Well, at last i did it. Decided to throw myself back into formal learning with the Open University.
I actually started my degree a long time ago now in 2003, did a couple of modules, got lazy for a few years. Then i tried to go back but got caught up with everyday distractions so never fully committed myself.
But no more!
I am on a new course T215, and i am enjoying it at the moment to be honest. Its all about digital communications and communications technology, so very relevant to my job actually.
So first assignment is pretty much done and ready to submit for marking, a little early but if i can stay ahead of the game then that's got to be good news!
What am i aiming for you ask?
Well after another 2 years of study, i will finally be able to collect my BSc (Bachelor of Science) degree.
Over the years i have done a mixture of courses, started some others and had to leave them, but all of the courses i have done have been maths, science and technology.
I will be glad when its all over really, but i can't help thinking that i should have done it sooner and got it out of the way.
I am also applying for my CEng at the end of the year, i am already MIET but would like to further develop myself by attaining chartership.
Here's to hoping that i get somewhere with that and eventually it pays dividends.#
Chris
Saturday 11 February 2012
Monday 7 November 2011
Faster than light???
Wow!!!
Its finally happened in my lifetime, a new physics discovery, or has it?
You may have seen on the news recently that scientists based at the LHC at the CERN facility in Switzerland have successfully fired a stream of neutrinos(very, very small particles of matter) through about 700km of rock and mountains towards Italy where they were detected by an experiment called OPERA.
Ok, so what i hear you cry!
Well, they were reported to arrive around 60ns (thats 0.000000060 seconds) early. i.e. faster than light particles called photons would arrive over that distance.
You see most things we think are 'solid' like rock, and humans and other objects we use everyday are actually about 99.9% empty space. Yes thats what i said, empty space.
Well what the hell does that mean?? It means that the atoms we are made of are mostly nothing, empty. The gap between the atomic nucleus and the orbiting electrons is that large in relative terms that particles such as neutrinos usually just pass staright through as if nothing was even there. If the atom was the size of the earth a neutrino would be smaller than a grain of sand.
We are all bombarded by millions of these tiny little pieces of matter everyday but of course we do not notice them in the slightest.
So that is why neutrinos can fly through rocks pretty much unimpeded for 700km. But what does travelling faster than the speed of light(if they did that is) actually mean in reall life terms?
Well, firstly it has not been proven that they have travelled that quickly.(approx 299,792,458 m/s for light in a vacuum), but if they did indeed finish first then that has some very profound impacts on real life. Firstly it means that our entire notion of causality is affected.
If you throw a ball to someone, and they catch it. Then it is fairly intuitive to us that they can only catch it after it has been thrown. Now in 'faster than light' causality, in theory you could catch it before it left the other persons hand...........mmmmmm....
So this means in deeper terms that things like the conservation of information is affected, entropy is affected, time direction is affected. In a faster than light universe, it would be possible to in theory travel backwards in time. In practical terms it is virtually impossible, as you would still need to create an immense amount of energy to outrun the fabric of teh cosmos and possibly skip through a shortcut to get to the other side before a signal you had sent yourself via radio got there!!
So, was the experiment faulty in some way?
Well there are those that think there was some error in the GPS clocks used to calculate the speed. Errors maybe in the distance between the two marker points. Errors in the timing of when the particles left CERN and arrived in Italy?
So far though all of the error margins calculated only accounts for around 10ns of tolerance. So where did the additional 50ns come from?
Nobody knows yet is the answer, but when they do we will either be in a new dawn of physics, or where we were before which much better error calculations for such high energy experiments!
Either way we will have learnt something new.
But i hope we are in a new dawn of physics and science as a whole. The speed of light has been a cornerstone of modern physics since 1905 when Einstein published his now famous theory of special relativity.
If proved corrct, and the neutrinos did actually travel faster than light, how did they manage it?
Well, there are many theories to this to. Hidden dimensions that are so small only particels such as neutrinos could pass through them, or possibly the membrane theory that states that our reality is played out on a one dimenisonal plane called a membrane, and to jump between membranes requires very small high energy particles like neutrinos to take short cuts outside of the fabric of space-time to get from A to B.
Think of it like driving along in your car on a straight road, there is another road that takes you through a tunnel to get to the other end much faster, but the tunnel is very small and no cars will fit though. Only a motorbike could fit through. Bot travelling at the same speed, but actually travelling differnt distances is one explanation as to why neutrinos may have reached Italy ealier than expected.
Its very interesting stuff, because for the first time, if validated it may have provided actaul experimental proof of string theory's hidden dimensions.
We will only know through rigorous experiment and calculation as to whether or not it was correct. But for now, i personally would like to think that it was............
Its finally happened in my lifetime, a new physics discovery, or has it?
