Science for Beginners

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I was thinking in bed this morning: Suppose you are in a lift, going down, and you jump up in the air - what will happen?

Well, I don't think anything will happen because you are travelling at the same speed as the lift.

But suppose, as you jumped, the lift suddenly stopped. Then what would happen? Would you land harder? Or would you shoot up to the ceiling of the lift?

Any ideas?

I was also thinking: The universe is made of stuff. We are made of stuff - the same stuff. The amount of stuff never increases, and it can't be destroyed. So, in a sense, we can never 'die'.

But what about the way the stuff is arranged in a pattern that I call ME and the pattern I experience as YOU? What happens to those patterns when we 'die'.? Do they somehow hang around as patterns or do they break up and the bits go to form other patterns?


Anna is right, I was born in a two up, two down, terraced house in a mining village. This is well documented in my (as yet unpublished) autobiography. I was often awakened by the sound of miners' clogs as the early  (6 am) shift clattered past my bedroom window.

Most of my uncles were miners. I could never understand why they kept on going down the pit even though we had plenty of coal in the shed.

My dad used to be a miner but he packed it in after witnessing a man get killed by a runaway tub, deep underground. He told me that he swore to himself, there and then, that if he ever saw daylight again he would never go back down the pit. He never did.

Mining as a career did not appeal to me, so I joined the armed forces. And when I came out of the military, it was then that I experienced the pleasures of the big house we called Wynorin. But you will have to read my autobiography to know more about that.