Name: Norman Anthony Aguero Currently a student at FIU. My major is chemistry and my minor is physics. My goal is to hopefully earn a Ph.D. in physical organic chemistry.
That singular sensation you're feeling is the very fabric of spacetime disintegrating around your ears.
If you ask an astrophysicist what a singularity is, he'll likely say it's a point in space where matter has become infinitely dense and the resulting gravitational field has dramatically warped space and time.
If you ask a mathematician what a singularity is, he'll tell you it's an uncomputable point for which you can compute all the surrounding points. It's the hole in the piece of graph paper.
These two definitions mean pretty much the same thing, but neither conveys how a singularity epitomizes the mind-bending funhouse atmosphere of the collective oxymoron we laughably refer to as "reality."
The physical idea of a singularity is intimately tied to the mathematical concept. An uncomputable point in space invariably represents the most extreme conditions known to science. Singularities are arguably the best available evidence that the universe is made out of math, because it appears that reality breaks down at the same place that math breaks down.
Around the start of the 20th century, people began to realize that the universe was a lot weirder than previously thought. Physicists began to speculate about what would happen when a dying star collapsed, and in 1939, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder put forward a model of the star collapsing to a "single point" -- compacting to infinitesmal size and reaching a measurement of density which is mathematically infinite, at which point the equations to describe the interior of the object break down, creating a singularity.
Physicist John Wheeler first used the phrase "black hole" to describe this phenomenon, which warps the very fabric of space and time into strange shapes. A black hole is a singularity so dense that it absorbs virtually everything around it, even light. Even space collapses, and the spacetime distortion creates an "event horizon" -- the point of no return.
Science fiction writers and physicists have speculated that black holes might be a gateway to other universes, parallel worlds, higher dimensions or some commbination of all three.
In sci-fi, this theory offers the possibility of cheerful jaunts in which daring adventurers somehow fly their spaceships through the event horizon and pop out on the other side, ready to explore strange new worlds.
While some physicists do believe black holes transport matter into another universe, traveling through a black hole is not unlike travelling through a wood chipper. All your parts end up on the other side, but not in their original configuration. And you won't enjoy the trip. Under this theory, the black hole purees all the matter that falls into it and shoots it out in a jet somewhere else in this universe or an entirely different one.
Anything that falls into the event horizon is gone forever, pulverized into a subatomic paste and trapped in a web of frozen time. There are no fancy shields or clever tricks that could possibly ease the way. There is no loophole for adventure, unless you consider entering the afterlife an adventure. By definition, a black hole disassembles anything caught in its web and reduces it to component parts so small they cannot be observed by even the most exacting microscope.
Because of the event horizon, black holes cannot be directly observed and no information can emerge from inside. Like a reclusive rock star, you can only spot a black hole by the disaster scene it creates in the neighborhood. Typical effects include a giant spiralling swirl of matter falling into the singularity. As the matter is pulverized (but before it falls into the event horizon), it emits X-rays, highly energetic radiation that moves fast enough to escape the black hole's gravity.
By studying these X-rays, scientists have been able use radio telescopes to spot several likely black holes, including a super-massive one in the center of the Milky Way galaxy, which is devouring stars at a phenomenal rate. This phenomenon may be related to the formation of galaxies, as well as their spiral structure.
Black holes can also create strange effects in their immediate vicinity. Quasars, the brightest objects known to astronomy, are believed to consist of a super-hot vortex of gas and material detritus rapidly spinning around a supermassive black hole. This notion is extremely hypothetical, however, since the closest quasars are billions of light years away from our own galaxy.
This distance also suggests that quasars are very old, possibly forming shortly after the Big Bang. There are many theories about exactly what we mean when we say "Big Bang," and none of them are 100 percent certain (or anywhere close). Many of these theories propose that the entire universe began as a singularity -- the ultimate black hole -- which then exploded/expanded/inflated into our universe for reasons which are entirely unclear.
Black holes may come in some exotic flavors, such as the hypothetical "naked singularity," which could theoretically be directly observed from the outside (unlike a black hole singularity, which is hidden by the blackness and the holeness).
Naked singularities have been proven mathematically feasible, which is not to say that you're especially likely to pass one while driving home from work.
All black holes are singularities, but not all singularities are black holes. A singularity simply refers to the point in a physical process where the equations break down. There are theoretically other non-black hole singularities which can occur in quantum physics, at the very small scales where reality gets weird.
One possible singularity was observed recently in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven, New York. Whilst scientists were smashing tiny particles together just to see what would happen, a small black-hole-like phenomenon popped up in the middle of a tiny fireball. The fireball was more or less intentional, but the baby black hole was apparently unexpected.
Scientists at RHIC hastened to explain that the black hole was not the same kind of black hole as the giant, star-swallowing, life-exterminating variety, and that no one was ever in any danger.
However, it's pretty easy to say after the fact that the mini-black-hole couldn't have swallowed the entire Earth and ended all human life -- because it didn't happen.
It's quite another proposition to suggest that nothing could possibly go wrong in the game of cosmic dice-rolling that goes on inside a particle accelerator.
Quantum physics experiments are by definition unpredictable. And the behavior of a singularity is also unpredictable -- again by definition.
So they're using one inherently unpredictable phenomenon to create another inherently unpredictable phenomenon, then predicting that nothing could possibly wrong. It doesn't take a doctorate in nuclear physics to spot the hole in this argument.
If you wake up one morning, and half the planet seems to have been sucked into a state of mathematical nonexistence, you won't even have the admittedly petty satisfaction of calling the folks over at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider to see their sheepish grins. They'll be on the other side of the event horizon, from which no information can escape.
You are sitting in front of a computer that would have filled a skyscraper had it been built in 1956. You have terabytes of the world's accumulated wisdom at your fingertips via Google. You have a college education in your pocket. Einstein, Feynman, Gödel, Jung, the Wachowski Brothers, Turing, Fermi, Crick and Watson have all blazed an intellectual trail for you to follow. With all this going for you, your major contribution to society so far consists of a message board post theorizing that the castaways on Lost might be in Purgatory.
About 400 years ago, before the discovery of electricity and only 150 years after the invention of the printing press, a barely literate German cobbler came up with the idea that God was a binary, fractal, self-replicating algorithm and that the universe was a genetic matrix resulting from the existential tension created by His desire for self-knowledge.
Clearly, someone's been slacking off.
It all started one day around 1610; a young German shoemaker was looking at a pewter dish when a dazzling ray of reflected sunlight unexpectedly turned out to be a message from God.
Many people receive messages from God. However, these usually tend to run along the lines of "Kill! Kill! Kill!" Such messages are not particularly interesting unless you happen to be on wrong end of the ax.
Jakob Böhme's transmission was considerably deeper than the usual psychotic imperative. In fact, his vision (well, let's call it that) contained profound theological insights well beyond his educational level, which amounted to little more than Bible study and sole-cobbling techniques.
Böhme wrote about his experience and the strange thoughts which resulted, but he sensibly decided to keep these notions within his circle of close friends. His friends had different ideas and copied Böhme's manuscript without his permission, circulating it around the prominent intellectual circles of the day.
Böhme became a celebrity overnight -- which was not a good thing. The local religious authorities were not amused. Luckily for Böhme, he was a Protestant and not a Catholic, so he was simply threatened with exile instead of having large spikes shoved up his ass.
Inconveniently, the visions kept coming. Although he was initially deterred by the threats of the local pastor, Böhme eventually began to write again, at first in secret and later in a handful of books. The majority of his work was not published until after his death.
His ideas were radical and exciting, and Böhme began to attract adherents -- which again led to trouble. His radical and exciting ideas received the exact same reception the second time around, but this time he was actually banished. Böhme received a friendlier reception in Dresden, but the positive attention there only further infuriated the clerical authorities back home.
All the controversy took a toll on his health, and Böhme died at the age of 49. But his ideas would live on, helping to shape a vast lineage of occultists, philosophers and lunatics for centuries to come.
Böhme treatises were mostly Gnostic and kabbalistic in nature. His concepts often reflected Eastern spiritual concepts that were not widely known in Germany at the time. Böhme began with a radical rethink of the traditional Judeo-Christian God. He threw out the traditional picture of a guy with a beard and long robes in favor of an abstract, formless deity.
Prior to the creation of man, Böhme wrote, God was an undifferentiated single unity defined by the absence of everything else -- the Abyss, or "Ungrund." Creation was the result of the Ungrund dividing from its state of original unity -- a proposition completely familiar to Taoists but foreign and offensive to Böhme's fellow Lutherans.
Even more controversially, Böhme argued that God could not be omniscient and omnipotent, since He was eternal and unique. "He knows no beginning, and also nothing like Himself, and also no end," Böhme wrote, arguing that God created man in His own image so that He could learn about Himself.
To initiate this learning process, God rendered Himself into positive and negative aspects -- yin and yang to the Taoists, although the material substance of Böhme's universe is not itself synonymous with God.
