16 MAY 2012 by ideonexus

 Elegant, Simple Description of the Electromagnetic Strong...

If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into ...
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Pulled together when a little distance apart, but repel one another when squeezed together.

06 JAN 2012 by ideonexus

 The Appalachian Mountains as the "Wreck of the World"

The great Appalachian Mountains, which run from York River back of these Colonies to the Bay of Mexico, show in many Places near the highest Parts of them, Strata of Sea Shells, in some Places the Marks of them are in the solid Rocks. 'Tis certainly the Wreck of a World we live on! [...] Such changes in the superficial parts of the globe seemed to me unlikely to happen, if the earth were solid to the centre. I therefore imagined, that the internal parts might be a fluid more dense, and of g...
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July 1747, Ben Franklin wrote to Jared Eliot, a Connecticut clergyman about the Appalachian mountains, where he found sea shells mixed in with the dirt and concluded that the mountains were the Earth after a cataclysm.