Friday, August 17, 2012

Phun phacts of physics


Here are some quotable-quotes  relating to the natural world.   If intrigued, click for the essay in which they appear.  Or for you busy pre-marrieds,  they make elegant brainy pick-up lines (in the better sort of bars):

[Climate change] The point is not that, on some particular day, instead of being a sizzling eighty-one, the mercury hits a sizzling eighty-one-and-a-half, but that more heat is being dumped into a hydrodynamic system, which feeds local instabilities, and may nudge changes in overall pattern.

Planetary orbits existed prior to Kepler and Galileo,  and the electron prior to Millikan, in much the same sense that the nightingale antedates Keats.

Failure to be observable in isolation certainly doesn't make a thing "metaphysical" (in the colloquial bad sense intended here).  You cannot observe a "brother" in isolation…

There have also been some remarkable recent examples of consilience between math and physics:  cases in which mathematicians, burrowing from (as it were) the east coast, and physicists, burrowing from (so to speak) the west, suddenly met in the middle.

every physicist’s privilege these days -- weighing in on the traditional Big Questions by sheer force of a Ph.D.   Apparently watching Large Hadrons collide  confers theological insights denied to the rest of us.

Unlike the case of Gödelian incompleteness,  which is a restriction on what we can show, Heisenberg Uncertainty is no mere epistemological limitation:  it can actually create particles



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