Prior to the initial split, God was only a potential mind with an unformed longing to know itself. After the split, God iterated into a binary-based matrix, continually increasing in complexity as He collected more and more information about Himself. In other words, Böhme's God evolves with the passage of time, in sharp contrast to the traditional Judeo-Christian view of a perfect, complete and unchanging figure who exists outside the normal flow of time.
The positive and negative aspects of creation were necessarily opposed to each other, and Böhme believed that this conflict was at the heart of the universe's logic and all of its processes. Since this tension is inherent to the design of all reality, evil and suffering are a necessary part of reality -- and both originate with God.
The tension between God's positive and negative aspects boils down to an identity crisis -- cosmic self-loathing. The positive force is the part of God that chose to differentiate itself in search of self-knowledge; the negative force is the part of God that seeks to return to its original unified state (obliterating reality in the process). Böhme characterized this negative force as "divine wrath," the eternal frustration of seeking a goal that can never be accomplished.
In Böhme's cosmology, the wrathful element of God as the Father, the beneficient element as Jesus Christ, the Son. The syzygy of the conflict between the opposite poles created a process of change -- the Holy Spirit, as the continual interaction of the Father and Son through time.
Böhme presented the universe as the product of the dueling forces of Father and Son, one bent on disordering and a return to unity (entropy), the other bent on ordering and harmonizing in the process of differentiation (organization), a formula now understood to foreshadow key concepts in chaos theory and genetic sequencing. The human body and soul, according to Böhme, were a microcosm of the divine model, akin to the holographic universe physics model first formally proposed in the 20th century.
Böhme expanded on these thoughts to develop theoretical frameworks encompassing virtually every aspect of the Christian mystical experience, covering everything from Sacred Geometry to the book of Genesis to the nature of Satan, the angels and the Antichrist.
With the basic underlying premise of creation firmly in hand, Böhme turned his attention to the details, integrating concepts from the Kabbalah and alchemy, and laying out a foundation for scientific and especially philosophical thought that exerted a wide-ranging influence on the elite minds of the Enlightenment (although the controversial nature of his assertions often kept that influence below the radar). Böhme's work reflected so many diverse spiritual concepts that he is considered to be the father of Theosophy -- a precursor to the New Age movement which stipulates that all religions are basically talking about the same thing in different words.
After his death, Böhme's writings were quietly circulated among the elite minds of Europe. His ideas were pursued by everyone from Friedrich Nietzsche to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (who revamped Böhme in a rationalist framework) to 20th century sci-fi author Philip K Dick, who had an extremely similar experience receiving an extremely similar revelation from a beam of pink light.
On the more disreputable end of the spectrum, Böhme was probably the single largest influence on the founders of modern occultism, including Aleister Crowley, Madame Blavatsky, and Adam Weishaupt, founder of the Illuminati, who got a lot of mileage out of Böhme's trademark imagery, including the famed "Illuminati eye" and the Ouroboros.
Small groups of adherents began to spring up. These early groups formed first among the Rosicrucians (a secret society active during Böhme's lifetime that was a precursor to modern Freemasonry) and a few small groups which, inspired by Böhme's tale of illumination in a ray of sunlight, began to refer to themselves as the Illuminati. Later, Weishaupt's Bavarian Illuminati would adopt some of Böhme's principles in their quest to rule the world -- a purpose Böhme himself would have found laughable.
God created the Earth in seven days, literally and exactly seven 24-hour days. And if you don't like it, you can go to hell. That is, you can literally go to Hell.
In all the world's rich panoply of religious and spiritual pursuits, there's nothing quite so inspiring as watching people desperately tie their entire view of the moral universe to an idea that's obviously wrong. Creationism is a particularly entertaining variant on an age-old theme. (Remember when Galileo was excommunicated for the ludicrous idea that the Earth goes 'round the sun and not the other way around?)
Creationism is pretty much summed up in the first sentence of this article. Creationists like to call their belief system "creation science" and would like to have it taught in school alongside the theory of evolution.
Now, it's certainly possible that some God or other created the world in seven 24-hour days. Any sentence that contains the word "God" is pretty much wide open to debate. But is it science?
Oh, wait, that sounded like a rhetorical question. It actually has an answer. No, it's not science. It's religion. Nothing wrong with religion, lots of people have it. Often very smart and well-educated people.
But beliefs based solely on the text of the Bible aren't science. Science is the "systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation." There is no scientific test which will show that Adam and Eve existed. At least, not according to the commonly accepted definition of science. However, if creationism is about anything, it's about language.
Western civilization has believed the seven-day theory for about 6,000 years longer than it's believed in evolution. The weight of that history is great indeed. Although Genesis was originally a Jewish scripture, the Christians were responsible for institutionalizing its contents as the undisputed truth about the world's origins.
The original notion of evolution dates back to the ancient Greeks, but early thinking on the subject was crushed by the Church of Rome. By the 17th century, however, the Protestant revolution and the whole Galileo fiasco had given the public reason to think that the Vatican was not necessarily the best source for scientific information.
Nevertheless, the idea that people had somehow evolved from a lower life form was abhorrent to most people, right up through the Victorian era. "Man" (and specifically the white male) was considered the highest possible form of life on earth, elevated above all others.
When Charles Darwin came along in the middle of the 19th century, all hell broke loose. Although Darwin outlined a progression of primitive man through modern man, the average joe looked at his chart and made the immediate mental leap that men essentially came from monkeys. The Victorians were not amused.
A violent religious backlash arose in response to the theory. Nearly 150 years later, depressingly, the backlash continues.
The theory of evolution quickly gained traction in scientific circles, but the common man held out for a lot longer. As it does with virtually all issues of any importance in the world, the United States responded to the controversy with litigation.
The state of Tennessee passed a law in 1925 banning schools from teaching any theory of human origin that conflicted with the Biblical account. A biology teacher named John Scopes defied the ban and was brought up on charges. A legal battle of historic proportions resulted, as Clarence Darrow stepped up as attorney for the defense; William Jennings Bryan came to the assistance of the state.
The "Scopes monkey trial" wrapped up with Darrow calling Bryan and staging a virtual debate over the issue of evolution vs. creation under the guise of cross-examination. It would have been great television, had there been television at the time.
DARROW: I will read it to you from the Bible: "And the Lord God said unto the serpent, because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life." Do you think that is why the serpent is compelled to crawl upon its belly?
BRYAN: I believe that.
DARROW: Have you any idea how the snake went before that time?
BRYAN: No, sir.
DARROW: Do you know whether he walked on his tail or not?
BRYAN: No, sir. I have no way to know. (Laughter in audience).
DARROW: Now, you refer to the cloud that was put in heaven after the flood, the rainbow. Do you believe in that?
BRYAN: Read it.
DARROW: All right, Mr. Bryan, I will read it for you.
BRYAN: Your Honor, I think I can shorten this testimony. The only purpose Mr. Darrow has is to slur at the Bible, but I will answer his question. I will answer it all at once, and I have no objection in the world, I want the world to know that this man, who does not believe in a God, is trying to use a court in Tennessee...
DARROW: I object to that.
BRYAN: (...) to slur at it, and while it will require time, I am willing to take it.
DARROW: I object to your statement. I am exempting you on your fool ideas that no intelligent Christian on earth believes.
In his closing remarks, Darrow conceded that his client was guilty and that he couldn't in good conscience plead otherwise, but that a higher court would have to decide the issue. These inspirational remarks led to the expected guilty verdict, which was later overturned on appeal for a technicality. Aside from the high drama, the trial accomplished pretty much nothing, since the technicality superseded the constitutional issue. The law remained on the books until 1967.
The bad publicity that came out of the trial left other states unenthusiastic about mandating creationism in the schools, but that didn't stop Protestant fundamentalists from rallying around the issue for the next 80 years.
Weirdly, although the whole issue had stemmed from an overly literal intepretation of the Bible, the second wave of creationists began madly embellishing the Biblical accounts of early man in an effort to get around some of the more undeniable evidence, such as dinosaur fossils.
The dwindling pool of modern creationists now tries to paint a picture of a Fred Flintstone-style Garden of Eden in which cheerful velociraptors traipse around with Adam and Eve like oversized puppies. According to these revisionist-literalists, pretty much any reference to a generic animal in the Bible is inclusive of dinosaurs.
The modern crop of creationists is often perceived as a bunch of harmless cranks, like Jerry Falwell and the Attorney General of the United States. Sure, harmless! They run wacky organizations like the "Institute for Creation Research" and the "Center for Scientific Creation," which contain arguments like "Evolutionists raise several objections. Some say, 'Even though evidence may imply a sudden creation, creation is supernatural, not natural, and cannot be entertained as a scientific explanation'" and "Teaching scientific evidence for creation has always been legal in public schools. Nevertheless, many teachers wonder how to do this."
If you're thinking that you don't know a lot of evolutionists who say evidence implies a sudden creation, or teachers who are wondering how to teach said evidence, welcome to the club. But then, it takes a special kind of thinking to keep ancient anachronisms alive and kicking.
