Cosmic Gall

Neutrinos, they are very small. They have no charge and have no mass And do not interact at all. The earth is just a silly ball To them, through which they simply pass. Like dustmaids down a drafty hall Or photons through a sheet of glass. They snub the most exquisite gas, Ignore the most substantial wall, Cold shoulder steel and sounding brass. Insult the stallion in his stall, And, scorning barriers of class. Infiltrate you and me. Like tall And painless guillotines, they fall ...

 You want a physicist to speak at your funeral

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child rem...

 Why Traveling at the Speed of Light Slows Down Time

the precise time difference between stationary and moving clocks depends on how much farther the sliding clock's photon must travel to complete each round-trip journey This in turn depends on how quickly the sliding clock is moving—from the viewpoint of a stationary observer, the faster the clock is sliding, the farther the photon must travel to the right. We conclude that in comparison to a stationary clock, the rate of ticking of the sliding clock becomes slower and slower as it moves fas...

 Explanation of the Higg's Boson

Protons are more massive than electrons, for example, and electrons are way more massive than neutrinos. Photons have no mass at all. For most us, that's no more than a fun fact (and not all that much fun, really). For physicists, though, it's a mystery that demands a solution. Why are the masses so different — and why do any particles have any mass at all? The answer, suggested several scientists back in the 1960's, is that the entire universe is suffused with a sort of energy field — i...

 What Makes Something a Distinct Object?

Let me look at the envelope from a very basic point of view, that of the neurophysiology of raw perception itself. Forgive me if it’s a bit oversimple. Take me-on the back of your retina I’m upside down, focused at the center but fuzzy at the edges, two-dimensional, a barrage of photons releasing rhodopsin and triggering neural impulses along the visual nerve. At the same time, the pressure wave I’m setting up right now with all this talk is causing little hairs inside the cochlea, in y...

 The Natural Economy is Solar Powered

The natural economy is solar-powered. Photons from the sun rain down upon the entire daytime surface of the planet. Many photons do nothing more useful than heat up a rock or a sandy beach. A few find their way into an eye - yours, or mine, or the compound eye of a shrimp or the parabolic reflector eye of a scallop. Some may happen to fall on a solar panel - either a man-made one like those that, in a fit of green zeal, I have just installed on my roof to heat the bathwater, or a green leaf, ...