Well, he's had enough! He reckons we're the worst neighbours in the universe, what with all the crash-bang-wallops of our never-ending wars and now we're actually firing rockets into his back garden. The Milky Way, hitherto a rather pleasant cosmotic neighbourhood, is being dragged down by our behaviour and inter-galactic property prices are beginning to fall. If he had his way he'd slap ASBOs* on the lot of us. Anyway, he's off. How do I know? Because unlike you lazy lot I am rapidly turning into a swot. All this science stuff is beginning to fascinate me, particularly as told by young Cox and Forshaw of the Lower Fifth in their book, Why Does E=mc2?
According to this pair of very bright adolescents** - I do hope they get into university, they deserve it - the gravity field of the moon shifts our oceans about. (Yes, yes, alright, I knew that as well as you!) What I didn't know was that all this water sloshing about puts a brake on our celestial speed as we spin around our own axis, and that in turn means that the length of our earthly days is increasing by - wait for it - two thousandth of a second per century! Crikey, time for the seat belts, I think. Anyway, because of something called 'the invariance of angular momentum' (don't ask!) which has to be preserved at all costs such that, so to speak, the loss of a grain of sand here, needs must a grain be added there, otherwise the universe will go pop, or more probably, several golden scientific laws will turn out to be rubbish and the boffins will have to start again. Anyway, because our spin is slowing the moon must speed up by a comparable amount in order to keep the Universal Accounts Book balanced, and that acceleration is slowly but surely driving the man in the moon further and further away. Franky, I'll miss him when he's gone.
Oh, do wake up at the back, there! I'm not telling you all this stuff for no reason. It has exceedingly practical application in your everyday lives. You see, the next time you are at a tedious dinner party in which death seems enticing compared to an endless 'conversation' about property prices, this year's hols and who is sleeping with who (should that be 'whom'?), you will be able drop this little gem into the chatter and bring about an early end to the evening - no, no, please don't thank me, just the usual cash in plain envelopes!
* For the benefit of my foreign readers ASBO stands for Anti-Social Behaviour Order under which young thugs who should be placed in town centre stocks and pelted with rotten fruit and veg, or better still banged up for a long time on bread and water and heavy labour, are instead told they are very, very naughty boys and they will have to stay at home in the evenings, an order which they mostly, and rather shrewdly, ignore on their well-founded knowledge that government bureaucrats do not work after hours, and in fact, not much even during hours.
** To be strictly accurate, never a high priority here at D&N, Brian Cox is professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester. Jeff Forshaw is Professor of theoretical physics at the same university and is the recipient of the Institute of Physics Maxwell Medal.
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