A special kind of thinking of the sort perpetuated by the aforementioned Attorney General John Ashcroft, who launched a Justice Department investigation of a Texas professor for demanding that future medical students truthfully tell their opinions about the origins of human life before he would agree to write recommendation letters for them. But hey, who wouldn't want a doctor that believes women can be extracted from your ribs?
A few days ago I was having some work done at my
local garage. Ablondecame in and asked for a
seven-hundred-ten.
We all looked at each other and another customer
asked, "W hat is a seven-hundred-ten?"
She replied, "You know, the little piece in the
middle of the engine, I have lost it and need a new
one.." She replied that she did not know exactly
what it was, but this piece had always been there.
The mechanic gave her a piece of paper and a pen
and asked her to draw what the piece lookedlike.
She drew a circle and in the middle of it wrote 710.
He then took her over to another car which had its
hood up and asked "is there a 710 on this car?"
She pointed and said, "Of course, it's right there."
Denatonium, usually available as denatonium benzoate (under trade names such as Bitrex or Aversion) and as denatonium saccharide, is the most bittercompound known to date. It was discovered in 1958 during research on local anesthetics by Macfarlan Smith of Edinburgh, Scotland, and registered under the trademark Bitrex.[1][2] Dilutions of as little as 10 ppm are unbearably bitter to most humans. Denatonium salts are usually colorless and odorless solids but are often traded as solutions. They are used as aversive agents to prevent accidental ingestion. Denatonium is used in denatured alcohol,[3]antifreeze, nail biting preventions, animal repellents, liquid soaps, and shampoos. It is not known to pose any long-term health risks although exposure may be irritating and unpleasant.
An amusing anecdote relates how one of the researchers at Atomergic Chemetals Corp. in Plainview, New York, went home without realising that he had a tiny trace of denatonium saccharide on the outside of his lip. When he kissed his wife, she almost vomited.
Autism Breakthrough: Girl's Writings Explain Her Behavior and Feelings
Doctors Amazed by Carly Fleischmann's Ability to Describe the Disorder From the Inside
Carly Fleischmann has severe autism and is unable to speak a word. But thanks to years of expensive and intensive therapy, this 13-year-old has made a remarkable breakthrough.
Two years ago, working with pictures and symbols on a computer keyboard, she started typing and spelling out words. The computer became her voice.
"All of a sudden these words started to pour out of her, and it was an exciting moment because we didn't realize she had all these words," said speech pathologist Barbara Nash. "It was one of those moments in my career that I'll never forget."
Then Carly began opening up, describing what it was like to have autism and why she makes odd noises or why she hits herself.
"It feels like my legs are on first and a million ants are crawling up my arms," Carly said through the computer. Carly writes about her frustrations with her siblings, how she understands their jokes and asks when can she go on a date.
"We were stunned," Carly's father Arthur Fleischmann said. "We realized inside was an articulate, intelligent, emotive person that we had never met. This was unbelievable because it opened up a whole new way of looking at her." This is what Carly wants people to know about autism.
"It is hard to be autistic because no one understands me. People look at me and assume I am dumb because I can't talk or I act differently than them. I think people get scared with things that look or seem different than them." "Laypeople would have assumed she was mentally retarded or cognitively impaired. Even professionals labelled her as moderately to severely cognitively impaired. In the old days you would say mentally retarded, which means low IQ and low promise and low potential," Arthur Fleischman said.
Therapists say the key lesson from Carly's story is for families to never give up and to be ever creative in helping children with autism find their voice.
"If we had done what so many people told us to do years ago, we wouldn't have the child we have today. We would have written her off. We would have assumed the worst. We would have never seen how she could write these things
how articulate she is, how intelligent she is," the grateful father added.
"I asked Carly to come to my work to talk to speech pathologists and other therapists about autism," said Nash. "What would you like to tell them? She wrote, 'I would tell them never to give up on the children that they work with.' That kind of summed it up." Carly had another message for people who don't understand autism.
"Autism is hard because you want to act one way, but you can't always do that. It's sad that sometimes people don't know that sometimes I can't stop myself and they get mad at me. If I could tell people one thing about autism it would be that I don't want to be this way. But I am, so don't be mad. Be understanding."
No doubt the secular humanists among you are already pissed off by this article, just because of its placement under the header of religion.
But what other classification is possible for a set of beliefs that can never be verified by direct observation? In which direct observation automatically negates the validity of the observation? In which invisible forces run counter to Newton's laws of thermodynamics, allowing for everything from time travel to bilocation to teleportation to free energy (also known as zero-point extraction)?
OK, OK, OK. It's probably unfair to classify quantum physics as religion. (Probably not, but let's just pretend it is to appease the secular humanists. Wink, wink.)
The 20th Century played host to the most amazing set of discoveries and reversals in the history of science. What was once thought to be a world of too, too solid flesh instead melted into a miasma of multiple possibilities, solidified probabilities and verifiable impossibilities.
17th century scientist Isaac Newton had defined a world view of strictly verifiable laws, everything in its place and most things definable by a series of junior high school-level math equations. Despite the fact that he spent the better part of his life obsessed with the now completely discredited "science" of alchemy, Newton defined the parameters of existence for virtually every Western scientist for 200 years.
But in the 20th Century, a new breed of scientists burst onto the scene. Albert Einstein was the most famous of these; he discovered that time and space were not the straight lines that Newton's laws demanded. Einstein put forth the radical idea that space and time were curved, and he had the math to back his ideas up.
Equally important, but less well known to the public at large, were shocking new developments by a core group of scientists studying the behavior of the universe at very small scales — at the level of the atom and even smaller.
This group of mostly men included Einstein himself, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger, and dozens of others. Together and often dramatically apart, these men developed the study of these very small phenomena into what we now call quantum physics.
The basic principles of quantum physics are relatively simple, but their ramifications are incredibly confusing. The following gross oversimplification is presented for your amusement:
Things behave differently at very small scales than they do at very large scales. In other words, none of what we previously considered the "laws of physics" apply at subatomic scales.
Energy, such as light, exists simultaneously as particles and waves (more on this below).
The act of observing something happening causes a change in the thing being observed.
From these basic tenets, a lot of weirdness ensues. At subatomic sizes, things become bizarre, but in relatively predictable ways. Bear in mind that while all of this is pretty much mathematical abstraction, it has actually been shown to work in the real world, with startling and insane consequences for our petty little lives.
The basic concept of the atom goes back to before Christian times, but the specific understanding of the atom (the one most of you were taught in high school) we have today didn't develop until the 19th and early 20th centuries. Unfortunately, that the specific understanding (the one most of you were taught in high school) is a crock of shit.
Take the electron. Remember how you learned that the electron orbits the atom? Crap. How about light? Remember the discussion of whether light was made of waves or particles or both? Crap.
In quantum physics, none of these things are what they seem. Despite the visceral-seeming experience of getting hit by a bolt of lightning, the fact is that electrons in a reasonably meaningful sense do not exist, let alone orbit those atoms.
The root contradiction of quantum physics is a principal called complementarity. Complementarity means that certain properties can't be measured simultaneously. Usually, this means you can't measure BOTH the location and trajectory of a particle. In fact, when you measure one of these qualities the other one more or less ceases to exist.
So if we were talking about a baseball in the air, for instance, you couldn't measure both the direction it's moving in and also measure its location. While this might seem weird intuitively, it's not actually that hard to grok. To measure the direction in which a baseball is flying, you need to observe it in at least two different locations, right? So you technically can't measure a single location and a trajectory at the same time.
What's different in quantum physics is that, according to most versions of the story, the baseball's location isn't just unmeasurable, but it ceases to be meaningful. Despite the unmeasurable location of the baseball, you can still bounce it off a bat, or your head, and it feels pretty meaningful. But if you try to measure the trajectory of an electron, for instance, as it theoretically orbits the center of an atom, the location mutates into something entirely different.
The location of an electron in this instance is described as a "cloud of probabilities." This means the electron does not exist in any one location, but it instead exists as a sort of phantom, in every possible location, all at once, surrounding the electron like a cloud instead of orbiting it like a planet.
Once you see this sort of thing happening, as you might imagine, the domino effect kicks in and the weirdnesses start to multiply.
Take the photon, a particle of light. It's a funny beast that defies all logic in its travels around the universe. The photon is a particle. We know this for sure. It's a measurable, definable particle. You know how you're reading this article? Photons. If the photon was not a measurable particle, you would be staring at a blank screen, which would be pointless because the retinas in your eyes wouldn't be working either. For TVs, computer monitors, remote controls, fiber optics, eyes, tanning booths and solar power to work at all, light has to be a particle.
Except that it's also a wave. Now if you went to the wrong high school, like I did, someone probably explained this to you by saying that light is actually a wave made of particles (in the same way waves of water are made of water molecules). This is an elegant explanation. Wrong, but elegant.
See, light's a particle but it exists as part of a wave of "probability." In other words, there's a wave shape that describes every possible trajectory that the photon can move in. That part's easy enough. The hard part is that the wave of probability isn't just an abstract concept, it has an actual physical existence — and the probabilities can affect actual objects and events even when they don't, technically, exist.