You may have seen on the news recently that scientists based at the LHC at the CERN facility in Switzerland have successfully fired a stream of neutrinos(very, very small particles of matter) through about 700km of rock and mountains towards Italy where they were detected by an experiment called OPERA.
Ok, so what i hear you cry!
Well, they were reported to arrive around 60ns (thats 0.000000060 seconds) early. i.e. faster than light particles called photons would arrive over that distance.
You see most things we think are 'solid' like rock, and humans and other objects we use everyday are actually about 99.9% empty space. Yes thats what i said, empty space.
Well what the hell does that mean?? It means that the atoms we are made of are mostly nothing, empty. The gap between the atomic nucleus and the orbiting electrons is that large in relative terms that particles such as neutrinos usually just pass staright through as if nothing was even there. If the atom was the size of the earth a neutrino would be smaller than a grain of sand.
We are all bombarded by millions of these tiny little pieces of matter everyday but of course we do not notice them in the slightest.
So that is why neutrinos can fly through rocks pretty much unimpeded for 700km. But what does travelling faster than the speed of light(if they did that is) actually mean in reall life terms?
Well, firstly it has not been proven that they have travelled that quickly.(approx 299,792,458 m/s for light in a vacuum), but if they did indeed finish first then that has some very profound impacts on real life. Firstly it means that our entire notion of causality is affected.
If you throw a ball to someone, and they catch it. Then it is fairly intuitive to us that they can only catch it after it has been thrown. Now in 'faster than light' causality, in theory you could catch it before it left the other persons hand...........mmmmmm....
So this means in deeper terms that things like the conservation of information is affected, entropy is affected, time direction is affected. In a faster than light universe, it would be possible to in theory travel backwards in time. In practical terms it is virtually impossible, as you would still need to create an immense amount of energy to outrun the fabric of teh cosmos and possibly skip through a shortcut to get to the other side before a signal you had sent yourself via radio got there!!
So, was the experiment faulty in some way?
Well there are those that think there was some error in the GPS clocks used to calculate the speed. Errors maybe in the distance between the two marker points. Errors in the timing of when the particles left CERN and arrived in Italy?
So far though all of the error margins calculated only accounts for around 10ns of tolerance. So where did the additional 50ns come from?
Nobody knows yet is the answer, but when they do we will either be in a new dawn of physics, or where we were before which much better error calculations for such high energy experiments!
Either way we will have learnt something new.
But i hope we are in a new dawn of physics and science as a whole. The speed of light has been a cornerstone of modern physics since 1905 when Einstein published his now famous theory of special relativity.
If proved corrct, and the neutrinos did actually travel faster than light, how did they manage it?
Well, there are many theories to this to. Hidden dimensions that are so small only particels such as neutrinos could pass through them, or possibly the membrane theory that states that our reality is played out on a one dimenisonal plane called a membrane, and to jump between membranes requires very small high energy particles like neutrinos to take short cuts outside of the fabric of space-time to get from A to B.
Think of it like driving along in your car on a straight road, there is another road that takes you through a tunnel to get to the other end much faster, but the tunnel is very small and no cars will fit though. Only a motorbike could fit through. Bot travelling at the same speed, but actually travelling differnt distances is one explanation as to why neutrinos may have reached Italy ealier than expected.
Its very interesting stuff, because for the first time, if validated it may have provided actaul experimental proof of string theory's hidden dimensions.
We will only know through rigorous experiment and calculation as to whether or not it was correct. But for now, i personally would like to think that it was............
Monday 2 May 2011
3 years later.....
Well i haven't posted anything at all for a while. I guess to be honest i had lost a little bit of interest in blogging or i just didn't have the time.
But anyway, i thought i would share another little simple lesson in life that im sure you have all come across at some point or other yourselves. Something isn't finished until you have seen it completed with your own eyes.
I was on holiday last week with wonderful weather, but the week before that i went to visit a site where we are currently working to help out for a couple of days whilst some of our engineers were testing the system. I used to work on that particular project so i have a vested interest in seeing it working correctly as most of the software running the system is mine, not all but the majority!!
It was an enjoyable couple of days for me because after 3 long years of drawings, design work, design issues, writing software and testing we have finally got to the point where it is all coming together. Thanks largely to the group of very well educated and hard working engineers configuring and testing the system on site.
Personally for me its a highlight i guess in a career by working on such a prestigous project. I can't name specifics of the project itself in terms of the technology but i can say the project is a road tunnel system for a goverment agency that will be the longest non esturial road tunnel in the UK when its open in a couple of months.
I hope it will all go smoothly for what left to do of course and soon we will start another project, although i have to say hopefully not a 3 year one! Its a long time to spend on one thing, but i have enjoyed it still and it was always challenging.
