The next morning, James awoke feeling oddly unsettled. After a quick breakfast James, which seemed to calm his unsteadiness, James gathered his project and made his way to the exhibition hall. London was relatively quiet at 8:00am on a Saturday and after a short walk to the large hall, he was permitted entry. The huge hall housed hundreds of young men and women, all in their last year of high school and all with hopes that their particular project would be chosen above all the rest. Parents, students and a few of the organizers milled about as James eyed some of the competitors.
James questioned whether a project reproducing the great astronomical experiments of history would actually have any chance of succeeding but at the regional competition it had proven a successful formula. Most of the other students had relied on high technology gadgets to produce their experiments and many had stumbled over the science involved. The Scottish judges had been impressed at James’s absolute understanding of the actual scientific concepts involved in his relatively simple, historically accurate experiments. Exhibiting his work in this hall and a trip to London was all the reward that James needed. Anything else was icing on the cake.
A commotion ran through the crowd which was building by the moment. The judges had arrived and something else that James had been told to expect: scientific celebrities. There were three or four who James didn’t recognize but must have been important people by the reverence that was being shown to them all. But there was one whom James did recognize. Dr. Arnold Benjamin was the chair of Astronomical studies at Cambridge. Amongst others who had occupied this position were Sir Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking. “Oh boy !” thought James “Now I had better know what I am doing”.
“The judges are here James,” observed Mr. Thurlough, one of the officials of the competition, who was stationed next to James’s table, and as he turned towards his table James noticed that indeed they were ready to evaluate his project. Scared for a moment James began explaining the various experiments. Observations of Venus and Mercury, carefully accumulated over an entire year, demonstrated that astronomers without telescopes could have determined that these planets orbited the sun. Using Eratosthenes methods, James had ridden his bicycle more than 800 km, loaded with camping gear, the length of England, Thurso to Sussex, where his Auntie Josephine lived. With a couple of homemade protractors he had accurately measured the circumference of the Earth. His parents did not want him to do that trip, which had lasted most of the previous summer. Determining the distance from earth to the moon did not require a trip. For this, James had to rely on applying Hipparchus’s method and asked his Uncle John, who lived in Madrid, to draw him a rendition of a chance encounter between the moon and the Pleiades on one late November night. Comparing his own drawing from the same night, at the same moment, on the Orkney mainland, James had come up with a value of the parallax resulting from the two different observation points. This result allowed James to calculate a fairly accurate result of 32 earth diameters distance from Earth.. The next step was to take a stab at the distance to the sun. Using parallax was out of the question given that there was no way that James’s father was going to be able to afford to take James along to a solar eclipse anytime in the near future. Instead, James opted for Aristarchus’s somewhat dubious method of measuring the angle between the sun and the moon at exactly the moment when the moon was half illuminated by the sun. It took five tries to observe an 89.6 degree angle. The fifth experiment was actually the easiest once James had his distance to the sun calculated. Using holes drilled in a thin metal plate and the genius of Christian Huygens, James compared the brightness of the stars at night to the amount of sunlight that would pass through the very small drill holes. By imagining the sun far enough away to produce this small amount of light James determined that Sirius must be 400,000 times as far away as the Sun is from earth, more or less correct when you factor in the size difference between the two stars. James produced mathematical calculations for each experiment, except for the observations of Mercury and Venus where scale drawings were more appropriate. Scale drawings also produced excellent calculation results for the other four experiments.
The judges appeared genuinely impressed which was hard for James to believe. The kid in the next display booth had built his own solar panel array for god sake! After they were finished with James the judges continued on to inspect a rocket that some fellow had flown up to twelve thousand feet: producing barometric pressure readings, temperature, humidity and even a video recording of the flight. Sheesh!!! Well at least it was over.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
The whole experience had left James drained and he eagerly accepted sandwiches and a drink offered to him by Mr. Thurlough.. While he tried to eat his lunch, interested spectators clustered around, asking this and that of James: “Did you really ride your bike all the way the length of Britain?” asked just about everybody. Almost nobody paid any serious attention to the math in his work, as tangents and sines were not everyone’s cup of tea but several did seem to grasp the significance of the scale drawings. “Great,” thought James, “I am glad that I included them.”
“Well, hello, young man”, interrupted a scholarly looking fellow in a lab coat, and it was him, Dr. Arnold Benjamin! This was really too, too much. James’s head began to swim but Dr. Benjamin took it easy on him, starting slow and building up the conversation. By the end both agreed that the Chinese likely had all the observations required to have determined that indeed Earth was not the center of the universe at least one thousand years before Galileo. “I hope to see you attend one of my classes someday soon young James,” he said as a parting comment.
That was it. That made the experience! James was in heaven. The man himself had been polite, heck he had been more than polite, he had certainly appreciated and enjoyed the project. If James could have picked up and boarded the train for home at that moment, he would have, completely content with his performance. Excellent! But his lightheadedness from the morning was returning and even the lunch time drinks and sandwiches, provided by the academy, did not revive him. James was having an unsettling feeling come over him that he was being observed from within. It was the oddest feeling, as if someone else was sharing his eyes.
Even Mr. Thurlough noticed James’s instability and obtained an unused chair, assisting James down to the seat. “Is everything alright son?” asked the man.
“I think so,” replied James as he gradually recovered from the experience. The remainder of the afternoon passed quickly. Judging took most of the day and at one point James felt well enough to get up and have a look at some of the other’s efforts. Several entrants proposed solutions to imagined future world catastrophes. James’s favorite described the Carrington effect where solar electrical storms created a huge electromagnetic pulse which might destroy a continent sized section of the world's electrical grid. The young man proposed that the survivors might be relocated to an unaffected part of the globe while repairs were made. “How did he ever win his regional?” wondered James.
Finally James noticed dignitaries collecting on stage. Speeches and congratulations to all followed. Results of the judging were announced. Unfortunately, just as these began James once again began to experience an unsettled uncontrollable feeling that another presence was intruding. He looked nervously to the sides and even behind himself wondering what was happening. “Was he going mad?” It was all very confusing and James was having difficulty maintaining composure.
Fourth place was announced and then third. Great applause and a short speech for each recipient followed. James wondered if he had a chance to finish second but doubted it. Perhaps fourth had been a possibility but not second and definitely not first. “Oh well, maybe I will be able to find some sort of list where all the placings will show, and I will be able to see how I fared,” thought James. Second place was indeed not James but instead the incredible rocket project. In his acceptance speech the young man pledged to try and fly a rocket into orbit someday. The crowd responded very well to this notion.
“Well that’s it then,” commented James. “Probably the solar panels will win overall, I suppose.”
“Don’t give up yet James,” responded Mr. Thurlough. “The judges really liked your explanations and that Benjamin fellow spent more time with you than anybody else. I even saw him having some big conversation with the judges about something or other. It was quite a heated discussion.” An interesting point, too bad James’s mind was wrestling with the unseen force. It was like double vision, or maybe double thinking.
“Now for the moment you’ve all been waiting for: The winner of the 2016 National Science Competition for his incredible depictions of the pivotal experiments in the history of Astronomy, is James Blair of Orkney of the Shetland Islands.” Announced the master of ceremonies to thunderous applause and cheering. He had done it! If only he could walk, but with Mr. Thurlough’s help, he managed to approach the stage and climb up to the podium. When Dr. Benjamin strode out to shake his hand congratulations he almost fell over. It was like a dream come true. An attractive young woman entered the stage dragging a huge cheque, made out in the name of James Blair for the amount of £1000. This time James did fall over.