There's a famous quantum physics experiment called the "double-slit experiment," which was one of the first proofs that all this wacky shit was actually true. In the double-slit experiment, you shine a light through a piece of cardboard with two small slits that allow the light to pass through. On the other side of the cardboard, is a piece of film. When the photon hits the film, it leaves a spot, so you can measure where the individual photons land.
Intuitively, this is pretty simple: One photon, two slits. The photon has to go through one or the other slit. So what you'd expect is to find a whole bunch of photons grouped near each of the slits, since the photons obviously went through either one slit or the other. And if you only have one slit, that's actually what you get, a clump of photons near the slit. THERE IS NO WAVE!
But when you have two slits, everything gets insane. Instead of two clumps, you get a pattern, as if a wave had simultaneously hit both slits, passed through and became two waves which interfered with each other. THERE IS A WAVE! BUT THERE ISN'T! There are only photons, one after another.
When the photon can only go through one slit (one possible course), there is only one photon traveling in a line. When there is more than one possibility, the single photon no longer exists; it becomes a wave of imaginary photons traveling along various possible paths. Nevertheless, when the photon eventually lands on the film, there's only one photon. If you only release one photon at a time, you still get the interference pattern, even though there's no possibility of more than one photon on the path at the same time.
ARGH! Has your head exploded yet?
The wave is a real thing. It affects where the photon lands. But the only way it can be real is if the photon actually exists in every possible place it could exist at the same time, which it clearly doesn't. But the experiment works in exactly the way described, which means all this is true.
From this point, all bets are off. Once you accept the paradox that unrealized probabilities have a tangible existence, almost anything becomes possible.
As you extend quantum physics out from this central paradox, a lot of science fiction concepts become potentially real, among them:
Teleportation: As the probability wave suggests, you can get from Point A to Point C without necessarily passing through Point B. Small particles can jump from one location to another without actually moving through space between the points, which is sometimes called a "quantum leap." In theory, this could be extended to larger particles.
Telepathy: While the funny business discussed until this point has to do with actual particles like electrons and photons, it can also apply to information. At the quantum level, information can be transmitted from one particle to another particle without any physical connection. This principle is being used to develop "quantum phones," which would surely be one of the weirdest products in this modern world.
Telekinesis: If you run the double-slit experiment explained above, but put a detector on each slit to determine for certain which slit the photon went through, the interference pattern disappears and you get the clumps of photons you would expect. In other words, the act of simply knowing which slit the photon went through changes the outcome of the experiment. Therefore, in principle (but not in currently imaginable practice), a specific state of mental knowledge could theoretically cause a change in physical states without direct interference.
Time Travel/Seeing The Future: If the double-slit experiment didn't already fry your brain beyond salvage, consider this: If you monkey around with the details of the experiment, you get an even more bizarre result. As stated before, when you take measurements, you change the outcome of the experiment. But when you take measurements AFTER THE FACT, the photon reacts with the same changed outcome. In other words, the photon seems to "know" beforehand whether or not you're going to take the measurement. At the very least, this strongly suggests information can travel backward through time. This is so bafflingly frustrating that some relatively well-educated physicists still simply reject the conclusion, because they think it sucks.
Of course, it would be an even more bizarre world, not to mention deathly dull, if people of limited imaginations could simply eradicate reality by disliking it. Quantum physics is here to stay, after decades of pissy, uninspired physicists did their level best to discredit every aspect of it.
And it gets weirder every day. Have you seen the commercial for the Volkswagen Passat where the guy gets the phone call from his future self? Just wait until you get that quantum cell phone... Sky's the limit...
In physics, entropy (from Greekεντροπία "a turning toward," from εν- "in" + τροπή "a turning"), symbolized by S, is a measure of the unavailability of a system’s energy to do work.[3] It is a measure of the randomness of molecules in a system. Entropy is central to the second law of thermodynamics and the combined law of thermodynamics, which deal with physical processes and whether they occur spontaneously. Spontaneous changes, in isolated systems, occur with an increase in entropy. Spontaneous changes tend to smooth out differences in temperature, pressure, density, and chemical potential that may exist in a system, and entropy is thus a measure of how far this smoothing-out process has progressed. In short, entropy is a function of a quantity of heat which shows the possibility of conversion of that heat into work. The increase in entropy is small when heat is added at high temperature and is greater when heat is added at lower temperature. Thus for maximum entropy there is minimum availability for conversion into work and for minimum entropy there is maximum availability for conversion into work.
Quantitatively, entropy is defined by the differential quantity dS = δQ / T, where δQ is the amount of heat absorbed in an isothermal and reversible process in which the system goes from one state to another, and T is the absolute temperature at which the process is occurring.[5] Entropy is one of the factors that determines the free energy of the system. This thermodynamic definition of entropy is only valid for a system in equilibrium (because temperature is defined only for a system in equilibrium), while the statistical definition of entropy (see below) applies to any system. Thus the statistical definition is usually considered the fundamental definition of entropy.
When a system's energy is defined as the sum of its "useful" energy, (e.g. that used to push a piston), and its "useless energy", i.e. that energy which cannot be used for external work, then entropy may be (most concretely) visualized as the "scrap" or "useless" energy whose energetic prevalence over the total energy of a system is directly proportional to the absolute temperature of the considered system. (Note the product "TS" in the Gibbs free energy or Helmholtz free energy relations).
In terms of statistical mechanics, the entropy describes the number of the possible microscopic configurations of the system. The statistical definition of entropy is the more fundamental definition, from which all other definitions and all properties of entropy follow. Although the concept of entropy was originally a thermodynamic construct, it has been adapted in other fields of study, including information theory, psychodynamics, thermoeconomics, and evolution.
Maxwell's relations are a set of equations in thermodynamics which are derivable from the definitions of the thermodynamic potentials. The Maxwell relations are statements of equality among the second derivatives of the thermodynamic potentials. They follow directly from the fact that the order of differentiation of an analytic function of two variables is irrelevant. If Φ is a thermodynamic potential and xi and xj are two different natural variables for that potential, then the Maxwell relation for that potential and those variables is:
where the partial derivatives are taken with all other natural variables held constant. It is seen that for every thermodynamic potential there are n(n-1)/2 possible Maxwell relations where n is the number of natural variables for that potential.
The four most common Maxwell relations
The four most common Maxwell relations are the equalities of the second derivatives of each of the four thermodynamic potentials, with respect to their thermal natural variable (temperature T or entropy S ) and their mechanical natural variable (pressure p or volume V ):
where the potentials as functions of their natural thermal and mechanical variables are:
Derivation of the Maxwell equations can be deduced from the differential forms of the thermodynamic potentials:
These equations resemble total differentials of the form
And indeed, it can be shown that for any equation of the form
that
Consider, as an example, the equation . We can now immediately see that
Since we also know that for functions with continuous second derivatives, the mixed partial derivatives are identical, that is, that
we therefore can see that
and therefore that
Each of the four Maxwell relationships given above follows similarly from one of the Gibbs equations.
General Maxwell relationships
The above are by no means the only Maxwell relationships. When other work terms involving other natural variables besides the volume work are considered or when the number of particles is included as a natural variable, other Maxwell relations become apparent. For example, if we have a single-component gas, then the number of particles N is also a natural variable of the above four thermodynamic potentials. The Maxwell relationship for the enthalpy with respect to pressure and particle number would then be:
where μ is the chemical potential. In addition, there are other thermodynamic potentials besides the four that are commonly used, and each of these potentials will yield a set of Maxwell relations.
Each equation can be re-expressed using the relationship
which are sometimes also known as Maxwell relations.
A guy walks into a post office one day to see a middle-aged, balding man standing at the counter methodically placing "Love" stamps on bright pink envelopes with hearts all over them. He then takes out a perfume bottle and starts spraying scent all over them.
His curiosity getting the better of him, he goes up to the balding man and asks him what he is doing. The man says, "I'm sending out one thousand Valentine cards signed, 'Guess who?'"
"But why?" asks the man.
"I'm a divorce lawyer," the man replies.
Economist Valentines
Top economist Valentine's Day cards
4. You raise my interest rate thirty basis points without a corresponding dropoff in consumer enthusiasm.
3. Let's raise housing starts together.
2. You stoke the animal spirits of my market.
1. Despite your decade of inflation, I still love you.
I just had a dream about it
A young woman was taking an afternoon nap. After she woke up, she told her husband, "I just dreamed that you gave me a pearl necklace for Valentine's day. What do you think it means?"
"You'll know tonight." he said.
That evening, the man came home with a small package and gave it to his wife. Delighted, she opened it--only to find a book entitled "The meaning of dreams".
Dictionary for women
Argument (ar*gyou*ment) n. A discussion that occurs when you're right, but he just hasn't realized it yet.
Airhead (er*hed) n. What a woman intentionally becomes when pulled over by a policeman.
Bar-be-que (bar*bi*q) n. You bought the groceries, washed the lettuce, chopped the tomatoes, diced the onions, marinated the meat and cleaned everything up, but, he, "made the dinner."
Blonde jokes (blond joks) n. Jokes that are short so men can understand them.
