June 2008

Features

Tobin’s turn

The latest in an occasional column from Cllr Simon Tobin, WDC Southwold and Reydon Ward. Of course, any opinions expressed below are not necessarily those of the Southwold Organ or Leiston Press, its publisher.

A lot is happening in our surrounding area at the moment.

One month ago, the largest wind turbine project in Europe started on the site of the Sizewell nuclear power station. The turbines, which will be out at sea, will just be able to be seen and a power line will come ashore from them and plug directly in to the main grid at Sizewell B. They will power 450,000 homes (Waveney as a district has a population of approximately 112,000 people). The project will make the Scroby Sands turbines at Great Yarmouth look like a child’s toy set. It should take two-and-a-half years to complete.

The Blyth Strategy Group are putting together a one-day conference on 14th June 2008. This is an invitation-only event for councils and heads of parties involved in the concern of flood risks and coastal erosion. The results of the event intend to be very high profile and focus on the great concerns that everyone has about the lack of maintenance of the Blyth River bank walls and the flood risks that may occur. I am a Vice Chairman of this Group and, if anyone would like to phone me with any information or suggestions to be put forward, please phone me on 07508 039404.

I had the great pleasure of working with John Huggins and his team carrying out further sand-bagging repairs along the Blyth River wall breaches on Saturday 24th May 2008. There are ten main wall breaches and these are gaping holes that the water goes through onto the marshes at very high tides. It is critical to fill these holes during the summer before the winter period because, after this winter, we believe they will never be able to be repaired and therefore lost forever. It seems amazing that so much money is put into the local economy from Southwold and the surrounding areas, and yet only a small amount of money in relation to this is needed from the government agencies for these repairs to protect the banks and marshes, and they cannot support us.

The Southwold Pavilion* on the Common is nearing completion. Rob Temple and his team should be given great respect for all their work carried out with fund raising for this project. The design, in my opinion, is excellent and Brian Haward has been very clever because it is truly difficult to notice it from a distance and yet it is very spacious. The fund-raising team still needs a lump of money to finish off the end of the project because of some extra work that needed to be added. This is your chance to do something for our area that will last for a long time and help sports and other activities to continue to benefit future generations. If you can put forward a donation, it would be greatly appreciated; telephone Rob Temple on 01502 723051 for details.

An interesting new law has just been introduced by the Government. If you had an industrial park and say you had ten units on it that could be let, but, if only five were let, you would only pay rates on five of them. You would have regular inspections to make sure that you were paying the correct rates. As of 1st April 2008, you will now have to pay for all the ten units even if they are not let. In the model that we are discussing, it could mean a further expense to the owner of £30,000 to £50,000 a year. This will then result in owners demolishing unused units until better times come in the future.

I am writing this on a desk that was made by Cleeve and Roy** in their workshops in Victoria Street. My thoughts and best regards to you, Roy.

Simon Tobin

* Watch progress on the Pavilion by visiting the Watertower webcam - courtesy of Suffolk Secrets

* Cleeve Finch died suddenly on 16 May.(Ed)

This is the latest in a of articles on stellar and tidal phenomena written for the Organ by Prof. Michael Rowan-Robinson, President of the Royal Astronomical Society.

27. The waves at the heart of reality

Living near the coast we cannot fail to be fascinated by the rich pattern of waves on the sea. Ocean waves are set in motion by the wind. The waves we see on Southwold beach may have been caused by winds hundreds of miles away. Hence the strange experience on some days of completely still air locally, not a trace of wind, yet huge waves breaking on the shore. But normally the waves and the wind come from the same direction and strong wind means big waves.

Waves turn out to be a very pervasive feature of modern physics. Newton thought that light was due to small particles hitting the eye but at the turn of the nineteenth century it began to become clear that there were a whole host of phenomena pointing to a wave nature for light. When light shines over a sharp edge, the shadow generated is not sharp but alternate dark and light bands are seen just inside the shadow. Light bends round corners and this points to it being a wave. In the second half of the nineteenth century James Clerk Maxwell realized that light is in fact an electromagnetic wave. So this wonderful image of the landscape that strikes our eyes is in fact a flickering electric and magnetic field. The length of the wave from peak to peak corresponds to the colour of the light.

In 1905 Albert Einstein showed that actually there are some properties of light in which it does behave like a stream of particles, just as Newton had suggested. The ‘photoelectric effect’ discovered by Einstein, when light is absorbed by or emitted by a metal, is crucial for devices like digital cameras. So light can behave both like a wave and like a stream of particles. This was the birth of quantum theory, which describes how matter behaves at the level of a single atom. And strangely, when we come to study the atomic and sub-atomic scale, we again find this duality. Sometimes matter behaves like small particles interacting with each other and being transformed from one type into another. And at other times we have to think of a particle like the electron as a wave permeating the whole of space.

So when we gaze out to sea and see the pattern of waves streaming towards us we should remember that the light with which we are seeing this view is also a wave and that the subatomic particles in our eyes, electrons, protons and neutrons, which ultimately detect the light, they too are at heart wave-like. All reality is made of waves.

© Michael Rowan-Robinson 2008

It's the Wine Talking
by Leslie J. Brinton of 'In the Pink' 01986 872579

I don’t know if writer Jack Kerouac was ever on the Sunrise Coast... but he was on the Starlight Coast or, to be more precise, he worked as a brakeman on the Coast Starlight Railroad, which runs between Seattle and Los Angeles on the American West Coast. That’ll be the Sunset Coast, then.

Now available in the Suffolk Coast Co-operative Stores is a blend of Merlot and Petit Verdot grapes from California, clocking 13.5% alcohol for a not unreasonable £5.99. Flavours of black cherry underpinned with notes of cigar box add up to an attractive and versatile brew: particularly worth trying with duck I reckon...

Look on the shelves for the Starlight Coast 2005 in its smart screw-capped bottle.

Leslie J. Brinton