I just hope that the system will serve its new owners for many years to come without issue......Otherwise i may need to get a one way flight to the North pole...
:-)
But anyway, i thought i would share another little simple lesson in life that im sure you have all come across at some point or other yourselves. Something isn't finished until you have seen it completed with your own eyes.
I was on holiday last week with wonderful weather, but the week before that i went to visit a site where we are currently working to help out for a couple of days whilst some of our engineers were testing the system. I used to work on that particular project so i have a vested interest in seeing it working correctly as most of the software running the system is mine, not all but the majority!!
It was an enjoyable couple of days for me because after 3 long years of drawings, design work, design issues, writing software and testing we have finally got to the point where it is all coming together. Thanks largely to the group of very well educated and hard working engineers configuring and testing the system on site.
Personally for me its a highlight i guess in a career by working on such a prestigous project. I can't name specifics of the project itself in terms of the technology but i can say the project is a road tunnel system for a goverment agency that will be the longest non esturial road tunnel in the UK when its open in a couple of months.
I hope it will all go smoothly for what left to do of course and soon we will start another project, although i have to say hopefully not a 3 year one! Its a long time to spend on one thing, but i have enjoyed it still and it was always challenging.
I just hope that the system will serve its new owners for many years to come without issue......Otherwise i may need to get a one way flight to the North pole...
:-)
Friday 25 February 2011
Simulation...
Well the theme seems to be simulation at the moment.
I am very busy at work and in my job i do lots of different things, software, hardware, networks, electrical design, testing....and on etc
Some of the systems we work on are varied and as such require a bit of time to learn and as such to test, so i have this bit of a project on the go at the moment to sort out some code for a system.
I do have the target hardware or some of it at least to hand to work on bit i just thought to myself with the API document in hand, i could write a .NET simulator that could help me with this easily. So i did....
I can't really go into the details of it but needless to say it replicates the functionality of the real system quite well and should help me to test the control software form the PLC without the need to have the real target equipment always attached.
I have lots of ideas for some good software tools but as usual 2 things stop me.....
1: Lack of time due to other things on.
2: Need to learn lots of new things in order to get it working.
Not so worried about number 2 its usually number 1 that gets me everytime...
:-)
I am very busy at work and in my job i do lots of different things, software, hardware, networks, electrical design, testing....and on etc
Some of the systems we work on are varied and as such require a bit of time to learn and as such to test, so i have this bit of a project on the go at the moment to sort out some code for a system.
I do have the target hardware or some of it at least to hand to work on bit i just thought to myself with the API document in hand, i could write a .NET simulator that could help me with this easily. So i did....
I can't really go into the details of it but needless to say it replicates the functionality of the real system quite well and should help me to test the control software form the PLC without the need to have the real target equipment always attached.
I have lots of ideas for some good software tools but as usual 2 things stop me.....
1: Lack of time due to other things on.
2: Need to learn lots of new things in order to get it working.
Not so worried about number 2 its usually number 1 that gets me everytime...
:-)
Wednesday 9 February 2011
Perl's or Ruby's
No this isn't about precious stones.
I'm talking about PERL and RUBY the scripting languages.....
Trying to implement something at work at the moment which will require me learning PERL so that i can create modules to 'bolt' into our open source architecture.
Never used it before, I'm more familiar with Windows Visual Studio type languages VB.Net especially, but have done C++ in the distant past to.
Lets see how i get on........
I'm talking about PERL and RUBY the scripting languages.....
Trying to implement something at work at the moment which will require me learning PERL so that i can create modules to 'bolt' into our open source architecture.
Never used it before, I'm more familiar with Windows Visual Studio type languages VB.Net especially, but have done C++ in the distant past to.
Lets see how i get on........
Monday 7 February 2011
Its all relative...
I have many interests in my head. As you know they mainly centre around science/technology.
Physics in particular holds a special interest for me as i feel that we have the best possible chance of understanding as much as we can if we study physics.
A a professional engineer i have to be able to explain complex systems, find solutions to complex problems and sometimes explain my ideas to people at varying levels. Admittedly i do get carried away with myself sometimes and start spouting lots of analogies to explain my ideas.
It occurred to me the other day that most non engineering people and probably most people in the world to be fair would have probably heard of Albert Einstein at some point through school or their life somewhere, but it also occurred to me as i drifted off into another analogy whilst talking to a colleague at work that although most people could probably tell you what Albert Einstein was in terms of him being a physicist, but probably couldn't really tell you much more than that.
Maybe a few could pick out the famous equivalence of mass and energy equation(E=mc^2), but i wonder how many of that smaller group could tell you about any of the other extremely profound work he did?
One such area of work was called 'Special relativity'.
I remember the day well that i first came across special relativity(special because it omits the force of gravity as an influence). I read it, then read it again, then read it again and thought what??
