Yesterday's solar storm was no big deal compared to the ones that might come later in the year but it came at a serendipitous time. The storm caused a 2 hour power outage here in Scarborough which meant I had to open our garage door (and our neighbour's) manually with a key and cable pull so Rosaleen could go to the bank and the neighbour could visit her father! While I was waiting for the power to come back on to make my porridge and make a cup of tea for lunch, I was reading a chapter of the book, Einstein: A Relative History, trying yet again to understand where old Albert was coming from. One of the papers Einstein published in his annus mirabilis (1905) was "On a Heuristic Viewpoint of the Generation and Conversion of Light", an analysis of the photoelectric effect, a phenomenon the 'history' explained, in part, like this, "Practical uses of the photoelectric effect abound today -- in elevators, automatic garage door openers and checkout lines at the supermarket ...". So there you have it, a very practical lesson on one aspect of relativity learned in solar-stormed Scarborough!
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