March 21, 2010 archive

When nature gets in your face.

There are always times when things won’t be what we wish, and the Fine Structure Constant is no exception to this rule. We humans usually see what we believe rather than what is, and to that end, it comes straight from nature’s gag reel.

There is a most profound and beautiful question associated with the observed coupling constant, e the amplitude for a real electron to emit or absorb a real photon…(…It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.) Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It’s one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the “hand of God” wrote that number, and “we don’t know how He pushed his pencil…”

-Richard P. Feynman (1985), QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Princeton University Press, p. 129

Please join me for a highly abridged and cherry-picked tale in the story of modern physics…

Ten Drops of Wine

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Turkana has a post up speaking to the many deficiencies of the soon-to-be-passed (or not) health insurance legislation.

In comments, a poster, GN1927 speaks to something that hit a chord of memory in me:

Blessings to your family

But with all due respect, can we please celebrate what’s on the table for two seconds; everyone knows that this legislation is a start, not a finish.

God bless your cousin and sending healing energy that way.

The memory was of Obama’s election and Proposition 8’s passing in California, all at the same time.

Fascism — There is a point of no return

It’s ironic that teabaggers are now raising the cry of American Exceptionalism.  The term has a long history, generally along the lines of U.S. as a beacon of Democracy, young, free, blessed by God.  The Communist Party USA in the 1930’s re-defined the term to claim they could achieve socialism peacefully, paving the way for their accommodation with Roosevelt.  The teabaggers are today re-defining it again as America having the right to rule the world, unrestrained by treaty, law or human decency.  America uber alles, you might say.

They have the audacity to call Obama a fascist, even as a U.S. rep at a teabagger rally proclaims in Huffington Post:

“Fill this city up, fill this city, jam this place full so that they can’t get in, they can’t get out and they will have to capitulate to the will of the American people,” he said.

“So this is just like Prague under communist rule?” the Huffington Post asked.

“Oh yeah, it is very, very close,” King replied. “It is the nationalization of our liberty and the federal government taking our liberty over. So there are a lot of similarities there.”

Earlier, King implored the crowd to bring the nation’s capital to a sort of paralysis. Warning, erroneously, that the health care bill would fund abortion and fund care for 6.1 million illegal immigrants, he demanded that concerned citizens “continue to rise up.”

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