Johanna Faust, a mixed race Jew, prefers to publish pseudonymously. She is committed: first, to preventing war, ecological disaster, and nuclear apocalypse; last to not only fighting for personal privacy & the freedom of information, but, by representing herself as a soldier in that fight, to exhorting others to do the same. She is a poet, always. All these efforts find representation here: "ah, Mephistophelis" is so named after the last line of Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, whose heretical success flouted the censor for a time.

If Your Brain Overheating From Theoretical Physics Sounds Like Fun


If you, like me, enjoy the sound and smell of your own brain sizzling from nearly failing at comprehending some Big Idea in physics, you may enjoy Does Time Exist,  by Old Timer over at Quantum Weirdness, a gem of an essay dense enough to entertain most of the Self-Taught (& even some of the Learnèd):


[snip]
A photon experiences zero distance and zero time due to its incredible speed.   Every photon that lights our office or illuminates our book arrives the instant it is emitted.  It has not aged even though we can calculate that it moved from the bulb to our book and then to our eye at about one nanosecond per foot of travel.  The photon did not experience the “time” that we measure or calculate.  It aged not at all.  Time does not exist for any particle moving at c.  It only exists for us as calculated or measured in a laboratory.  But does it exist as a real dimension?  Does it have a physical basis?  
[Read more]


Just a bit of candy from the universe.




Be seeing you.





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