Cantaloupe (kant*e*lope) n. Gotta get married in a church.
Clothes dryer (kloze dri*yer) n. An appliance designed to eat socks.
Diet Soda (dy*it so*da) n. A drink you buy at a convenience store to go with a half pound bag of peanut M&Ms.
Eternity (e*ter*ni*tee) n. The last two minutes of a football game.
Exercise (ex*er*siz) v. To walk up and down a mall, occasionally resting to make a purchase.
Grocery List (grow*ser*ee list) n. What you spend half an hour writing, then forget to take with you to the store.
Hair Dresser (hare dres*er) n. Someone who is able to create a style you will never be able to duplicate again. See "Magician."
Hardware Store (hard*war stor) n. Similar to a black hole in space-if he goes in, he isn't coming out anytime soon.
Childbirth (child*brth) n. You get to go through 36 hours of contractions; he gets to hold your hand and say "focus,...breath...push..."
Lipstick (lip*stik) n. On your lips, coloring to enhance the beauty of your mouth. On his collar, coloring only a tramp would wear...!
Park (park) v./n. Before children, a verb meaning, "to go somewhere and neck." After children, a noun meaning a place with a swing set and slide.
Patience (pa*shens) n. The most important ingredient for dating, marriage and children. See also "tranquilizers."
Waterproof Mascara (wah*tr*pruf mas*kar*ah) n. Comes off if you cry, shower, or swim, but will not come off if you try to remove it.
Valentine's Day (val*en*tinez dae) n. A day when you have dreams of a candlelight dinner, diamonds, and romance, but consider yourself lucky to get a card
Organic molecules – in the form of methane – have been detected on a planet outside our solar system for the first time. The giant planet lies too close to its parent star for the methane to signal life, but the detection offers hope that astronomers will one day be able to analyse the atmospheres of Earth-like worlds.
Astronomers Mark Swain and Gautam Vasisht of Caltech in Pasadena, US, and Giovanna Tinetti of University College London, UK, used the Hubble Space Telescope to observe the giant planet HD 189733b, which is slightly more massive than Jupiter and lies 63 light years from Earth.
Because the planet crosses the face of its parent star as seen from Earth, some starlight is periodically filtered through the planet's atmosphere, where different chemicals absorb particular wavelengths.
The observations confirm an earlier tentative detection of water vapour and reveal the presence of methane gas.
"Initially, that is surprising," says Sara Seager of MIT in Cambridge, US, who was not involved in the study. Because HD 189733b orbits very close to its parent star – just 10% of Mercury's distance from the Sun, it is very hot, with atmospheric temperatures of about 700° Celsius. "When the temperature is this high, the dominant form of carbon should be carbon monoxide, not methane," says Seager.
The authors suggest that some ill-understood chemical process might be responsible, either concentrating the methane in cooler parts of the atmosphere, or generating extra methane directly. Alternatively, the methane might simply mean that the planet happens to be very rich in carbon, Seager says.
This combination of water and organic molecules would be a promising one for life if it were found in a less hostile spot than the atmosphere of a searing gas giant.
Eventually, astronomers hope to be able to analyse the atmospheres of smaller planets more akin to the Earth, and the new study is a big step in that direction, says Seager. "The path that we're on is towards rocky planets," she told New Scientist. "I'm really excited about this."
I am writing a working resume. I needed a bit of inspiration. A chronological resume I chose, but I needed something to epitomize my life's experiences. So...
Says one atom to the other, "Hey! I think I lost an electron!"
The other says, "Are you sure??"
"Yes, I'm positive!"
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate!
A neutron walks into a restaurant and orders a couple of cokes. As she is about to leave, she asks the waiter how much she owes. The waiter replies, "For you, No Charge!!!"
A sign outside the chemistry hotel reads "Great Day Rates, Even Better NO3-'s"
Sometimes people can get carried away with a danger that isn't real! A group is working hard to ban the "potentially dangerous" chemical, dihydrogen monoxide (water) - check out the research on this subject.
A small piece of ice which lived in a test tube fell in love with a Bunsen burner. "Bunsen! my flame! I melt whenever I see you" said the ice. The Bunsen burner replied :"It's just a phase you're going through".
Heisenberg is out for a drive when he's stopped by a traffic cop. The cop says: " Do you know how fast you were going? Heisenberg replies: "No, but I know where I am".
Why did the white bear dissolve in water? Because it was polar.
What do you call a tooth in a glass of water? A one molar solution.
What do dipoles say in passing? "Have you got a moment?"
Why does hamburger have lower energy than steak? Because it's in the ground state.
What do you do with a dead chemists? Barium
What weapon can you make from the elements potassium, nickel and iron? A KNiFe.
What did one titration tell the other? Let's meet at the endpoint.
Why are chemists great for solving problems? They have all the solutions.
Did you hear about the chemist who was reading a book about Helium? He just couldn't put it down.
Why do chemistry professors like to teach about ammonia? Because it's basic material.
What is a cation afraid of? A dogion.
What did the Cowboy Chemist tell his horse? HIO Ag!!!!
How many moles are in a guacamole? Avocado's number.
Why did Carbon marry Hydrogen? They bonded well from the minute they met.
What kind of ghosts haunt chemistry faculties? Methylated spirits.
If H20 is water what is H204? Drinking, bathing, washing, swimming. . .
According to a chemist, why is the world so diverse? Because it's made up of alkynes of people.
What's the difference between Chemistry and cooking? In Chemistry, you should never lick the spoon.
A group of organic molecules were having a party, when a group of robbers broke into the room and stole all of the guest's joules. A tall, strong man, armed with a machine gun came into the room and killed the robbers one by one. The guests were very grateful to this man, and they wanted to know who he was. He replied: My name is BOND, Covalent Bond.
A freshman chemistry student prepared a standard solution and showed it to her professor. The professor gave her a puzzled look, and said: This solution looks a bit WEIRD. Are you sure you used the right set of reagents? The student replied: Absolutely. According to my calculations, this is one NORMAL solution.
In a Tokyo Hotel:
Is forbidden to steal hotel towels please. If you are not a person to do
such thing is please not to read notice.
In a Bucharest hotel lobby:
The lift is being fixed for the next day.
During that time we regret that you will be unbearable.
In a Leipzig elevator:
Do not enter the lift backwards, and only when lit up.
In a Belgrade hotel elevator:
To move the cabin, push button for wishing floor. If the cabin should
enter more persons, each one should press a number of wishing floor.
Driving is then going alphabetically by national order.
In a Paris hotel elevator:
Please leave your values at the front desk.
In a hotel in Athens:
Visitors are expected to complain at the office between the hours
of 9 and 11 A.M. daily.
In a Yugoslavian hotel:
The flattening of underwear with pleasure is the job of the chambermaid.
In a Japanese hotel:
You are invited to take advantage of the chambermaid.
In the lobby of a Moscow hotel across from a Russian Orthodox monastery:
You are welcome to visit the cemetery where famous Russian and Soviet composers, artists, and writers are buried daily except Thursday.
In an Austrian hotel catering to skiers:
Not to perambulate the corridors in the hours of repose
in the boots of ascension.
On the menu of a Swiss restaurant:
Our wines leave you nothing to hope for.
On the menu of a Polish hotel:
Salad a firm's own make; limpid red beet soup with cheesy dumplings
in the form of a finger; roasted duck let loose; beef rashers
beaten up in the country people's fashion.
Outside a Hong Kong tailor shop:
Ladies may have a fit upstairs.
In a Bangkok dry cleaners:
Drop your trousers here for best results.
Outside a Paris dress shop:
Dresses for street walking.
In a Rhodes tailor shop:
Order your summers suit. Because is big rush we will execute
customers in strict rotation.
A sign posted in Germany's Black forest:
It is strictly forbidden on our black forest camping site that people of
different sex, for instance, men and women, live together in one tent unless
they are married with each other for that purpose.
In a Zurich hotel:
Because of the impropriety of entertaining guests of the opposite sex in the bedroom, it is suggested that the lobby be used for this purpose.
In an advertisement by a Hong Kong dentist:
Teeth extracted by the latest Methodists.
In a Rome laundry:
Ladies, leave your clothes here and spend the afternoon having a good time.
In a Swiss mountain inn:
Special today -- no ice cream.
In a Bangkok temple:
It is forbidden to enter a woman even a foreigner if dressed as a man.
In a Copenhagen airline ticket office:
We take your bags and send them in all directions.
On the door of a Moscow hotel room:
If this is your first visit to the USSR, you are welcome to it.
In a Norwegian cocktail lounge:
Ladies are requested not to have children in the bar.
In a Budapest zoo:
Please do not feed the animals. If you have any suitable food,
give it to the guard on duty.
In the office of a Roman doctor:
Specialist in women and other diseases.
In an Acapulco hotel:
The manager has personally passed all the water served here.
In a Tokyo shop:
Our nylons cost more than common,
but you'll find they are best in the long run.
From a Japanese information booklet about using a hotel air conditioner:
Cooles and Heates: If you want just condition of warm in your room,
please control yourself.
