Universe stuff

A newish bookshop in town offers discounts every week on certain items. Today we had a 25% off voucher. Hubby got first refusal. We came away with the Sunday Times bestseller “The Road to Reality – A complete guide to the Laws of the Universe”. It’s a modest tome of 1096 pages.

Now, I scraped a CSE in Maths. I didn’t study Physics, Chemistry or Biology beyond the age of 14. I have a respectable O level in Geology, but there is where my scientific education ends. This hasn’t stopped me being blown away by the sensational universe we live in. I still get all excited about the natural world; it has never become passé.

So, I’ve been balancing this brick of a book on my lap and grappling with the contents page (grin). I went straight to the section on Fibre Bundles (I used to call them Fur Balls to a former boyfriend who lectured on them). An aside, he was a brilliant theoretical physicist and rather good oboist to boot. Funny how clever scientists are often musical too.

Back to fur balls. I had no idea how much our universe twists and turns about. Even if you leave black holes out of the picture, there’s an awful lot of movement going on, and you can’t see any of it. And what amazes me even more, if you subtract a letter out of one of those long “in parenthesis” equations that mathematicians are so fond of, we could all vanish / get sucked into a black hole or meet ourselves coming backwards. And speaking of meeting myself coming backwards, I nearly met Mary Poppins today. We’ve had wind gusts of 78 kmh.