The Ham Nomads

8 Nov 2014. <GB-ENG> Stratford-upon-Avon, & Temple Grafton, Warw —

Shakespeare's Birthplace by night

An overcast day. We went in to Stratford, to do a little shopping — we were running low on Toblerone, so went to Poundland where the 170g blocks are only £1 — good value. We bought ten, which should hold us over for a while. Went into McDonald's where we did a little internet banking and a little blogging — and also checked what was showing at the Picturehouse cinema, and found that Interstellar had a showing at 5pm. A good little treat, so we walked around town, then went to the Hole in the Wall, a pub whose pizzas we have come to love, and then off to the cinema.

Interstellar has had some not-so-good reviews, but Warren feels that the reviewers didn't really appreciate the science or the science-fiction aspects of the film. Maybe the script itself is a little pedestrian, but the ideas (and that's usually what SF is all about) are mind-boggling. It addresses what a wormhole is really like, similarly for a black hole, the perturbations of time when you encounter an intense gravitational field, and the relativistic time-dilation effects. A 40-year-old father, Cooper, leaves home and his young teenage daughter, Murphy, travels on a relativistic journey, interacts with a worm-hole and with a black hole, and comes back (finally, after about 5 years to him) to Earth and Murphy dying of old age! There are other thought provokers as well — such as four-dimensional space-time viewed from a five-dimensional space-time. Fun on the intellectual level, the effects are superb (and as realistic as possible), and the story-line is more than adequate.

One interesting image was that of the wormhole as it was being approached — in the past, films have portrayed them much like huge whirlpools, but when you think of it, a spherical interface where you can see right through to the objects at the other end of the wormhole is much more likely!

After a good night at the movies, we went back to our layby near Alcester, only a few miles away.

Distance driven — today, 8 miles ( 13 km ); to date, 9,692 miles ( 15,598 km )