REPORTER
COVINGTON | MAPLE VALLEY | BLACK DIAMOND
A Division of Sound Publishing
Polly Shepherd publisher: pshepherd@kentreporter.com
425-432-1209 ext. 1050 Dennis Box editor: dbox@maplevalleyreporter.com 425-432-1209, ext. 5050
Kris Hill assistant editor: khill@maplevalleyreporter.com 425-432-1209, ext. 5054
Katherine Smith reporter ksmith@maplevalleyreporter.com 425-432-1209, ext. 5052
Advertising 425-432-1209 Classified Marketplace 800-388-2527
Letters dbox@maplevalleyreporter.com dbox@covingtonreporter.com
27116 - 167th Pl SE, Suite 114 Covington, WA 98042. For delivery inquiries 253-872-6610 or e-mail circulation@maplevalleyreporter.com
www.covingtonreporter.com • www.maplevalleyreporter.com
O Q U O T E O F N O T E : I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear. - Nelson Mandela
A letter from South Africa Guest Columnist
All of us struggle between the desire for stability and the desire for change. Some favor stability and order above all else. Others are dissatisfied with the status quo and want to improve conditions for themselves and/or others. I write to you from the home of my daughter Betsy and her family in rural Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa, where I see these two forces at work. Recently, Betsy and her family took us on a tour of the Champagne Valley in the Drakensberg Mountains. We were mainly among whites who were on holiday, since it’s early summer here. The area is beautiful and green with luxury resorts, dams and spectacular views of the mountains and fine buildings. These people enjoy their stability because, for them, life is good. Nearby Loskop, a Zulu community of about 50,000, has a 40 percent AIDS infection rate. Poverty is endemic. Until recently, few had electricity and running water usually comes from a faucet outside among the houses. There is little furniture in their homes. They live in small mud huts. There is no way most Zulus will ever be able to afford to take advantage of those resorts except, perhaps, as employees. South Africa has the greatest income disparity in the world. This is the “stability” that these blacks encounter. Betsy, with the help of local Christians, aid from the U.S. donations and nonprofit contributions, now pays salaries to 20 full-time, homebased care workers (who make $150 a month), a few part-timers and a part-time nurse to care for
RICH ELFERS
COVINGTON MAPLE VALLEY
OPINION
[4] December 27, 2013
O L E T T E R S YOUR OPINION COUNTS: E-MAIL: editor@maplevalleyreporter.com. MAIL: Letters, Covington/Maple Valley Reporter,
The space race and relativity Guest Columnist
Alexander Link
Scan this code and start receiving local news on your mobile device today!
In 1969, Apollo 11’s voyage to the moon ended the space race and captured the imagination of billions but it is what we confirmed when they returned that truly astonished. A perfectly accurate clock was sent into space with the crew, while another, equally accurate clock remained on Earth. After the eight day voyage, the clocks were found to be 2.779 billionths of a second off. While this would seem irrelevant to most, and certainly never made any headlines in a time when man had just finished landing on another world, but the fact confirmed Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity, which stated that as one moved faster, time
their physical needs, a pastor to minister to their spiritual needs and a full-time social worker/ manager. They care for about 500 AIDS patients and orphans. For these people, change comes in fits and starts. The contrast between the rich, primarily white world and the poor blacks is stark. Since I come from the West, I’m more comfortable with the white stability, but when I see the endemic poverty and suffering, I wish for even half that stability for the blacks. Nelson Mandela was recently buried in the Eastern Cape, about 900 miles to the west of where I am writing this. He was one of those few great leaders the world gets every generation or two. Today we will visit the place where Mandela was captured. We will spend Christmas
near Cape Town. We will also visit where Mandela lived after he became the president of the Republic of South Africa. Mandela was a change agent who also brought greater stability to the lives of blacks, Asians and minorities without taking away the financial stability of the whites, a remarkable accomplishment. One reason I travel is so I can shake myself out of the comparably stable world in which I live and to remind myself that on a personal level others are not as fortunate as I. Being reminded of that challenges my complacency. It reminds me that for the privileged few, change is necessary to bring stability to the many who suffer poverty and want. Why not have “life is good for all,” not just the privileged few?
27116 167th PL. SE, Suite 114 Covington, WA 98042 FAX: 425-432-1888 ON THE WEB: Go to www.covingtonreporter. com, click on Contact Us in the upper right corner, and select the Letter to the Editor form from the drop down menu.
Letters should be about 250 words. Letters may be edited for style, clarity and length. All letters to the editor will require confirmation.
in their area slowed down. Scientists predicted that the Apollo 11 launch would distort time by 2.78 billionths of a second, which was almost exactly borne out by experiment. When two cars side by side are traveling at 40 miles per hour, neither moves ahead of the other, despite the fact that both are moving. If one of these two cars were to move at 80 MPH, we would expect them to be 40 miles apart after an hour. While logical, this idea proved invalid for light. Albert Einstein realized that no matter how fast one went, light always moved ahead at the same speed, as if one was not moving at all — it would be as if the car moving 80 MPH were always 80 miles ahead of you after an hour, whether you were standing still or moving 79 MPH. Despite skepticism, numerous points of evidence convinced scientists worldwide that Einstein was right. The only possibility, then, was that time itself were changing “speed.” The car moving 40 MPH sees the faster car pulling ahead of it, and at the end of an hour notices that the car has travelled 40 miles ahead of it. A man sitting still when the cars started moving also watched the cars for an hour, but observes that the faster car is also
Please provide contact information when submitting a letter to the editor in any of the forms provided above. 40 miles ahead of him after an hour. The only solution, then, is that the hours must be different. The fast car was faster than both, but it would take twice as long for the car to be 40 miles away from the slow car than from the sitting man, thus, one hour inside the slow car is equal to two hours for the still man. This rule is true even at slow speeds, but they are far too slow compared the “fast car” — which is light, traveling at 185,000 miles per second — to matter. Even the Apollo rockets were only able to slow time by billionths of a second. While it is theoretically impossible to travel faster than the speed of light, the fact that time can be changed may make it possible to “work around,” this limitation. That, and other potential ways of exceeding the speed of light barrier, will be the focal point of my next article.
Alexander Link is a junior at Tahoma High school and a self described math nerd. He is taking two AP math courses this year and this will be his third year participating in Bear Metal, Tahoma’s robotics club.