won’t be a surprise. “

He smiles.

“So if the hanging is not on Friday, it cannot be on Thursday either, since by Wednesday night I will also know that my execution will be on Thursday. “

His smile broadens.

It broadens further when he realises he can extend this logic right up to Monday, coming to the fabulous conclusion that he cannot possibly be hanged at all, because the Judge apparently has made an erroneous statement.

He is really smiling now.

However, he actually has to go beyond surprise into astonishment when, on Tuesday at 1155, the executioner turns up and he is hanged at noon, expiring with the most comical look of surprise on his face you have ever seen.

So what was wrong with the prisoner’s argument? Did the Judge make an erroneous statement? The sentence was carried out to the letter, all in accordance with the Judge’s two statements, yet the prisoner’s logic seems ironclad.

Much has been written about this paradox, and I have my own take on it.

However, surprisingly enough, I will await the comments of those in the know before divulgence.

The True Nature of the Force

One of the most amazing discoveries in all of science, let alone physics, is the discovery of the speed of light.

Yes, I did say "discovery", even though the speed of light had been known (approximately) for many years prior.

For many years, science thought it knew most of electricity and magnetism, that they were deeply related, etc.

So, we continued our research whilst the other guys were measuring the speed of light with varying degrees of accuracy. They usually got about 300,000 km per second.

Meanwhile, us lab physicists continued to study electricity and magnetism. We even discovered two numbers which seemed to be the same for empty space. That is, through our experiments, we got two constants referring to the properties of empty space, as witnessed by electricity and magnetism respectively. The electric one was called "epsilon-0" and the magnetic one "nu-0". In English, they are the "permittivity" and the "permeability" of free space. Once measured, with known values of the other numbers in the experiments, we could go ahead and calculate what would happen if we didn't know all the other numbers.

Meanwhile, the light-speed measuring people found that now, it was clear that the speed of light was a little LESS than 300,000 km per second, something like 299,000.

Then, in 1865, along came James Clerk Maxwell. He thought it might be a good idea to come up with THE set of equations which completely defined electricity and magnetism, or "electromagnetism", as he called it. He believed that they were just manifestations of the same thing. After the research, his equations seemed to lack something. They were not symmetrical. So, he made a correction (it is called "displacement current" now, but to us cynics, a "fudge" would perhaps be more appropriate - as any South Korean stem-cell research scientist would know).

Anyway, this "correction" made a whole, complete set of 4 symmetric equations, one of which (div B =0) predicted that magnetic monopoles did not exist.

A prediction of one of the other equations proved interesting as well. It predicted that under some circustances electric circuits will radiate self-propogating waves out into empty space in all directions, the speed of which was defined by those two constants mentioned earlier. More specifically, these waves would travel at a speed

s = 1/ SQRT(nu-0*epsilon-0)

Mr maxwell was excited. He plugged the known values of the permeability and permittivity into the above equation. as determned by electric and magnetic experiments, turned the handle, and came up with another constant, s, the speed of these new "waves".

He got this:

s = (approximately) 299,790 km per second.

Wait a minute minute! Isn't that the the latest figure for the speed of light our other chaps are trying to measure?

NOW we know what light is! It is simply an electromagnetic wave, of which many more have since been discovered. Radio, radar, microwaves, X-rays, gamma-rays, uv, infra-red, tv, all are part of what we now know to be the "electromagnetic spectrum", where the differents bits named above, differ only in wavelength. Oh, and there is the visible bit , too, that part which we see with our eyes, otherwise konwn as "light".

And all travel at one speed in empty space, 299,799 km per second, which we now call "c".

The implications that "c" was a derived quantity from other constants, and therefore a universal constant in itself, were not realised until Einstein started to address them in 1905, under Special Relativity, but that is another topic and post!

Marry Charisma's!

2006 is upon us and this blog is seriously out of date. The latest post is dated October 15, and is below the 3-jet post. I still have to figure out why.

Meanwhile, checkout my latest brain-teaser.....

"How many people do you have to invite to a party to be able to say there's more than a 50-50 chance of any two having the same birthday?"

Whilst thoughts abound on that, I will be trying to think of more thunks to think a thunking thing about, that "wioll haven be" a new and pointed post about physics.

10 bonus points for those who can suss where "and how" "wioll haven be" came from.

20 bonus points for identifying where "and how" came from!

How times have changed!