The accidental universe and Norfolk birding

Snow Bunting

To help kick-start my new year birding list I like to do a January trip to Norfolk where, hopefully, I will connect with the various east coast winter specialties. The short days this time of year require an early start to maximise the daylight birding on site. So with a forecast that was at least not dreadful on Monday I was up at silly o’clock and on my way. 

My habit when driving to Norfolk is to take a small detour around the so called Wolferton triangle near Sandringham. This was, at least until recently, one of very few places you could still see Golden Pheasant in the UK. I’ve not seen one over the past 4 years and again there was no sign on Monday. Sadly, it looks as though this exotic gamebird is close to, or perhaps actually, nationally extinct. Maybe they have all been run over by a certain member of the royal family!

My first port of call in Norfolk was the wonderful RSPB reserve at Titchwell. Not surprisingly, given the amount of the stuff that has dropped from the heavens recently, the water level on the freshwater marsh was very high with no wader margin. I hence spent most of my time down on the beach. With weather warnings for high wind in force to say the weather on the beach was bracing would be an understatement! The sea had the appearance of a biblical storm making it very hard to pick up birds on the water. A large flock of Ruff were braving the weather close to the water line frantically feeding alongside oystercatchers and bar-tailed godwits on goodies in the wet sand. Red-breasted merganser were fishing quite close to the shoreline also apparently quite unphased by the elements. 

Pink-footed Goose

Snow Bunting

After a couple of hours I was chilled to the bone and decided to head over to Holkham gap, a reliable spot for some of the many thousands of pink-footed geese that overwinter on the Norfolk coast. On arrival there were indeed many pink-footed and brent geese feeding on the wet fields and flying overhead. A grey partridge feeding in the field by the car park was also a useful addition to the year list. I parked the car and walked down to the beach where a large roped off area is usually a reliable location in winter for shore lark and indeed a flock had been observed in this very location earlier in the day.  By the time I arrived the flock, however, had flown away from this usual area and I was unable to relocate them. Oh well I’ve seen them every other time I tried so I can’t complain! I did encounter a flock of forty or so beautiful snow buntings feeding in the roped off area. I then went over the road to look at the lake adjacent to Holkham hall where a black necked grebe had been reported earlier but again there was no sign. By now it was staring to get dark and I walked back to the car to commence the long drive home via Wells where a juvenile rough-legged buzzard had been seen earlier but it was almost dark when I arrived and I’m sure the buzzard had by then settled down to roost. Not to worry, I’ve again seen them before both in Norfolk and in Canada where they are called rough-legged hawks and the embryonic year list had moved on nicely.

Grey Partridge

It’s been some time since I digressed into the wonderful world of physics so ….

There are four known forces of nature, i.e things that make objects attract and/or repel each other. The two that most people are familiar with are gravity, which produces the attractive force between objects with mass, and the electromagnetic which produces the attractive force generated by magnets. The two other forces, the strong and weak nuclear forces, only act over the very small distances associated with atomic nuclei. Without the strong and weak nuclear force, however, there would be no such thing as atoms and the universe would be a very different place.  Physicists imagine these forces as fields which permeate through space. So how does, say, one electron feels the repulsive force of the other.? We believe that one particle exchanges so called virtual particles with the other to convey this information. In the case of the electromagnetic force these are virtual photons. In the case of gravity it is the yet to be observed hypothetical graviton.

We believe that just after the big bang there was only one unified force of nature but as the universe cooled in the first moments after the big bang this unified force split into our current four forces.  These extreme energies where the forces were unified are what big particle accelerators like LHC at CERN are attempting to explore. We have good theories that unite three of these forces into one force moments after the big bang but gravity is a real misfit.

I mentioned before the problem that physicists have with gravity, i.e that is it so incredibly weak compared to the other three forces which, although, they act over different distant scales, have strengths that are roughly comparable. Gravity, however, is 

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

times weaker! The best theory we have of why this is the case is so called string theory. This imagines elementary particles to be vibrating strings in space time. String theory says that the universe has more than the three spatial dimensions that we experience but these are wrapped up on incredible small length scales. According to string theory gravity is so weak because it leaks in and out of these extra dimensions and we only get to experience a tiny drip of the true strength of gravity.

Now here to finish is an absolutely mind blowing fact!

If you change the strength of any of these four forces by an absolutely minuscular amount the universe would not exits as we know it. There would be no atoms or stars and hence no life! The so called “accidental” nature of the universe we live in goes even further than this. Unless many of the other physical constants of the universe are very exactly as we find them, e.g. the mass of various elementary particles etc, there would be again no atoms stars or life. So the chances of our universe having the very exact set of physical parameters required for life seems to be infinitesimal small.

These remarkable coincidences are explored in great detail in Paul Davies’ wonderful book, The Accidental Universe and, if you want to find out more on this topic, I would highly recommend it! His book includes a detailed examination of the so call anthropic principle which attempts to explain these extraordinary physical coincidences. Perhaps more on this at a later date.