This can't be right......
But of course it was, i wasn't questioning the great man's work, who am i to do that. What i was doing was struggling to understand the awesome impact on the world around me as i knew it.
Time as i knew it and as we all know it was not constant...........
For the physics bods out there, this of course is nothing that you already do not know. However the main purpose of this blog is to interface engineers, scientists and others that are interested but do not work or study these things together to explore their own understanding.
So back to the time thing.....
As an engineer i quickly got my head around the applications of this profound insight, but can you imagine what most people must think.
If you asked most people on the street what is the time they will tell you, but if you said did you know that time is not the same for everything? i.e. there is no universal time.......what would they say back?
An interesting experiment that could be.
In a nutshell the faster you travel relative to something else travelling slower the the slower time ticks past. This is a real phenomenon that happens to us all everyday, its just that it is so small with the normal velocities that we are dealing with that we do not notice it.
However, we can still use a real everyday example.
You and your friend set your super accurate watches together so that they are synchronised to a few millionths of a second.
You fly on an aeroplane from the UK to the US then fly back again afterwards, whilst your friend stays in the UK.
Even at a average speed of about 600mph you are travelling fast enough to make a discernible difference, on your return you check the watches still agree........
They do not!!
They may only differ by fractions of a second but its there in front of you for all to see, your watch is slow compared to your friends watch and therefore ticked slower than your friends watch.
In technical terms it is called time dilation, in theory if you could travel at the speed of light which is 299,792,458 m/s (in a vacuum) then time would according to SR stand still!!!
OMG.....That's crazy right?
For me SR has got to be one of the most interesting 'classical' theories of physics even though it is over 100 years old it still never ceases to amaze me.
Physics in particular holds a special interest for me as i feel that we have the best possible chance of understanding as much as we can if we study physics.
A a professional engineer i have to be able to explain complex systems, find solutions to complex problems and sometimes explain my ideas to people at varying levels. Admittedly i do get carried away with myself sometimes and start spouting lots of analogies to explain my ideas.
It occurred to me the other day that most non engineering people and probably most people in the world to be fair would have probably heard of Albert Einstein at some point through school or their life somewhere, but it also occurred to me as i drifted off into another analogy whilst talking to a colleague at work that although most people could probably tell you what Albert Einstein was in terms of him being a physicist, but probably couldn't really tell you much more than that.
Maybe a few could pick out the famous equivalence of mass and energy equation(E=mc^2), but i wonder how many of that smaller group could tell you about any of the other extremely profound work he did?
One such area of work was called 'Special relativity'.
I remember the day well that i first came across special relativity(special because it omits the force of gravity as an influence). I read it, then read it again, then read it again and thought what??
This can't be right......
But of course it was, i wasn't questioning the great man's work, who am i to do that. What i was doing was struggling to understand the awesome impact on the world around me as i knew it.
Time as i knew it and as we all know it was not constant...........
For the physics bods out there, this of course is nothing that you already do not know. However the main purpose of this blog is to interface engineers, scientists and others that are interested but do not work or study these things together to explore their own understanding.
So back to the time thing.....
As an engineer i quickly got my head around the applications of this profound insight, but can you imagine what most people must think.
If you asked most people on the street what is the time they will tell you, but if you said did you know that time is not the same for everything? i.e. there is no universal time.......what would they say back?
An interesting experiment that could be.
In a nutshell the faster you travel relative to something else travelling slower the the slower time ticks past. This is a real phenomenon that happens to us all everyday, its just that it is so small with the normal velocities that we are dealing with that we do not notice it.
However, we can still use a real everyday example.
You and your friend set your super accurate watches together so that they are synchronised to a few millionths of a second.
You fly on an aeroplane from the UK to the US then fly back again afterwards, whilst your friend stays in the UK.
Even at a average speed of about 600mph you are travelling fast enough to make a discernible difference, on your return you check the watches still agree........
They do not!!
They may only differ by fractions of a second but its there in front of you for all to see, your watch is slow compared to your friends watch and therefore ticked slower than your friends watch.
In technical terms it is called time dilation, in theory if you could travel at the speed of light which is 299,792,458 m/s (in a vacuum) then time would according to SR stand still!!!
OMG.....That's crazy right?
For me SR has got to be one of the most interesting 'classical' theories of physics even though it is over 100 years old it still never ceases to amaze me.
Smashing limits
I found this article today on the BBC news website, link is below check it out:
Looks like a really interesting concept, especially the 'active windscreen' technology. Almost like a HUD(Heads up display) for drivers similar to that of a fighter pilot.
Using camera and sensor technology to actually project an image onto the windscreen to aid the driver in seeing the edge of the road in foggy or low visibility conditions.
Nice one GMC & Volvo!
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