L'Eau Commotion Westabout

3:00pm Sunday 7th January 2018 ( UTC-3 ) " Have you seen the massive pistons of the giant CPR, With the punishing force of a thousand horse, Then you know what pistons are" No but as a young lad travelling by steam train from Hawkesbury River to Gosford each day we had a fair idea of the meaning of raw power. Not the dirty black clanking 32 class that was the all stops school train but the Newcastle Flyer drawn by that modern masterpiece of engineering ingenuity, the Streamlined and Green C38 class locomotive. As it crossed the then new Hawkesbury River bridge the fireman would turn on the taps and pour on the coals so as it burst out of the Long Island tunnel and gathered speed down the long downhill embankment a vast plume of steam would issue from the safety valve. With all that steam and to spare the driver would give us kids a thrill with a long drawn out and full throated bellow of his whistle as he thundered through the long smooth curve of the platform and then stride up the steep grade to Cowan as if it wasn't there. And yes the Doppler Effect was there but we didn't know the name of it then but we knew if we stationed someone right on the Northern end of the platform to give the thumbs up we would get an extra Wooo-oo woooo.. Ah, those were the simple carefree times of the Forties and Fifties when all we had to worry about was the impending nuclear war between the USA and Russia and the resultant Nuclear Winter, the Yellow Peril of invasion from China heralded by the Korean War, that is if the Indonesians didn't get us first, and the collapse of world trade if Colonel Nasser blocked the Suez Canal. Compared to today's children who are being told we face flooding of Biblical proportions to our coastal cities and long drawn out droughts and plagues of malaria and massive starvation of billions as a result of Climate Change we had it good. And only if that other Genius of modern Astrophysics,Hubble, had stood by me as I milked the goats ( Annie and Rastus ) and heard the slightly different tone heard from three miles away of the evening Flyer heading North and come to the conclusion as did I that it might have something to do with the dying evening sea breeze and not the presumption that the Hawkesbury River railway station must be moving away. But Hubble knew because he was a true believer of that other Genius, Einstein that the speed of light is constant no matter the circumstance and that the Red Shift can have one and only one reason - the Universe must be flying apart. And of course he then came, to him, the obvious conclusion that the whole of the Universe must have occupied a space much smaller than the head of a pin and much, much hotter than the firebox of the C38. And we smirk when we learn Creationism is taught as a science in Alabama.