“Tracks made by atomic particles from a particle accelerator, a device that speeds up the particles. The eye can’t see protons, electrons, and other subatomic particles, but a camera records their frothy wakes in a chamber of liquefied neon and hydrogen at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. Physicists study the tracks to learn about the characteristics of the particles that produced them.” - National Geographic, 1978.
my friend is studying for the mcat and was just trying to explain to me about heat transfer and she said ‘you know, like the reason you get cold when you go outside on a freezing day is that your tiny human body is trying to warm up the entire universe’ and i think that’s the best thing i have ever heard
I kind of needed this today. Thank you.
Happy DNA Day! (April 25th)
The 1962 Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution has an article “The Place of Genetics in Modern Biology” by George W. Beadle (pp.399-414) that is an interesting look into the knowledge and understanding of genetics less than a decade after Watson and Crick (and Rosalind Franklin) discovered the double helix structure of DNA.
We now know that the Earth is many billions of years old, and that it has changed an unimaginably number of times over millennia. Scientists (who we now call geologists) began to explore the Earth’s layers and found fossils, suggesting it was much, much older than they first thought.
But what are these layers made up of? How many are there and what is their impact on the whole?
To celebrate Earth Day we have collected together a brief summary of the different layers of the Earth.
You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.
And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.
And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.
And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly. Amen.
Aaron Freeman “You Want A Physicist To Speak at your Funeral”