After I finish tomorrow I’m not in at work again until Wednesday so I’m back to my most time consuming astronomy related activity; checking weather forecasts. I’m not liking what I’m finding. All my least favourite things are there, cloud, wind, rain, snow, looks like there might be a short window around midday on Monday when a clear sky could appear! It’s not true about snow, I really like snow as I’m just a big kid really!
It’s looks like I’m going to have chance to break the back of my current OU course if I can’t get the ‘scope out, which is not a bad second prize as I’m enjoying the work, but also feeling like something of an old fart. There are kids still at school doing the same course who pop up on the OU forums from time to time, reminding me how long it is since I was at school, and appear to carry around information in their heads, such as the value of Avogadro’s Number, that I know I’m not going to bring to the course. Rather disappointingly it seems that advances in physics did not stop the moment I left full time education; for instance I don’t remember it ever being suggested to me, even as a theory up to circa 1975 A level physics, that there could be a particle that could carry +/-2 charge, yet this seems clear from quantum physics, three up quarks or down quarks = a baryon with +2 or -2 charge and is something called a Delta particle, very short lived with a decay period of 6x10-23s, which is where Avogadro’s Number comes in as it’s very similar at 6x1023. Purely coincidental but you never know when such a correlation may have relevance and if you don’t have this data to hand then you’re never going to spot it. All in all it’s great to be learning new stuff but worrying to contemplate what holes there may be in my knowledge, which is turning out to be even more limited than I imagined, that the people who prepare the course assume to be general knowledge?
