Electronics Related Quotes

Technologies of the soul tend to be simple, bodily, slow and related to the heart as much as the mind. Everything around us tells us we should be mechanically sophisticated, electronic, quick, and informational in our expressiveness - an exact antipode to the virtues of the soul. It is no wonder, then, that in an age of telecommunications - which, by the way, literally means "distant connections" - we suffer symptoms of the loss of soul. We are being urged from every side to become efficient rather than intimate.

Electronic circuits are millions of times faster than our biological circuits. At first we will have to devote all of this speed increase to compensating for the relative lack of parallelism in our computers, but ultimately the digital neocortex will be much faster than the biological variety and will only continue to increase in speed.

The very nature of materiality is an entanglement. Matter itself is always already open to, or rather entangled with, the "Other." The intra-actively emergent "parts" of phenomena are coconstituted. Not only subjects but also objects are permeated through and through with their entangled kin; the other is not just in one's skin, but in one's bones, in one's belly, in one's heart, in one's nucleus, in one's past and future. This is as true for electrons as it is for brittlestars as it is for the differentially constituted human . . . What is on the other side of the agential cut is not separate from us--agential separability is not individuation. Ethics is therefore not about right response to a radically exterior/ized other, but about responsibility and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are a part.

there are just two activities that are significantly correlated with depression and other suicide-related outcomes (such as considering suicide, making a plan, or making an actual attempt): electronic device use (such as a smartphone, tablet, or computer) and watching TV. On the other hand, there are five activities that have inverse relationships with depression (meaning that kids who spend more hours per week on these activities show lower rates of depression): sports and other forms of exercise, attending religious services, reading books and other print media, in-person social interactions, and doing homework.

After some cogitation, it is difficult not to agree with Herman Bondi (1919 - 2005), who in his book 'Relativity and Common Sense' says: ... The surprising thing, surely, is that molecules in a gas behave so much as billiard balls, not that electrons behave so little like billiard balls.

There is a most profound and beautiful question associated with the observed coupling constant, e - the amplitude for a real electron to emit or absorb a real photon. It is a simple number that has been experimentally determined to be close to 0.08542455. (My physicist friends won't recognize this number, because they like to remember it as the inverse of its square: about 137.03597 with about an uncertainty of about 2 in the last decimal place. It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.) Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly!

The existence of both (electron and pebble) depends upon the context created by our thoughts, our language, our theories, and our interaction (experimentation) with our external world.

The reason for this was that the South African government wanted to establish good relations with the Japanese in order to import their fancy cars and electronics. So Japanese people were given honorary white status while Chinese people stayed black.

The fine structure constant is undoubtedly the most fundamental pure (dimensionless) number in all of physics. It relates the basic constants of electromagnetism (the charge of the electron), relativity (the speed of light), and quantum mechanics (Planck's constant).

Twenge finds that there are just two activities that are significantly correlated with depression and other suicide-related outcomes (such as considering suicide, making a plan, or making an actual attempt): electronic device use (such as a smartphone, tablet, or computer) and watching TV. On the other hand, there are five activities that have inverse relationships with depression (meaning that kids who spend more hours per week on these activities show lower rates of depression): sports and other forms of exercise, attending religious services, reading books and other print media, in-person social interactions, and doing homework.

It is very easy to grow tired at collecting; the period of a low tide is about all men can endure. At first the rocks are bright and every moving animal makes his mark on the attention. The picture is wide and colored and beautiful. But after an hour and a half the attention centers weary, the color fades, and the field is likely to narrow to an individual animal. Here one may observe his own world narrowed down until interest and, with it, observation, flicker and go out. And what if with age this weariness becomes permanent and observation dim out and not recover? Can this be what happens to so many men of science? Enthusiasm, interest, sharpness, dulled with a weariness until finally they retire into easy didacticism? With this weariness, this stultification of attention centers, perhaps there comes the pained and sad memory of what the old excitement was like, and regret might turn to envy of the men who still have it. Then out of the shell of didacticism, such a used-up man might attack the unwearied, and he would have in his hands proper weapons of attack. It does seem certain that to a wearied man an error in a mass of correct data wipes out all the correctness and is a focus for attack; whereas the unwearied man, in his energy and receptivity, might consider the little dross of error a by-product of his effort. These two may balance and produce a purer thing than either in the end. These two may be the stresses which hold up the structure, but it is a sad thing to see the interest in interested men thin out and weaken and die. We have known so many professors who once carried their listeners high on their single enthusiasm, and have seen these same men finally settle back comfortably into lectures prepared years before and never vary them again. Perhaps this is the same narrowing we observe in relation to ourselves and the tide pool—a man looking at reality brings his own limitations to the world. If he has strength and energy of mind the tide pool stretches both ways, digs back to electrons and leaps space into the universe and fights out of the moment into non-conceptual time. Then ecology has a synonym which is ALL.

