Category Archives: United Kingdom

National Trust, Greys Court and the Polestar

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R and I went for a trip to the National Trust house of Greys Court on a bright and sunny day. Today was a little warmer than we’ve been used to, so very pleasant. Yes more days without rain, but with a cool Northerly wind. The fields were very hard and dry. We visited to see the bluebells, unfortunately, they were not quite their best, but another week and they should be. The formal gardens were looking very pretty. We took a long slow walk across the fields to the bluebell woods, eating our Cornish Pasty lunch on some old decaying logs. Back at the house we managed our second cup of tea, served a great deal faster than our morning coffee.

This was also the longest trip in my new electric car. No need for range anxiety as the return trip was only 64 miles, giving an estimated range of 237 miles.

Southwold Birthday Treat

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At last, we had a few days away from home in our home from home campervan. The second time we have been away this year. We did manage a break to Iceland just before the first Lockdown. Now we were away to Southwold to celebrate my Birthday, again a couple of weeks before the second Lockdown. Last year I spent more than 60 nights in the campervan, Rosemary a few days less (fewer festivals}. This year the campervan has not been used for a whole year, (yes, my last birthday was the last time Morrison the campervan was used.) The VW has been regularly charged and goes for a short drive every month or so when it is dry to stop the wheels going square.

The VW has still cost money for maintenance during that period.

  • A repair to the screen washer pipes, the existing pipe was fragile and the constant opening and closing of the bonnet (hood) caused the washer pipe to break. This is something I could fix, with the aid of YouTube and eBay.
  • The time the bonnet (hood) locked firmly shut, so it had to go to the local garage to be freed and a new locking mechanism inserted. YouTube did not come up trumps, a video of someone cutting a hole through the bonnet to release the catch did not seem the way to go. Instead, it went on a ramp, and our white knight engineer managed to release the catch from underneath.
  • The time I decided to see if I could get the spare wheel off, and grease the spare wheel locking nuts. Of course, a weld failed which held the thread to cradle, and the wheel was no longer secure. Another visit to the garage for some simple welding.

But now we were away for three nights away. We set off early, at 7.am so we could go to St Peter’s Church in Wenhaston for prayer time. Wenhaston is very close to Southwold and Blythburgh. The church has an amazing five-hundred-year Doom Painting of the Last Judgement. The Doom Painting was discovered in 1892 when the chancel was being restored. Some old whitewashed wooden boards blocking the upper part of an arch were removed and thrown out into the churchyard ready to be burnt. Overnight there was a torrential rainstorm and some of the whitewash was washed off, revealing the paintings below. The paintings created a stir among students of late medieval art. The painting was probably created between 1500, and 1520. Some of the details in the painting are intriguing. Look for the imps taking a ride in the scales weighing the good deeds against the bad deeds. The detail eyebrows of the devil. We had the church to ourselves with the vicar, who pointed out the details and explained the history.

Our next stop was the Harbour Inn on the Blackshore in Southwold. Arrived a bit early for lunch, so a coffee outside while we ordered. Thankfully we were early so they could feed us with their reduced seating. I ate a grilled pair of slip soles, caper & cockle butter, Wangford greens, new potatoes. After lunch, we drove into Southwold and had a wander around. Then we went on to the campsite and set up. Afterwards, we walked back into Southwold and visited the pier. We were surprised at how nice the pier was. We were taken by the painting of George Orwell, not knowing he had lived in Southwold. There was also the slightly rude clock sponsored by Thames Water.

The marshes, fields and estuaries were covered with Geese, who would on occasion move off to another location with a loud noise.

Saturday was my birthday, so after opening cards and eating breakfast, we went for a walk into town across the golf course. We arrived at the Swan Hotel for our prebooked lunch. Started off with a pre-prandial drink, Negroni (well, variation thereof) of course and a G&T (First Rate) for the lady (Rosemary). I went very fowl for my meal, eating roulade of pigeon, baby leek, poached plum with hazelnut for starters, and breast of guinea fowl, braised flaked leg, roscoff onion, carrot, pickled blackberries and gel, and watercress for the main course. Rosemary ate roast Suffolk chicken breast, radicchio, pickled enoki mushrooms, pear, barley, pancetta salad with maple dressing for her main course. I finished the event with a number of Suffolk cheeses.

We walked back slowly to our van, for the rest of the day, somehow avoiding the early evening torrential rain & high winds.

