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Was that me? Did I really say that?
These are all things that I have said or written at one point or another. You can reference them if you like…
Ever wanted to know the mean life of an electron? Well now you can – it’s more than 66 octillion years!
[Linked to Above] Or how about the numerical value of Avogadro’s constant? That’s 6.022 140 76 × 1023 as defined by the BIPM.
Knowledge is power and nobody can take that away from you.
Mathematics, the study of logic, reasoning and deduction.
[Upon Neo Skinner’s Ramblings] There used to be a joke that all scientists had to be mad before they could start on something truly ground-breaking and maybe this is what has happened here…
In his seemingly mundane quest, Planck stumbled across a strange property of light. He found that, for his equations to work, light must be comprised of tiny packets almost like particles.
Wow, I really have spent a lot of time explaining how proportionality works!
One thing you must understand about science is that discoveries come in waves – not light or water waves, metaphorical waves representing the peaks of achievements.
Fermion is just a special word for ‘matter elementary particle.’
Don’t worry if you don’t have a particle collider, we’ll do it theoretically.
A science book would be incomplete without a discussion of naming conventions and unfortunately for you, I love them!
Although it is a nice thought, sadly particles do not have feelings otherwise I’d have a queue of particles as large as the universe asking me why they exist. Not good.
Muons can’t last forever after all.
Flavour is a physics concept paralleled in consumerism; imagine for a moment that we were shopping – don’t go shopping with a physicist if you wish to keep your sanity – and I asked you what type of ice cream you wanted. You’d probably look at me blankly and say: “type, don’t you mean flavour?” And this in essence is flavour in particle physics, the type of particle.
[Upon Electromagnetism] Maxwell’s new interaction has a relative strength of 1036, that’s like your grandma (gravity) attempting to win a weightlifting competition against the strongest man in the world (electromagnetism)!
[An Example of the Absurdity of Temperature in the Early Universe] This was apparent in the early universe shortly after the ‘big bang’ when the universe was only 1015 K (roughly the same temperature in celsius at this scale).
In a very similar fashion to people who step in to settle an argument and restore all world order, bosons prevent the worst from happening within the universe – that is the complete lack of law and order within the very prestigious quantum community.
Photons, as previously expressed, are remarkable things – we experience them every second of our lives as the bouncing balls that allow us to see, but light is a wave, is it not? How can particles come together like starlings to form a murmuration?
Since mesons are composed of one part matter and one part antimatter (yes, it appears I have branched out into recipe books too now) the interactions between the two particles define the properties of the meson.
[Upon the Double-Slit Experiment] An electron beam gun […] would most definitely ionise your coffee.
Theoretical physics has a gaping hole somewhere between the fundamentals and the beginning of it all.
The question to ask is not now “What is everything made up of?” but rather the more subtle “How is everything made up?”
[Upon String Theory] It is important to remember as always in quantum physics that what we call objects and particles are of course scientific constructs arising from a necessary need to analogise physical phenomena for easier understanding; our strings are nothing more than a framework for understanding a single-dimensioned object and their vibration nothing more than a property rather than a physical action.
Just because our understanding of fields and interactions has so far called upon the use of bosons does not mean that gravity will follow this rule through inevitability.
[Upon the Properties of Quarks] This is the nature of the universe; everything happens for a reason and things do not simply leap into existence including the very properties of the most fundamental of things.
[Upon Dimension Compactification] In such a universe it would seem outrageous to even consider that a theory of everything is possible if our best current theory is provably unprovable.
As a race of intelligent beings, humans have thus far prospered incredibly well on the journey to uncover the hot boiler room of the universe – the ‘big bang.’
All of physics is composed of approximations, who is to say that a thrown ball does not teleport to the other side of the world by way of a wormhole in an infinitely short amount of time before returning to its apparent position and continuing its Newtonian journey to rest?
Our understanding of the basic components of nature is founded upon continued approximations that cannot be proven in every possible situation – there is no limn→∞ for real life enabling us to rigorously prove every theory and law to an infinite degree.
I’m not the kind of person to provide basic answers to any question.
Digital media is a staple of the modern world and, with almost everyone in the developed world with access to the internet, it is a pivotal tool in the transfer of ideas and information.
There are all manner of different ways in which an unstable atom can decay; from electromagnetic radiation, lighter nuclei, and even neutrinos, nothing is seemingly safe from the unstable nucleus’ rampage against itself.
The universe is a deeply unusual thing.
Is mathematics truth or an elaborate figment of our imagination?