Chapter 25

Stumped:

It has been suggested to me in the past that I am a very lazy fellow. I cannot dispute this since I am quite capable of sleeping about twenty hours a day. Well that isn’t quite true in fact. The truth is that I am quite happy to lie down and rest my body for that sort of time but my mind is not resting.

I am thinking.

My most productive thinking is done when I am in that half conscious, semi-dream world that comes with being relaxed. My best ideas occur in the early morning when I am not still asleep but not yet really awake. I probably have good ideas in the evenings too but they have usually dissolved by morning. As I grow older I find that I can approximate to this situation by dozing at any time of day.

Today it is the seventeenth of March in the year two thousand and ten. I note this since I wish to register my latest invention.

About twenty years ago I got interested in astronomy, an interest which abides. Now astronomers need telescopes and being a reasonably practical man I though about the problems of making one.

My good friend Tony being more practical than I set about the task of grinding the mirror required for a reflector telescope.

The process is simple but arduous, One takes a slab of glass, sticks it on a rotating surface, like a potter’s wheel, applies some grinding paste and begins rubbing across the surface, rotating the wheel in small increments. Because one is grinding the centre at every stroke and the edge only when it is in line with your action the result is to produce a pretty accurate parabolic dish which is exactly what a Newtonian reflecting telescope needs. By successively using finer grinding pastes one eventually gets a surface smooth enough to apply a mirrored surface to.

Tony spent many happy hours at this work and got to the stage where the grinding medium was about as fine as flour. It was at this stage that his smoking habit caught up with him. He dropped some ash from his cigarette onto the beautifully smooth parabolic glass surface and ground a huge deep scar across his hundreds of hours work. He gave up and I daresay his nearly finished Newtonian objective is gathering dust (shock horror!) in his loft or garage.

It was about then that I reckoned there had to be a better way to do it. I came up with the following brilliant idea. Why not put the glass in a couple of inches high flat circular baking tray. Rig it up to a motor to spin it and heat it till it melts. Simple maths shows that if this is then rotated then the glass will flow to make a parabolic surface. A bit like stirring a cup of tea really. Cool it gently and voila! The perfect base for a parabolic reflector mirror.

“It won’t work” said my friend.
Well actually it will, not that I ever got round to it myself. In fact I discovered later that that is exactly how some very large telescope mirrors are made. I was pleased to discover this but also a bit miffed that I had been beaten to the idea. Perhaps Richard Sheldrake is right .

On a trip to Canada umpteen years ago I noticed that they don’t use cats-eyes on the roads. This struck me as silly because they are such a marvellous aid to following a traffic lane or indeed to prevent one running off a road altogether. Later that year after some heavy snow in Wales I was driving to Aberdaron when I suddenly realised why Canada doesn’t use cats-eyes. In the centre of the road there were large numbers of new bits of tar. These filled the holes where the snowploughs had excavated the cats-eyes. Of course, cats-eyes stick out above the surface of the road and are only too easily destroyed by snowploughs.

The solution is obvious. Design a cats-eye which sits flush with the road surface. I have sketched these out many times and I really don’t see a problem. Has somebody else beaten me to it? I don’t know but I have never seen them in use.

There has been a lot of cricket on the tele here for the last few weeks and I have to admit to being an addict. I love it in all its various formats. The fact that I was born in the village of Hambledon in Hampshire might have something to do with it. (Look it up on the net if you don’t know why?).
Having spent a career as some sort of a scientist I am of course intrigued by the technology now being used to prevent umpiring mistakes. The clickometer, the slow-motion replays, the hot-spot camera etc have all made, in my view, a positive contribution to the game.
This afternoon whilst lying, half asleep on my bed I suddenly had a good idea. When a batsman is run out, the wicket has to be broken before any part of him, usually his bat, is grounded within the crease. Slow motion replays are often used to assess this. It must be seen that a bail has been removed before he makes his ground. The camera is good at this but quite often the definitive action takes place between camera frames and it is very difficult to see exactly when a bail leaves the stumps. The batsmen then should be given the benefit of the doubt.

My idea is this. Place the bails on micro-switches in the stumps such that a circuit is made whenever a bail is displaced. Just set it up to a transmitter or even a buzzer. That has just got to be easy to do. It would give the precise moment when the wicket was broken. It would operate like a clickometer which shows whether the batman actually made contact with the ball or not.

I expect, as with most of my ideas, it has been done. I am, sort of, getting used to that but if so why don’t they use it!