Many comments to follow; what can I say, I liked this entry a lot.
entire magazines devoted to Early Victorian Literature Featuring Women In Giant Skirts.
*snort* Sadly, correct.
Gravitation by Misner, Thorne and Wheeler, a book that is so massive in and of itself that if you put two copies together on a bookshelf you stand a reasonable risk of creating your own black hole.
You got me curious, so I looked up that book on Amazon. 1,215 flippin pages. Screw that. (is fervently glad to be a writer instead)
At the human scale they are very different, one is big and sits there, the other blows up. But at the quantum scale, matter is energy that's taking a breather
You know, you're very good at explaining things in a colloquial, entertaining way. Have you ever considered writing a book?
Even the homeless couple down the street know that the Standard Model is wrong, and they ask me about it whenever I go by.
...Aaaand that would be the first time I ever did a spit-take reading about physics. Congratulations.
The Standard Model has something on the order of thirty [constants]. That's far too many knobs for a satisfying theory. Every other theory gets progressively simpler as you get closer to the "truth".
You know what that reminds me of? The way some astronomers used to make these hugely convoluted charts that showed the paths all the other planets and the sun took as they revolved around the Earth. The actual truth was appallingly simple, but the pre-Copernican charts showed planets going in wee little circles as they progressed in their orbits to account for apparent retrograde motion.
String theory operates close to the GUT scale
What's the GUT scale? Also, re: string theory. I'm no physicist*, but I love science, which may sound like a weird dichotomy, but I promise it's not. I love love love (layperson) astronomy, and used to read about it every chance I got when I was a kid. But still, way before I ever heard of string theory, I felt like something was missing in the textbooks. Gravity makes objects want to get all close and lovey and play Al Green. Why? Why not just hang out in space instead? I hated that all the answers seemed to be, at the bedrock, "Just because."
So, a couple years ago, my GAFF Secret Santa sent me Hyperspace by Michio Kaku, and it blew the back of my head off. Who knows, maybe the book is totally contemptible to actual physicists, but to a layperson like me, it was absolutely riveting. I know it can't be tested by any means we have, but I love the theory of it, the crazy imagination. Instead of saying gravity happens "just because", it says, "Hey, gravity is really just the apparent effect of something happening in another dimension." I love it that anything is possible in science, and sometimes it's the strangest things you never guessed that turn out to be true.
*Actually, I spent the greater portion of high school Physics playing spades. Mostly because I loathe math in most any form, but my mother insisted I take the class, so what could I do?
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Date: 2006-05-30 07:53 am (UTC)entire magazines devoted to Early Victorian Literature Featuring Women In Giant Skirts.
*snort* Sadly, correct.
Gravitation by Misner, Thorne and Wheeler, a book that is so massive in and of itself that if you put two copies together on a bookshelf you stand a reasonable risk of creating your own black hole.
You got me curious, so I looked up that book on Amazon. 1,215 flippin pages. Screw that. (is fervently glad to be a writer instead)
At the human scale they are very different, one is big and sits there, the other blows up. But at the quantum scale, matter is energy that's taking a breather
You know, you're very good at explaining things in a colloquial, entertaining way. Have you ever considered writing a book?
Even the homeless couple down the street know that the Standard Model is wrong, and they ask me about it whenever I go by.
...Aaaand that would be the first time I ever did a spit-take reading about physics. Congratulations.
The Standard Model has something on the order of thirty [constants]. That's far too many knobs for a satisfying theory. Every other theory gets progressively simpler as you get closer to the "truth".
You know what that reminds me of? The way some astronomers used to make these hugely convoluted charts that showed the paths all the other planets and the sun took as they revolved around the Earth. The actual truth was appallingly simple, but the pre-Copernican charts showed planets going in wee little circles as they progressed in their orbits to account for apparent retrograde motion.
String theory operates close to the GUT scale
What's the GUT scale? Also, re: string theory. I'm no physicist*, but I love science, which may sound like a weird dichotomy, but I promise it's not. I love love love (layperson) astronomy, and used to read about it every chance I got when I was a kid. But still, way before I ever heard of string theory, I felt like something was missing in the textbooks. Gravity makes objects want to get all close and lovey and play Al Green. Why? Why not just hang out in space instead? I hated that all the answers seemed to be, at the bedrock, "Just because."
So, a couple years ago, my GAFF Secret Santa sent me Hyperspace by Michio Kaku, and it blew the back of my head off. Who knows, maybe the book is totally contemptible to actual physicists, but to a layperson like me, it was absolutely riveting. I know it can't be tested by any means we have, but I love the theory of it, the crazy imagination. Instead of saying gravity happens "just because", it says, "Hey, gravity is really just the apparent effect of something happening in another dimension." I love it that anything is possible in science, and sometimes it's the strangest things you never guessed that turn out to be true.
*Actually, I spent the greater portion of high school Physics playing spades. Mostly because I loathe math in most any form, but my mother insisted I take the class, so what could I do?