Wilson Waffling

204: What would you do in your last 8 minutes?

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Sinopsis

This week, at the end of the mathematics session at university, we got talking about the Sun, the celestial body rather than the rather dubious newspaper. According to Google, so I am sure it is correct, our sun will actually turn into red giant and engulf our planet in about 5 billion years. You might be thinking, what a morbid topic to be discussing in a mathematics lesson, but it was at the end and originally we started to think about the amount of time it takes for light to travel. I was informing the students that probability had been removed from the key stage 2 curriculum and so that awkward question will the Sun definitely rise the next day no longer needed to be engaged with. As the students claimed it was certain, I reminded them that it takes eight minutes for the light of the Sun to actually reach us, so the sun could have actually exploded now, and we wouldn't know for another eight minutes. (Google actually says 8 minutes and 20 seconds...although it might just be trying to make us feel better b