From a brochure of a car rental firm in Tokyo:
When passenger of foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. Trumpet him
melodiously at first, but if he still obstacles your passage then tootle
him with vigor.
Two signs from a Majorcan shop entrance:
English well talking. - Here speeching American.
The world's first time machine? Tunnel to the past could open door to future within three months, say Russians
Last updated at 13:26pm on 7th February 2008
Time travel could be a reality within just three months, Russian mathematicians have claimed.
They believe an experiment nuclear scientists plan to carry out in underground tunnels in Geneva in May could create a rift in the fabric of the universe.
The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) hopes its "atom-smashing" tests - which aim to recreate the conditions in the first billionth of a second after the "Big Bang'" created everything - will shed invaluable light on the origins of the universe.
But Irina Aref'eva and Igor Volovich, of Moscow's Steklov Mathematical Institute, say the energy produced by forcing tiny particles to collide at close to the speed of light could open the door to visitors from the future.
According to Einstein's general theory of relativity, any large amounts of matter or energy will distort the space and time that surrounds it.
If the energy or mass is large enough, it is claimed that time can be distorted so much that it folds back on itself - creating a wormhole, or time tunnel, between the present and the future.
But Dr Brian Cox, a member of CERN and one of Britain's leading experts in particle physics, is highly sceptical about the Russian claims, calling them "nothing more than a good science fiction story".
Wormhole: Scientists plan to carry out tests in underground tunnels in Geneva in May which could create a rift in the fabric of the universe
He said: "Cosmic ray collisions in the upper atmosphere are far more energetic than anything we can produce.
"They have been occurring for five billion years, and no time travellers have appeared.
"Stephen Hawking has suggested that any future theory of quantum gravity will probably close this possibility off, not least because the universe usually proceeds in a sane way, and time travel into the past isn't sane."
Cynics often point out that if time travel was really possible, we would have been visited by people from the future.
However, Einstein's laws of physics suggest that time travel is only possible into the past as far as the point when the first time machine was invented.
Warning! Do not listen to these two videos if you are offended easily. Do no let anyone under 17 hear this. I grew up in New York, so this guy reminds me of NYC natives. His humor is very vulgar, yet he cracks me up. I need a good laugh this weekend.
The Alchemist
2007 Darwin Award Nominee
Confirmed True by Darwin
(10 December 2007, Russia) As a child, Sergei promised his grandmother, "I will establish for you the elixir of immortality! I want you to live forever." As an adult, we find Sergei sitting in his college biology class, licking potassium cyanide off his palm. He had found the magic elixir: swallow poisons daily, to strengthen his body and protect him from death.
He regularly consumed small quantities of toxic mushrooms, arsenic, and cyanide salts, and urged others to join him during daring night-time excursions. "I shall not die," he said. "I have long drank poison, and my body today, nothing can kill."
After swallowing the KCN, he began to feel ill, and asked his comrades to fetch him some water. But instead of drinking plain water, he dissolved the rest of the cyanide powder in it, and consumed the solution.
Sergei was an intelligent 18-year-old, interested in chemistry and anatomy. He earned "a gold medal" and was "easily accepted into two universities, the Medical Academy and the Ural State University." But Sergei's scientific premise was flawed. Instead of immortality, he had discovered the elixir of mortality. He suffered convulsions, slipped into a coma, and died without regaining consciousness.
His father called Sergei a gifted chemist who died for the sake of science.
It's the Ryugyong Hotel in North Korea, where the world's 22nd largest skyscraper has been vacant for two decades and is likely to stay that way ... forever.
By Eva Hagberg
A picture doesn't lie -- the one-hundred-and-five-story Ryugyong Hotel is hideous, dominating the Pyongyang skyline like some twisted North Korean version of Cinderella's castle. Not that you would be able to tell from the official government photos of the North Korean capital -- the hotel is such an eyesore, the Communist regime routinely covers it up, airbrushing it to make it look like it's open -- or Photoshopping or cropping it out of pictures completely.
Even by Communist standards, the 3,000-room hotel is hideously ugly, a series of three gray 328-foot long concrete wings shaped into a steep pyramid. With 75 degree sides that rise to an apex of 1,083 feet, the Hotel of Doom (also known as the Phantom Hotel and the Phantom Pyramid) isn't the just the worst designed building in the world -- it's the worst-built building, too. In 1987, Baikdoosan Architects and Engineers put its first shovel into the ground and more than twenty years later, after North Korea poured more than two percent of its gross domestic product to building this monster, the hotel remains unoccupied, unopened, and unfinished.
Construction on the Hotel of Doom stopped in 1992 (rumors maintain that North Korea ran out of money, or that the building was engineered improperly and can never be occupied) and has never started back up, which shouldn't come as a shock. After all, who the hell travels to beautiful downtown Pyongyang? It would make sense if the hotel were in South Korea, where Americans are allowed to travel and where projects like the Busan Lotte Tower and the Lotte Super Tower now rise thousands of feet above the formerly modest skyline.
With Pyongyang's official population said to range between 2.5 million and 3.8 million (official numbers are not made available by the North Korean government), the Ryugyong Hotel -- the 22nd largest skyscraper in the world -- is a failure on an enormous scale. To put it in context, imagine if the John Hancock Center (1,127 feet tall) in Chicago (population 2.9 million) was not only completely vacant, but unfinished with zero hope of ever being completed.
You may not be able to actually live there, but the building now has its own virtual real estate managers, Richard Dank and Andreas Gruber, a pair of German architects and self-described "custodians of the pyramid's diverse manifestations." The duo run Ryugyong.org, which they describe as an "experimental collaborative online architecture site." Sad you can't visit the building in real life? Log on, view the detailed 3-D models, and "claim" a subsection for yourself.
Map of the Hawaiian Islands, a chain of islands that stretches 1,500 mi (2,400 km) in a northwesterly direction from the southern tip of the Island of Hawaiʻi.
The Hawaiian Islands, once known as the Sandwich Islands, form an archipelago of nineteen islands and atolls, numerous smaller islets, and undersea seamounts trending northwest by southeast in the North Pacific Ocean between latitudes 19° N and 29° N. The archipelago takes its name from the largest island in the group and extends some 1,500 miles (2,400 km) from the Island of Hawaiʻi in the south to northernmost Kure Atoll. Excluding Midway, which is an unincorporated territory of the United States, the Hawaiian Islands form the U.S. State of Hawaii.
This archipelago represents the exposed peaks of a great undersea mountain range known as the Hawaiian-Emperor seamount chain, formed by volcanic activity over a hotspot in the earth's mantle. At about 1,860 miles (3,000 km) from the nearest continent, the Hawaiian Island archipelago is the most isolated grouping of islands on Earth (Macdonald, Abbott, and Peterson, 1984).
A NASA satellite image of the Hawaiian Islands taken from space. Click on the image for a larger view that shows the main islands and the extended archipelago.
Islands and reefs of the Hawaiian archipelago
Photograph of the Hawaiian Islands from Space Shuttle Discovery, looking southeast by south. Kauaʻi is closest at bottom right
3-D perspective view of the southeastern Hawaiian Islands shown in green, with the white summits of Mauna Loa (4,170 m/13,700 ft high) and Mauna Kea (4,206 m/13,800 ft high). The islands are the tops of massive volcanoes, most of whose bulks lie below the sea surface. Ocean depths are colored from violet (5,750 m/18,900 ft deep northeast of Maui) and indigo to light gray (shallowest). Historical lava flows are shown in red, erupting from the summits and rift zones of Mauna Loa, Kilauea, and Hualalai volcanoes on Hawaiʻi.
Some information sources state that there are 137 "islands" in the Hawaiian chain. This number includes all minor islands and islets offshore of the main islands (listed above) and individual islets in each atoll. (Hawaiʻi state government, undated). Following is a list of islets and small offshore islands that make up the total count beyond 19:
The chain of islands or archipelago formed as the Pacific plate moved slowly northwestward over a hotspot in the Earth's mantle at about 32 miles (51 km) per million years. Hence the islands in the northwest of the archipelago are older and typically smaller, due to longer exposure to erosion. The only active volcanism in the last 200 years has been on the southeastern island, Hawaiʻi, and on the submerged but growing volcano at the extreme southeast, Loihi. The Hawaiian Volcano Observatory of the U. S. Geological Survey documents recent volcanic activity and provides images and interpretations of the volcanism.
Almost all magma created in the hotspot has the composition of basalt, and so the Hawaiian volcanoes are constructed almost entirely of this igneous rock and its coarse-grained equivalents, gabbro and diabase. A few igneous rock types with compositions unlike basalt, such as nephelinite, do occur on these islands but are extremely rare. The majority of eruptions in Hawaiʻi are Hawaiian-type eruptions because basaltic magma is relatively fluid compared with magmas typically involved in more explosive eruptions, such as the andesitic magmas that produce some of the spectacular and dangerous eruptions around the margins of the Pacific basin.
