Our glorious, if slightly dim, leader Helen Holland told the press today, “Cabot Circus is a quantum leap for Bristol beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.”
Speak for yourself Helen. It might be normal for the Holland household to have wild dreams about cement, concrete, glass, bricks and global corporate retail outlets but the rest of us might just be a little more exotic than that.
As for this “quantum leap”. Does she know what quantum means?
quan·tum (kw
n
t
m) n. pl. quan·ta (-t
The smallest amount of a physical quantity that can exist independently, especially a discrete quantity of electromagnetic radiation.
Doh!
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A Quantum Leap is the term sometimes used by to describe the transition of an electron from one energy level to another: the excited state. It is interesting in that after being pushed into this state, an electron can drop down into the unexcited state, releasing the energy out again. The atom then returns to whatever state it was in before.
If you consider the opening of Cabot Circus to be some short term excitement, followed by the emission of energy -noise, light, heat- and the return of Broadmead to its stable state, then yes, she is near-perfect in her use of the metaphor. We must congratulate her on her knowledge of subatomic physics.
Spot on Steve. If I may offer another analogy from physics, albeit the plodding Newtonian variety, ‘every action has an equal and opposite reaction’. So all the hyping up of Cabot Circus will in the course of time generate a widespread disillusionment.