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d the the sending of an email which read ...You may recall the job to replace the offside rear window of my wife’s VW Beetle Cabriolet, registration WR05YKV, the repair of a boot-lid locking mechanism and the subsequent replacement of a driver’s door-mounted petrol flap unlocking switch.
The window rubber of said offside rear window has now come adrift from the bodywork and fallen a centimetre or so into the bodywork. It would appear that it has come ‘unglued’ and the glue looks quite old. Having agreed for the £700+ job to be done, regardless of the fact that a 50/50 arrangement was agreed with VW UK, the least that I would have expected is that, it would have been suggested that this rain deflection rubber should be replaced at the time of the job by a new one, in no dissimilar manner to a VW recommendation to fit a replacement water pump at the time of a cam-belt replacement. Or at the very least re-glue the old one in place to avert the no-doudt extensive addition labour now involved.
Instead of which, being £700+ lighter of pocket for the replacement window, a second boot-lock repair because the first one was not completed correctly and a replacement petrol flap switch - all driven from 'the driver’s side of the loom’ - I am back to square one with gaffer tape keeping the rain out of the car.
During the aforementioned repairs, I escalated my concerns to VW UK and was asked if on completion of the job, I would send an email detailing my complaint to Customer Services. I had two subsequent telephone calls from VW UK and I concluded with them that I was then happy. I am most certainly not a happy bunny now, following this latest incident with what I am beginning to believe is a £24K friday afternoon beetle, but will reserve judgement in this instance until next week when Tamara has booked the car in for 2 days.
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Added by Michael Grove at 12:33 on September 13, 2014
ar does it stretch? Where does it end... and what lies beyond its star fields... and streams of galaxies extending as far as telescopes can see?
These questions are beginning to yield to a series of extraordinary new lines of investigation... and technologies that are letting us to peer into the most distant realms of the cosmos...
But also at the behavior of matter and energy on the smallest of scales.
Remarkably, our growing understanding of this kingdom of the ultra-tiny, inside the nuclei of atoms, permits us to glimpse the largest vistas of space and time.
In ancient times, most observers saw the stars as a sphere surrounding the earth, often the home of deities.
The Greeks were the first to see celestial events as phenomena, subject to human investigation... rather than the fickle whims of the Gods.
One sky-watcher, for example, suggested that meteors are made of materials found on Earth... and might have even come from the Earth.
Those early astronomers built the foundations of modern science. But they would be shocked to see the discoveries made by their counterparts today.
The stars and planets that once harbored the gods are now seen as infinitesimal parts of a vast scaffolding of matter and energy extending far out into space.
Just how far... began to emerge in the 1920s.
Working at the huge new 100-inch Hooker Telescope on California's Mt. Wilson,
astronomer Edwin Hubble, along with his assistant named Milt Humason, analyzed the light of fuzzy patches of sky... known then as nebulae.
They showed that these were actually distant galaxies far beyond our own.
Hubble and Humason discovered that most of them are moving away from us. The farther out they looked, the faster they were receding.
This fact, now known as Hubble's law, suggests that there must have been a time when the matter in all these galaxies was together in one place.
That time... when our universe sprung forth... has come to be called the Big Bang.
How large the cosmos has gotten since then depends on how long its been growing... and its expansion rate.
Recent precision measurements gathered by the Hubble space telescope and other instruments have brought a consensus...
That the universe dates back 13.7 billion years.
Its radius, then, is the distance a beam of light would have traveled in that time ... 13.7 billion light years.
That works out to about 1.3 quadrillion kilometers.
In fact, it's even bigger.... Much bigger. How it got so large, so fast, was until recently a deep mystery.
That the universe could expand had been predicted back in 1917 by Albert Einstein, except that Einstein himself didn't believe it...
until he saw Hubble and Humason's evidence.
Einstein's general theory of relativity suggested that galaxies could be moving apart because space itself is expanding.
So when a photon gets blasted out from a distant star, it moves through a cosmic landscape that is getting larger and larger, increasing the distance it must travel to reach us.
In 1995, the orbiting telescope named for Edwin Hubble began to take the measure of the universe... by looking for the most distant galaxies it could see.
Taking the expansion of the universe into account, the space telescope found galaxies that are now almost 46 billion light years away from us in each direction... and almost 92 billion light years from each other.
And that would be the whole universe... according to a straightforward model of the big bang.
But remarkably, that might be a mere speck within the universe as a whole, according to a dramatic new theory that describes the origins of the cosmos.
It's based on the discovery that energy is constantly welling up from the vacuum of space in the form of particles of opposite charge... matter and anti-matter.…