Eruptions from the Hawaiʻi hotspot have left a trail of underwater mountains across the pacific over millions of years, called the Emperor Seamounts
Hawaiʻi (the Big Island) is the largest and youngest island in the chain, built from five different volcanoes. Mauna Loa, comprising over half of the Big Island, is the largest shield volcano on the planet. The measurement from sea level to summit is more than 2.5 miles (4 km), from sea level to sea floor about 3.1 miles (5 km). [1]
The Hawaiian Islands are the site of many earthquakes. Generally, they are caused by the islands' volcanic foundations. Most of the early earthquake monitoring took place in Hilo, by Sarah J. Lyman and her family. From 1833 to 1896, approximately 4 or 5 earthquakes were reported per year.[2]
The state of Hawaii accounted for 7.3% of the United States' reported earthquakes with a magnitude 3.5 or greater from 1974 to 2003, with a total 1533 earthquakes. Hawaii ranked as the state with the third most earthquakes over this time period.[3]
On Sunday, October 15, 2006, there was an earthquake with a magnitude of 6.7, off the northwest coast of the island of Hawaii, near the Kona area of the big island. The initial earthquake was followed approximately five minutes later by a magnitude 5.7 aftershock. Minor-to-moderate damage was reported on most of the big island, including several major roadways rendered impassable by rock slides, and other structural damage, and effects were felt as far away as Honolulu, Oahu, nearly 150 miles (240 km) from the epicenter. Power outages lasted for several hours to whole days on several islands. Several water mains ruptured.
Linda Lingle, the governor of Hawaii made a statewide disaster declaration several hours after the earthquake struck. A tsunami alert was issued, but quickly canceled after sensor buoys failed to detect significant wave activity. No deaths or life-threatening injuries were reported.
The Hawaiian Islands are home to a large number of endemic species. The plant and animal life of the Hawaiian Islands developed in nearly complete isolation over about 70 million years. Mammals were absent until they arrived with the first human settlers.
Human contact, first by Polynesians, introduced new trees, plants and animals. These included voracious species such as rats and pigs, who took a heavy toll on native birds and invertebrates that evolved in the absence of such predators. The growing population also brought deforestation, forest degradation, treeless grasslands, and environmental degradation. As a result, many species which depended on forest habitats and food went extinct. As humans cleared land for farming, monocultural crop production replaced multi-species systems.
The arrival of the Europeans had a significant impact, with the promotion of large-scale single-species export agriculture and livestock grazing. In turn, this led to the increased clearing of forests, and the development of towns, driving more species to extinction. Today, many of the remaining endemic species are considered endangered. [1]
The islands receive most rainfall from the trade winds on their north and east flanks (called the windward side) as a result of orographic precipitation. Coastal areas in general and especially the south and west flanks or leeward sides, tend to be drier. Because of the frequent build-up of Tradewind clouds and potential showers, most tourist areas have been built on the leeward coasts of the islands.
In general, the Hawaiian Islands receive most of their precipitation during the winter months (October to April). Drier conditions generally prevail from May to September, but the warmer temperatures increase the risk of hurricanes (see below).
Temperatures at sea level generally range from high temperatures of 85-90 °F (29-32 °C) during the summer months to low temperatures of 65-70 °F (18-21 °C) during the winter months. Very rarely does the temperature rise above 90 °F (32 °C) or drop below 60 °F (16 °C) at lower elevations. Temperatures are lower at higher altitudes; in fact, the three highest mountains of Mauna Kea, Mauna Loa, and Haleakala sometimes receive snowfall during the winter.
One of the most distinctive features of Hawaii’s climate is the small annual variation in air temperature range. This is because there is only a slight variation in length of night and day from one part of Hawaii to another because all its islands lie within a narrow latitude band. The small variations in the length of the daylight period, together with the smaller annual variations in the altitude of the sun above the horizon, result in relatively small variations in the amount of incoming solar energy from one time of the year to another. This factor, and the location of Hawaii in mid-ocean contribute to Hawaii’s pleasant climate. The surface waters of the open ocean around Hawaii have an average temperature that ranges from 73° to 74 °F (23 °C) between late February and early April, to a maximum of 79° to 80 °F (27 °C) in late September or early October. With air temperatures this mild for hundreds of miles around, the air that reaches Hawaii is neither very hot nor very cold. Temperatures of 90 °F (32 °C) and above are quite uncommon (with the exception of dry, leeward areas). In the leeward areas, temperatures may reach into the low 90’s several days during the year, but temperatures higher than these are unusual.
The other reason for the small variation in air temperature is the nearly constant flow of fresh ocean air across the islands. Just as the temperature of the ocean surface varies comparatively little from season to season, so also does the temperature of air that has moved great distances across the ocean; the air brings with it to the land the mild temperature regime characteristic of the surrounding ocean. In the central North Pacific, the Trade winds represent the outflow of air from the great region of high pressure, the Pacific Anticyclone, typically located well north and east of the Hawaiian Islands. The Pacific High, and with it the trade-wind zone, moves north and south with changing angle of the sun, so that it reaches its northernmost position in the summer. This brings the heart of the trade winds across Hawaii during the period of May through September, when the Trade winds are prevalent 80 to 95 percent of the time. From October through April, the heart of the Trade winds moves south of Hawaii; however, the Trade winds still blow across the islands much of the time. They provide a system of natural year-long ventilation throughout the islands and bring to the land the mild, warm temperatures characteristic of air that has moved great distances across tropical waters.
The wind patterns on the islands are very complex. Though the trade winds are fairly constant in speed and duration, their relatively uniform air flow is distorted and disrupted by mountains, hills, and valleys. The usual regime is to have upslope winds by day and downslope winds by night. Local conditions that produce occasional violent winds are not well understood, even though the general causes of these winds can be surmised. These are very localized winds, observed only in a few areas. They sometimes reach speeds of 60 to 100 MPH and are best known in the settled areas of Kula and Lahaina on Maui. The Kula winds are strong downslope winds that occur on the lower slopes of the west side of Haleakala. These winds tend to be strongest between 2,000 and 4,000 feet (1,200 m) above mean sea level. The Lahaina winds are also downslope winds, but have somewhat different characteristics. They are also called “lehua winds” after the lehua tree, whose red blossoms fill the air when these strong winds blow. They issue from the canyons at the base of the main mountain mass of western Maui, where the steeper canyon slopes meet the more gentle piedmont slope below. These winds are quite infrequent, occurring every 8 to 12 years. They are extremely violent, with wind speeds of 80 to 100 MPH or more (130–160 km/h).
Road to Hana
Cloud Formation – Under trade wind conditions, there is very often a pronounced moisture discontinuity between 4,000 and 8,000 feet (1,200–2425 m). Below these heights the air is moist; above it is dry. The break (a large-scale feature of the Pacific Anticyclone) is caused by a temperature inversion embedded in the moving trade wind air. The inversion tends to suppress the vertical movement of air and so restricts cloud development to the zone just below the inversion. The inversion is present 50 to 70 percent of the time; its height fluctuates from day to day, but it is usually between 5,000 and 7,000 feet (1,500–2,100 m). On trade wind days when the inversion is well defined, the clouds develop below these heights with only an occasional cloud top breaking through the inversion. These towering clouds form along the mountains where the incoming trade wind air converges as it moves up a valley and is forced up and over the mountains to heights of several thousand feet. On days without an inversion, the sky is almost cloudless (completely cloudless skies are extremely rare). In leeward areas well screened from the trade winds (such as the west coast of Maui), skies are clear 30 to 60 percent of the time. Windward areas tend to be cloudier during he summer, when the trade winds and associated clouds are more prevalent, while leeward areas, which are less affected by cloudy conditions associated with trade wind cloudiness, tend to be cloudier during the winter, when storm fronts pass through more frequently. On Maui, the cloudiest zones are at and just below the summits of the mountains, and at elevations of 2,000 to 4,000 feet (600–1,200 m) on the windward sides of Haleakala. In these locations the sky is cloudy more than 70 percent of the time. The usual clarity of the air in the high mountains is associated with the low moisture content of the air.
It is also true that in Hawaii very light showers are extremely frequent in most localities. On the windward coast, it is common to have as many as 10 brief showers in a single day, not one of which is heavy enough to produce more than one-hundredth of an inch of rain. This is because the usual run of trade wind weather yields many light showers in the lowlands, whereas the torrential rains are associated with a sudden surge in the trade winds or with a major storm. Hana has had as much as 28 inches (710 mm) of rain in a single 24-hour period.
Major storms occur most frequently between October and March, inclusive. During this period, there may be as many as six or seven major storm events in a year. Such storms bring heavy rains and are sometimes accompanied by strong local winds. The storms may be associated with the passage of a cold front – the leading edge of a mass of relatively cool air that is moving from west to east or from northwest to southeast.