Sunday was another fine day, the rain obliged to fall during the night. We went for a walk along the river Blyth and ended up walking to Old Hall Cafe and Walks. They were extremely busy with their all-day breakfast. We didn’t need a great deal, tea had been booked at The Swan, so opted for a cappuccino, and a (very good) sausage roll. The walk along the Blyth was fascinating, the waders, old windmills, and the farmland seemingly below sea level.

We walked on, heading for The Swan (again!) for tea, where we met up with Bob and Liz. The tea was one of those affairs where you get plate loads of savoury dishes, follow by plate loads of sweet dishes. The Scotch egg was excellent, cooked with savoury herbs. It was so yummy. We did go away with our doggy bag which I used for my late evening meal back in the campervan.

Oxford and Cambridge Weekend

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Saturday – Oxford Conference

For several years we have been meaning to attend a one day conference at Oxford University on various topics concerned with the History and Philosophy of Physics. These conferences run about three times a year and are organised by the Post Graduate college of St Cross. They appear to be open to anyone.

We dutifully made full use of our old people’s bus passes and parked at the Bicester Park and Ride (still free) and took the S5 into Oxford. We walked to the Martin Woods Lecture Theatre for our days’ conference on The Rise of Big Science in Physics.

Big Physics: The Manhattan Project

The first session was a history lesson given by Professor Helge Kragh from the Niels Bohr Institute. This lecture charted the history of Big Science before, after and including the Manhatten Project. We heard about the Leviathan of Parsonstown, a large telescope built by William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse which was the largest telescope in the world from 1845 to 1917.

The liquefaction of Helium was an expensive project first undertaken by Kamerlingh Onnes. In 1904 he founded a very large cryogenics laboratory and invited other researchers to the location. In 1908 he was the first to liquify helium. He also discovered superconductivity and superfluity during this research.

Big science ramped up in cost when high energy synchrotrons were built. These were necessary to understand the building blocks of life. They became more costly as they became more and more powerful.

During the war, the Manhattan Project to build the Nuclear bomb was an expensive project, which involved organisations from across America. In today’s money, this project cost $20 billion. Huge industrial plants were built to separate the uranium isotopes.

We heard how the Americans led the high energy physics until the Europeans got together after the war, coordinated and jointly funded CERN to build powerful cyclotrons. We also learnt a little about the Russians and their spying.

CERN

Dr Isabelle Wingerter from the French National Centre for Scientific Research talked about CERN, and the Large Hadron Collider built to find the Higgs Boson particle. Listening to her talk, you became amazed how these large projects are run. How technology advances during the build, and how the documentation and project management must be an absolute nightmare. Definitely going to visit CERN when we are in the area again.

ITER

Next up was Bernard Bigot, the director-general of the ITER project. ITER is a Nuclear Fusion reactor being built in France. It will be the model for commercial reactors and should be the first reactor to generate more power than put in.

The project is funded by China, EU, Japan, Korea, Russia and the USA. Components for the reactor are built in all the counties and shipped to France to be assembled. The agreement to build the reactor was signed in 2006. All members of the project share all the intellectual property rights generated by the project. The UK participates, and the fusion reactor at Culham is used to prototype technologies to be used in ITER.

This reactor should generate 500MW for 50 MW put in. Commercial reactors will be larger. The reactor works at high temperatures and uses a magnetic field to keep the plasm in place, The device is huge, with 18 Toroidal Field Coils weighing 360 tons each. They are built to a precision of 0.2 mm. The central solenoid is 1,000 tonnes and powerful enough to lift an aircraft carrier out of the water.

The work is progressing on time, work started on site in April 2014. The next two years are crucial with most of the large components being delivered and installed. Then comes the long few years in commissioning the equipment. The first plasm should be generated in December 2025.

Lunch

We left for lunch and had soup at the Pitt Rivers Museum. The queue was busy when we arrived. A few from the conference were there also. A thought, each session of the conference was around 30 minutes, with questions afterwards. Some of the questions were rather bizarre. One attendee was asking about documentation, and how to get these large projects documented. He found nobody wanted to update the Wikis. Isabelle said there was nothing better than human interaction and meetings. But what happens years down the line when everyone has left.

Interesting to hear how the published papers now had hundreds to thousands of names as authors. These were the researchers, but not the technicians who built. operated and serviced the machines.

ASTRON

Professor Carole Jackson from Astron, The Netherlands Institute of Radio Astronomy talked about the mega projects in Astronomy. Here we learnt about the creation of NASA and how they were the birthplace of big astronomical projects. We again heard about the hyper authors, with over a thousand authors named on a paper.

