I was going to explain the connection between gravity, general relativity, and time. But I understand less than half of it and anyway, that’s not what our boy AG is really talking about here. He’s talking about coming to grand conclusions based on understanding less than half of something. And the guy he’s quoting, […]
Physics
Back at the end of the 19th century, when scientists were just discovering radioactivity and Marie Curie was trying to isolate radium, nobody knew what the effect of radioactivity on the human body might be. Radium was a new element, just a pretty blue glowing thing. Curie also wrote: “One of our joys was to go […]
That vertical axis — the electromagnetic spectrum which is science-talk for light — actually goes from something like 3 x 102 to something like 3 x 1024 (in the same units), which is from radio waves, through microwaves, to infrared, to the visible (that tiny rainbow window there), to the ultraviolet, to xrays, to gamma rays. […]
This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics was, in a way, a foregone conclusion. The 1998 discovery by two teams of scientists that the expansion of the universe is accelerating—under the influence of something that scientists have shruggingly come to call dark energy, which later studies have revealed to comprise 72.8 percent of the universe—was one […]
Our boy, AG, is referring to a joke: a dairy farmer asks a physicist how to estimate milk production. The physicist begins the calculations with, “Assume a spherical cow,” and takes it from there. Physicists are famous for this. They call it simplifying the model. Sometimes they have a problem that’s too complicated to be […]
Think about this one for a while and see where it gets you. It just got me confused. Translating AG’s Latin title — Time devours things — doesn’t help. John Archibald Wheeler was a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and then the H bomb, helped clarify the atom, made up the phrase “black […]
Theorists really do think this, that maybe every fundamental particle has a so-far-invisible partner. The partners’ names are just the names of the regular particles only with an “s” in front: squarks, selectrons. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland is kicking up a lot of dust looking for them (and for another putative particle […]
4/20: I write an email to a scientist. I explain that I work in an old building that sits in a sort of pit, partly surrounded by a hill. Midway along the hill is a little terrace on which is a street, and along the street, a sidewalk and a wire fence; and they’re all […]