Electric Wheels

My lifestyle will be changing tomorrow. I’ve never been a petrol-head but the internal combustion engine has been part of my life ever since I passed my driving test nearly 53 years ago. The family vehicle for the last six years has been an Alfa Romeo Brera. It’s a lovely car which I’ve enjoyed driving. Driving is usually a rubbish experience nowadays so you might as well do in in something which is fun to drive. Four or five years ago we bought an elderly camper van and that was a very rewarding lifestyle change, especially for the dog who enjoys it even more than we do.

The Alfa was getting a bit long in the tooth, the back seat was very cramped for the odd occasions when we gave people lifts and my grandchildren complained about having to get in through the wide, heavy doors. My wife started saying “you’ll have to get an ordinary car next time”. Oh dear.

Then we started thinking about how we use vehicles. We use the camper van for holidays and for carting around large objects while the Alfa is rarely used for long journeys. My son started the rot when he described being taken out in his boss’s new Tesla. I had a look at one in a showroom and decided that the only thing wrong with it was that we didn’t have £80k to spare. But when I look under the bonnet of the Alfa (or the camper van, to be fair) and see all the oil, water and petrol systems, and think about how a reciprocating engine works, and the clutch, and the gearbox, then the simplicity of an electric car looks rather attractive.

What started as a bit of a joke turned into something more serious. We have the camper van for long journeys and the thought of being able to cope with a range of 80-100 miles began to look possible, especially with the increasing number of charging points.

A bit of research suggested that a Nissan Leaf was the one to go for, at least currently. So a couple of weeks ago we visited the local dealer – ‘just for a look’. Well, you know what happened – we pick one up tomorrow.

The car was already in the garage so I don’t understand the delay. Mind you, I’ve never understood motor dealers. But it did give us chance to get a 7.2kW home charging point fitted. Tomorrow is 29 February, a day when I understand that people are supposed to do things out of the ordinary. Well, there you are.

We’ll see how things go and I’ll post again about the experience, with some facts and figures on running costs, range and so on.

We are trading in the Alfa and we did not want to leave too much petrol in it. Yesterday it beeped and said ‘Limited cruising range’. I normally get twitchy then but the wife pointed out that probably means about 60 miles. As she said, “get used to it”.

Einstein was right, and wrong

February 11 2016. Great excitement today. My daily check on the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day revealed only an announcement that the picture would appear after 11:00 EST (that’s 4 o’clock in the afternoon for us Brits) after the announcement of results from the LIGO observatory. We now know (and it was widely anticipated) that this was the first detection of gravitational waves. These were first predicted in a paper published by Einstein in 1915 – 100 years ago, what a PR achievement!

The irony of this is that the signals detected have been attributed to the collision between two black holes. But Einstein did not accept the idea of black holes.

While I claim to be a scientist, my scientific knowledge isn’t strong enough to understand fully all the wrinkles of this (pun not intended – gravitational waves can be seen as wrinkles in space-time). But I do find myself intensely excited about this.

But then I see all the conflicts and starvation in the world and I have to wonder if we are getting things rightly in proportion. A cynic might want to know how much the LIGO experiment has cost and how  many mouths you could feed for that. I’ve wrestled with this a bit and I still come down on the side of LIGO and anything that increases our knowledge of the universe we live in. If we stop asking questions like that we will cease to be human. I have struggled to understand TS Eliot but I wonder if his words in ‘Little Gidding’ are relevant here:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Another thought might be: “If we can do all these wonderful scientific things, why can’t we solve problems on our own earth?”. I can’t answer that but it might be worth remembering that all the scientists who discovered gravitation waves were all working together to achieve the same goal.