Kona storms are features of the winter season. They are so-called because they often generate winds coming from the “kona” or leeward direction. The rainfall in a well-developed Kona storm is more widespread and more prolonged than in the usual cold-front storm. Kona storm rains are usually most intense in an arc, or band, extending from south to east of the storm and well in advance of its center. Kona rains last from several hours to several days. The rains may continue steadily, but the longer lasting ones are characteristically interrupted by intervals of lighter rain or even partial clearing, as well as by intense showers superimposed on the more moderate regime of continuous, steady rain. An entire winter may pass without a single well-developed Kona storm. More often, however, there are one or two such storms a year; sometimes there are four or five. Three harbors provide some protection from Kona storms Kahului Harbor (used mostly for commercial vessels), Lahaina and Maalea Harbors used primarily for sailing craft.
The hurricane season in the Hawaiian Islands is roughly from June through November, when hurricanes and tropical storms are most probable in the North Pacific. These storms tend to originate off the coast of Mexico (particularly the Baja California peninsula) and track west or northwest towards the islands.
True hurricanes are very rare in Hawaii, indicated by the fact that only four have affected the islands during a 63-year period. Tropical storms are more frequent. These are similar to hurricanes but with more modest winds, below 74 mph (119 km/h). Because weak tropical storms resemble some Kona storms in the winds and rains they produce, and because early records do not distinguish clearly between them, it has been difficult to estimate the average frequency of tropical storms. A tropical storm will pass sufficiently close to Hawaii every year or two to affect the weather in some part of the Islands. Unlike cold fronts and Kona storms, hurricanes and tropical storms are not limited to the winter season. They are most likely to occur during the last half of the year, from July through December.
Hawai‘i is protected by the vastness of the Pacific (i.e. the improbability of a direct hit); as storms cross the Pacific they tend to lose strength if they bear northward and encounter cooler water. It is thought that the topography of the highest islands (Haleakalā on Maui, Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa on the Big Island) may protect these islands, and certainly Kauaʻi has been hit more often in the last 50 years than the others.
Effect on trade winds
The top image above shows the winds around the Hawaiian Islands measured by the Seawinds instrument aboard QuikSCAT during August 1999. Trade winds blow from right to left in the image. The bottom image shows the ocean current formed by the islands' wake. Arrows indicate current direction and speed, while white contours show ocean temperatures. The warm water of the current generates winds which sustain the current for thousands of miles.
Despite being a tiny speck of land within the vast Pacific Ocean, the Hawaiian Islands have a surprising effect on ocean currents and circulation patterns over much of the Pacific. In the Northern Hemisphere, the trade winds blow from northeast to southwest, from North and South America toward Asia, between the equator and 30 degrees north latitude. Typically, the trade winds continue on an uninterrupted course across the Pacific — unless something gets in their way, like an island.
Hawaii's high mountain landscape presents a substantial obstacle in the path of the trade winds. The elevated topography blocks the airflow, effectively splitting the trade winds in two. This split causes a zone of weak winds, called a "wind wake," to form on the leeward side of the islands.
Aerodynamic theory indicates that an island wind wake effect should dissipate within a few hundred kilometers and not be felt in the western Pacific. However, the wind wake caused by the Hawaiian Islands extends 1,860 miles (3,000 km), which is roughly 10 times longer than any wake observed elsewhere. The long wake testifies to the strong interaction between the atmosphere and ocean, which has strong implications for global climate research. It helps researchers assess climate sensitivity, namely how much increase can be observed in the global mean temperature as carbon dioxide levels increase. It is also important for understanding natural climate variations, like El Niño.
There are number of reasons why this phenomenon has only been observed in Hawaii. First, because the ocean reacts slowly to fast-changing winds, the wind system must be steady to exert force on the ocean, as is the case with the trade winds. Second, the high mountain topography of Hawaiʻi provides a significant disturbance to the winds. Third, the Hawaiian Islands are large in horizontal scale, extending over four degrees in latitude. It is this active interaction between wind, ocean current, and temperature that creates this uniquely long wake west of Hawaiʻi.
In addition, the wind wake drives an eastward "counter current" that brings warm water 5,000 miles (8,000 km) from the Asian coast to Hawaiʻi. This warm water drives further changes in wind, allowing the island effect to extend far into the western Pacific. The counter current had been observed by oceanographers near the Hawaiian Islands years before the long wake was discovered, but they did not know what caused it.[4]
Tsunamis
Aftermath of the 1960 Chilean tsunami in Hilo, Hawaiʻi, where the tsunami left 61 people dead and 282 seriously injured.
The Hawaiian Islands can be affected by tsunamis, great waves that strike the shore typically but not exclusively from the north. Tsunamis are movements of the surface layer of the ocean most often caused by earthquakes somewhere in the Pacific. The city of Hilo on the Big Island has historically been most affected by tsunamis, where the inrushing water is accentuated by the shape of the bay on which the town is situated.
That singular sensation you're feeling is the very fabric of spacetime disintegrating around your ears.
Physicist John Wheeler first used the phrase "black hole" to describe this phenomenon, which warps the very fabric of space and time into strange shapes. A black hole is a singularity so dense that it absorbs virtually everything around it, even light. Even space collapses, and the spacetime distortion creates an "event horizon" -- the point of no return. 
While some physicists do believe black holes transport matter into another universe, traveling through a black hole is not unlike travelling through a wood chipper. All your parts end up on the other side, but not in their original configuration. And you won't enjoy the trip. Under this theory, the black hole purees all the matter that falls into it and shoots it out in a jet somewhere else in this universe or an entirely different one. 
By studying these X-rays, scientists have been able use radio telescopes to spot several likely black holes, including a super-massive one in the center of the Milky Way galaxy, which is devouring stars at a phenomenal rate. This phenomenon may be related to the formation of galaxies, as well as their spiral structure. 
Black holes may come in some exotic flavors, such as the hypothetical "naked singularity," which could theoretically be directly observed from the outside (unlike a black hole singularity, which is hidden by the blackness and the holeness). 
However, it's pretty easy to say after the fact that the mini-black-hole couldn't have swallowed the entire Earth and ended all human life -- because it didn't happen. 
You are sitting in front of a computer that would have filled a skyscraper had it been built in 1956. You have terabytes of the world's accumulated wisdom at your fingertips via Google. You have a college education in your pocket. Einstein, 
About 400 years ago, before the discovery of electricity and only 150 years after the invention of the printing press, a barely literate German cobbler came up with the idea that God was a binary, fractal, self-replicating algorithm and that the universe was a genetic matrix resulting from the existential tension created by His desire for self-knowledge. 
Jakob Böhme's transmission was considerably deeper than the usual psychotic imperative. In fact, his vision (well, let's call it that) contained profound theological insights well beyond his educational level, which amounted to little more than Bible study and sole-cobbling techniques. 
His ideas were radical and exciting, and Böhme began to attract adherents -- which again led to trouble. His radical and exciting 
Even more controversially, Böhme argued that God could not be omniscient and omnipotent, since He was eternal and unique. "He knows no beginning, and also nothing like Himself, and also no end," Böhme wrote, arguing that God created man in His own image so that He could learn about Himself. 
The positive and negative aspects of creation were necessarily opposed to each other, and Böhme believed that this conflict was at the heart of the universe's logic and all of its processes. Since this tension is inherent to the design of all reality, evil and suffering are a necessary part of reality -- and both originate with God. 
Böhme presented the universe as the product of the dueling forces of Father and Son, one bent on disordering and a return to unity (entropy), the other bent on ordering and harmonizing in the process of differentiation (organization), a formula now understood to foreshadow key concepts in chaos theory and genetic sequencing. The human body and 
After his death, Böhme's writings were quietly circulated among the elite minds of Europe. His ideas were pursued by everyone from 
God created the Earth in seven days, literally and exactly seven 24-hour days. And if you don't like it, you can go to hell. That is, you can literally go to 
Western civilization has believed the seven-day theory for about 6,000 years longer than it's believed in evolution. The weight of that history is great indeed. Although Genesis was originally a Jewish scripture, the Christians were responsible for institutionalizing its contents as the undisputed truth about the world's origins. 
A violent religious backlash arose in response to the theory. Nearly 150 years later, depressingly, the backlash continues. 
In his closing remarks, Darrow conceded that his client was guilty and that he couldn't in good conscience plead otherwise, but that a higher court would have to decide the issue. These inspirational remarks led to the expected guilty verdict, which was later overturned on appeal for a technicality. Aside from the high drama, the trial accomplished pretty much nothing, since the technicality superseded the constitutional issue. The law remained on the books until 1967.
The modern crop of creationists is often perceived as a bunch of harmless cranks, like 
No doubt the secular humanists among you are already pissed off by this article, just because of its placement under the header of religion.
This group of mostly men included Einstein himself, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger, and dozens of others. Together and often dramatically apart, these men developed the study of these very small phenomena into what we now call quantum physics. 
Take the electron. Remember how you learned that the electron orbits the atom? Crap. How about light? Remember the discussion of whether light was made of waves or particles or both? Crap. 
Once you see this sort of thing happening, as you might imagine, the domino effect kicks in and the weirdnesses start to multiply. 
And if you only have one slit, that's actually what you get, a clump of photons near the slit. THERE IS NO WAVE! 
As you extend quantum physics out from this central paradox, a lot of science fiction concepts become potentially real, among them: 
The Alchemist
