Thoughts provoked by late night reading.

OK random, but one of places I send my mind when I am bored is on an imaginative tour of Quantum Mechanics. I try to imagine such weirdness as the schrodinger's cat paradox. I tell my pupils at school that imagination is everything in science. Unless you can imagine it, then you don't really understand it. I don't understand an 11 dimensional universe because I can't imagine it. But quantum physics, the nightmare of my university degree, does seem to make sense really late at night just before I go to sleep. When it crystallises into a picture that I can explain I will write a bit more about it. Until then let me leave you with this quote from C. S. Lewis's "God in the Dock"

"If a man doubts whether he is dreaming or waking, no experiment can solve his doubt, since every experiment may itself be part of the dream"

A bit of poetry

The kiss of the sun for pardon,

The song of the birds for mirth,

One is nearer God's heart in a garden

Than anywhere else on earth.

Dorothy Frances Gurney

Red Deer rut at Bradgate Park

Disaster! My trusty video camera has died! That means until I can get it fixed there will be no slow motion and no super close ups. The only camera I have is awful for nature shots but it will have to do for now. Its an old Fujifilm S5500. Anyhow, I took it to Bradgate Park early in the morning and caught some of the Red Deer rut. However the only deer I managed to photograph with no motion blur was this one, and as you can see this one could well have been asleep.

Still the morning was beautiful and the sky blue. As far as the eye could see a mist covered the land. It reminded me of cloud inversions that I have occasionally seen on mountains. For a while I could kid myself that the hill of Bradgate park was the Summit of Snowdon or some other hill.

As the day warmed up, Leicester began to emerge from the white gloom. The tops of the buildings appearing first.

Then on the distant horizon Billesdon Coplow, like a distant battleship on a murky sea, caught my eye. Itself, for a time, the only other land above the mist.

Britain's most awesome toadstool

This is a great time of year to go hunting for fly algaric (amanita muscaria). Back in 2005 I found a fantastic bunch just off the path in Felley Nottinghamshire. Then in 2006 I returned to the same spot and took these photos.

It is worth noting that fly algaric is quite poisonous (if you eat enough of it).