As well as building large radio telescopes, there is collaborative research where telescopes are linked together across the world to make one large machine. Pure Science research requires global participation.

Look Ahead at the Next Decade

Dr Michael Banks a journalist from Physics World, Institute of Physic Publishing, took a look into the next decade.

In 2021 we should have the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. This will work in the Infrared and is a joint project from NASA, EAS and CSA. $8.8 billion

2025 The European Extremely large telescope with a 39.9-meter diameter dish. This will be used to searching for exo planets. $1 billion.

The Square Kilometre Array, thousands of radio antenna, building in South Africa and Australia. (low radio interference) $1 billion

2027 Long baseline Neutrino Facility. A proton accelerator and neutrino detector. Built-in Fermilab and Sanford. To detect the symmetry violations in antimatter. 180 organisations including CERN. Cost $1.5 billion

2027 Hyper Kaniokande, 260,000 tons of pure water in a mine in Japan to detect the symmetry violation of neutrinos. Why is there more matter than antimatter? $0.8 billion.

2035? International Linear Accelerator. 20 km accelerator (250GeV) with two detectors. To study the Higgs Boson in greater detail. To be built in Japan, $7.5 billion

2040? Compact Linear Accelerator 11 km tunnel (380GeV) CERN, further study of the Higgs Boson. $6.0 billion

2040? Future Circular Collider. 100 km tunnel, first stage 250GeV, then 100TeV with protons. Higgs Boson and look for further particles. $9-25 billion

Tea

Tea was taken in the Physics Department. Chatted with a couple of attendees. One was a questioner, who had a bone to pick on documentation. Hopefully, he won’t be at the evening meal.

Closing

Professor Frank Close closed the proceedings with a summary of the days’ events.

Conference Dinner

Dinner was held at St Cross College. We arrived in plenty of time and sat in the Common Room waiting for pre-dinner drinks. Close examination of the pictures on the wall, which had all been bought in a few years from a bequest. The College was founded in 1965, admitting its first five graduate students a year later. The College moved to its present location on St Giles in 1981.

After preprandial drinks, we went into dinner. Rosemary and I seemed to be seated in quite a good position on the table. Near to the organisers and some of the speakers. Our dinner, which included wine was.

Twice-baked cheddar souffle
Confit of duck with spiced plums, celeriac mash and flageolet bean ragout.
Vanilla baked cheesecake with roasted spiced plums
Coffee, mints & petit fours

It was an enjoyable evening with lots of conversation. We left and caught the S5 bus home. Busses seem to run late into the evening and well past midnight in Oxfordshire.

Sunday – Cambridge Society

Next day was the Berkshire branch of the Cambridge Society AGM. It had been scheduled to be the last AGM. This was to be the winding up AGM as there was no one wanting to stand as committee members. Thankfully two new members were found and we are going forward.

The meeting was held at Hurley Village Hall. We held the AGM, over quite quickly. We then ate lunch, each of has brought along a dish. Then there was a talk on a cruise from the UK, to France around Spain and back again. This did not persuade Rosemary to undertake any more cruises. We might visit Bordeaux though.

I came away not a member of the committee. We were asked to look at whether it was possible to organise a tour of the Space Centre at Wescott.

Tesco Vegan Breakfast

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The cafe in the Tesco at Bicester is so much better than the cafe in the Aylesbury Tesco. The Bicester Tesco has cooked breakfast, ideal for morning sustenance while Rosemary is doing the weekly shop. They recently launched their vegan breakfast which comprises two vegetarian sausages, half an avocado, baked-beans, mushroom, tomato, toast and some steamed green leaves (spinach??).

The breakfast took a long time arriving, much longer than a traditional breakfast. I assume this was because the food had to be prepared fresh, and not from a range of food already prepared, or at least cooking on already hot griddles.

So what did it taste like?

The sausages were fine, avocado was good, spiced with some black pepper. Beans, can’t go wrong. The mushroom and tomato could have booked cooked longer with more oil. The toast was OK. The steamed green leaves were bitter and not at all nice.

Would I have this again? No, the cooked standard breakfast was so much nicer than this. I don’t have an issue with vegan foods, just I don’t think you should try and make a pretend English breakfast from vegetable ingredients. Some hummus and toast would have been so much better.

(In case anyone is thinking what a swine I am to be eating while R is food shopping, I should say I go with her blessing. In fact, she positively herds me towards the cafe. Apparently, I become irritating if I walk around with her. (So you know what to do, chaps…..)