Last Thursday I was standing at the same bus stop waiting for the
number 10 to the JR and Marston when the strangest thing happened.
A young lady pushing a buggy came
round the corner in a bit of a hurry, nearly knocking over the old lady
in front of me. The young mother mumbled an apology and hurried off to
her late appointment. It struck me at the time that the baby in the
buggy seemed rather large and I considered idly, that perhaps the
near-miss had been caused by the simple fact that it must have been
quite a job for the mum to control the heavy buggy coming down a steep hill. Imagine if she had tripped on a paving stone and let
the buggy go for a second......Our bus stop is on a very busy road.
It has often been said that you hear a new word or idea one day and then you find that for the next few days you are coming across the same word so many times it is unbelievable. The same thing happens when you buy a new car/dress/jacket. You suddenly find that the whole world is full of stuff similar to yours that you had never noticed. Well to cut a long story short I switched on the telly at my mistress's flat that evening and there was this boring science programme about mechanics, velocity, motion etc etc.
Don't get me wrong, I used to like physics way, way back in Form Two and the principal reason was one bright sweet lady called Condoleezza Ajiambo. She was the light of the class, no, of the school. She defied the old physics formula that was inscribed in every school boys heart that Beauty X Brains = a Constant. She was clever, witty and pretty and had what is sometimes referred to as a GSOH. Everyone liked to be near her and I loved the physics master because he had instructed me, the slowest in uptake to sit next to her in the Physics lab.
The master himself was a phenomenon. I think he had taught Einstein most of what he knew. This guy looked the part of the 101% nerd. He even wore those check jackets with elbow pads. In his lab he was King. If you asked him a question he would swing round on his heels, cowboy fashion and armed with a chalk he produced Egyptian, Chinese and Ethiopian -looking characters on the black board. He would tweak them here, cross-out there and adjust there and in a few minutes he would unveil another masterpiece of an equation. He was a judge at the famous Science Congress outings....remember those?
One morning, after another satisfactory equation exhibition, Master asked if there were any questions. Ms Ajiambo, or Condi, as we called her stood up and asked "So mwalimu, how do you think the world will end?"
The teacher smiled, pulled out another piece of chalk and said," There are many ways in which the world can end but my favourite are as follows:
"
He swung on his heels to face the board and wrote:
1 The sun burns itself out so that the earth has no source of energy and life, as we know it ceases to exist
2 A most powerful volcanic erruption that would crack the earth's core killing most life on the planet.
3 My worst scenario is the case of an unstoppable body moving fast towards an immoveable body.
The teacher explained that outer space was full of debris from the break up of other heavenly bodies. This debris travelled at "astronomical speeds" and if even one such body say about a quarter of the size of our moon was to crash into the earth.......He ended by saying that even now as we spoke there were many objects speeding through the universe on a collision course with our planet. Impact was assured. It was simply a question of when this would happen.
Much time has passed between us and I wish I could see Condi now. I wish I could just ask her whether the GW Bush foreign policy can be compared to an un-stoppable object?. If we were to say that Iran is the immoveable object is there an equation that one could solve in order to predict the consequences of a collision?
My mistress called to me from the bedroom and reminded me to put the cat outside before I went in to bed.
Trackback(0)
 |
TrackBack URI for this entry
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Show/Hide comments
Show/Hide comment form
Alexander