A speculative mind

I have recently had the opportunity to visit London, Paris, and Edinburgh. That is why my blog has been absent the past couple of weeks. One of the things my wife and I did was to ride the Eurostar train from London to Paris (through the “chunnel”). Something that struck me, is the similarity between a high speed train and an airliner. The interior cabin looks very similar. Walking into the train, if you didn’t know better you might think you were on a plane. But it is the external appearance that I want to talk about. Both the high speed train and the airplane need to be streamlined to minimize wind resistance. You don’t want a lot of wind resistance (except under the plane’s wing where wind resistance is a good thing). The streamlined design carries with it an inherent beauty, symmetry and smooth lines. Space ships also need a streamlined shape if they are going to be travelling through an atmosphere. But if they are not going to be travelling through an atmosphere, they ca...

How can a children’s nursery rhyme teach you about the laws of Thermodynamics? “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.” This is an illustration of the second law of thermos dynamics. “All the King’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.” This is an illustration of the first law of thermodynamics. Let’s look at Humpty falling down first. In short, things fall down; they don’t fall up. Left to their own devices, things always eventually proceed from energy states of higher order to energy states of lower order. When Humpty is sitting on the wall, he (is Humpty a he? I don’t know that Humpty’s gender has ever been definitively stated) he has potential energy. In the act of falling, Humpty has kinetic energy, the energy of motion. When Humpty comes to the big stop at the end he becomes less orderly. Yeah, in fact he is a mess. But also the kinetic energy is converted to heat (infrared radiation) which is the least orderly state of...

The paperback version of my novel Star Liner came out a month ago and this allowed a number of my friends (who won’t read ebooks) a chance to read and comment on it. One of them said something to me the other day that struck home. The novel is a science fiction space opera that is part murder mystery and part action/adventure. But she said it seemed to her that there was an underlying theme to the novel. It is about art. Even though I was not consciously trying to make a statement about art, it is there. I can see what she means. In some ways even though the story of Star Liner takes place centuries into the future, in some ways it is similar to our own. Jan, my main character, is an artist. I am using artist in a broad sense to encompass any form of artistic endeavor. Jan himself is a singer and actor, but it would not matter if he were a painter, composer, sculptor, or a poet. The same problem faces artists of his century that face artists in our own time: it is really ha...