4 Letter Words

Returning from a musical last Friday, the 10th of May, I noticed that a couple of friends (thank you Yvette and Henri) had posted photos of the Aurora Borealis (The Northern Lights). These multicoloured curtains of charged particles falling down through the sky.  I spent about an hour and a half taking photographs using a iPhone and a 3 to 10 second exposure. The darkened skies with their diagonal shimmers revealed these red, pink, yellow and green scars across the night sky.  Ahh, the Aurora Borealis, that ethereal dance of light across the Northern skies, a sight that has captivated the imagination of countless souls throughout the ages. But what, pray tell, is the scientific explanation for this most wondrous workout of natural phenomena?  So what is it? Well my dear reader, it all begins with the Sun, that great nuclear furnace our solar system, ever-churning and belching forth a steady stream of charged particles, known as the solar wind. Not that type of wind, you c...

Flow - even the onomatopoetic way the word flows, sorry, out of your mouth. The f being the force as it explodes out of your mouth, followed by the "el"and the only vowel of the word and concluding with the cross section of a wave.  According to that font of knowledge, Wikipedia, has 42 separate definitions or examples of the word flow. With that number, we could squeeze in a quote from the Hitch Hiker's Guide to Galaxy, where Douglas N Adams (his initials take us down another rabbit hole to Cambridge and nearly forgetting Friedrich Miescher .) Adams had written that Earth had been made to calculate the answer to Deep Thought's question on Life, the Universe and Everything. It was run by mice, wasn't it? Okay, so what does flow mean? Funny you should ask. Well, you could say that it is the motion of particles in a liquid or a gas. I am sure that we have all done that cheeky fart under the duvet after a good meal and hoped that it would be a gas and not a liquid...