Electrons, when they were first discovered, behaved exactly like particles or bullets, very simply. Further research showed, from electron diffraction experiments for example, that they behaved like waves. As time went on there was a growing confusion about how these things really behaved ---- waves or particles, particles or waves? Everything looked like both. This growing confusion was resolved in 1925 or 1926 with the advent of the correct equations for quantum mechanics. Now we know how the electrons and light behave. But what can I call it? If I say they behave like particles I give the wrong impression; also if I say they behave like waves. They behave in their own inimitable way, which technically could be called a quantum mechanical way. They behave in a way that is like nothing that you have seen before. Your experience with things that you have seen before is incomplete. The behavior of things on a very tiny scale is simply different. An atom does not behave like a weight hanging on a spring and oscillating. Nor does it behave like a miniature representation of the solar system with little planets going around in orbits. Nor does it appear to be somewhat like a cloud or fog of some sort surrounding the nucleus. It behaves like nothing you have seen before. There is one simplication at least. Electrons behave in this respect in exactly the same way as photons; they are both screwy, but in exactly in the same way…. The difficulty really is psychological and exists in the perpetual torment that results from your saying to yourself, "But how can it be like that?" which is a reflection of uncontrolled but utterly vain desire to see it in terms of something familiar. I will not describe it in terms of an analogy with something familiar; I will simply describe it. There was a time when the newspapers said that only twelve men understood the theory of relativity. I do not believe there ever was such a time. There might have been a time when only one man did, because he was the only guy who caught on, before he wrote his paper. But after people read the paper a lot of people understood the theory of relativity in some way or other, certainly more than twelve. On the other hand, I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. So do not take the lecture too seriously, feeling that you really have to understand in terms of some model what I am going to describe, but just relax and enjoy it. I am going to tell you what nature behaves like. If you will simply admit that maybe she does behave like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possible avoid it, "But how can it be like that?" because you will get 'down the drain', into a blind alley from which nobody has escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

Furthermore, because silicon packs on more protons than carbon, it's bulkier, like carbon with fifty extra pounds. Sometimes that's not a big deal. Silicon might substitute adequately for carbon in the Martian equivalent of fats or proteins. But carbon also contorts itself into ringed molecules we call sugars. Rings are states of high-tension- which means they store lots of energy-and silicon just isn't supple enough to bend into the right position to form rings. In a related problem, silicon atoms cannot squeeze their electrons into tight spaces for double bonds, which appear in virtually every complicated biochemical.

There are two foundational pillars upon which modern physics rests. One is Albert Einstein's general relativity, which provides a theoretical framework for understanding the universe on the largest of scales: stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and beyond to the immense expanse of the universe itself. The other is quantum mechanics, which provides a theoretical framework for understanding the universe on the smallest of scales: molecules, atoms, and all the way down to subatomic particles like electrons and quarks. Through years of research, physicists have experimentally confirmed to almost unimaginable accuracy virtually all predictions made by each of these theories. But these same theoretical tools inexorably lead to another disturbing conclusion: As they are currently formulated, general relativity and quantum mechanics cannot both be right.

It's safe to say that 'Horror,' as a fictional genre, has claim to it's own canon. There is a definite history that can be traced back to the origins of human language, both orally and written, and now multimedia based. We at this point, have access to the full gambit of 'genre' Horror in all its hybrid forms (electronically at least). Sub-genres ensure that Horror can and will multiply in its complexities and evolve along with human fears.

The key is to take a larger project or goal and break it down into smaller problems to be solved, constraining the scope of work to solving a key problem, and then another key problem. This strategy, of breaking a project down into discrete, relatively small problems to be resolved, is what Bing Gordon, a cofounder and the former chief creative officer of the video game company Electronic Arts, calls smallifying. Now a partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, Gordon has deep experience leading and working with software development teams. He’s also currently on the board of directors of Amazon and Zynga. At Electronic Arts, Gordon found that when software teams worked on longer-term projects, they were inefficient and took unnecessary paths. However, when job tasks were broken down into particular problems to be solved, which were manageable and could be tackled within one or two weeks, developers were more creative and effective.

Even if a particle could travel backward in time, information could not. Retrocausality will be replaced by something more sophisticated. There are no perfect symmetries, there is no pure randomness everything is an approximation of something else. Information may appear in a digital form but meaning never does. Spacetime is built up from approximations, not discrete ones and zeros, and the only constant may be ratios. Quantum entanglement and geometry; if we think of a particle as being at one pole of an expanding sphere that is not perfectly symmetrical, this surface would be "rippling" like the surface of the ocean (in the audio world this is called dithering), at the other pole is the entangled particle's pair and it is a property of the sphere that gives the illusion of connectivity. This is not a physical geometry, it is a computational geometry. Is spacetime a product of entanglement? Renate Loll believes that time is not perfectly symmetrical. Her computer models require causality. Possibly some form of quantum random walk in state space. If a photon is emitted by an electron inside of a clock on Earth and it travels to a clock four light years away, time stops for the clock on Earth and time jumps forward eight years for the distant clock also, the electron that will capture the photon becomes infinitely large relative to the photon but the electron that emitted it does not become infinitely small therefore, time is not perfectly symmetrical.

Evolution endowed us with intuition only for those aspects of physics that had survival value for our distant ancestors, such as the parabolic orbits of flying rocks (explaining our penchant for baseball). A cavewoman thinking too hard about what matter is ultimately made of might fail to notice the tiger sneaking up behind and get cleaned right out of the gene pool. Darwin’s theory thus makes the testable prediction that whenever we use technology to glimpse reality beyond the human scale, our evolved intuition should break down. We’ve repeatedly tested this prediction, and the results overwhelmingly support Darwin. At high speeds, Einstein realized that time slows down, and curmudgeons on the Swedish Nobel committee found this so weird that they refused to give him the Nobel Prize for his relativity theory. At low temperatures, liquid helium can flow upward. At high temperatures, colliding particles change identity; to me, an electron colliding with a positron and turning into a Z-boson feels about as intuitive as two colliding cars turning into a cruise ship. On microscopic scales, particles schizophrenically appear in two places at once, leading to the quantum conundrums mentioned above. On astronomically large scales… weirdness strikes again: if you intuitively understand all aspects of black holes [then you] should immediately put down this book and publish your findings before someone scoops you on the Nobel Prize for quantum gravity… [also,] the leading theory for what happened [in the early universe] suggests that space isn’t merely really really big, but actually infinite, containing infinitely many exact copies of you, and even more near-copies living out every possible variant of your life in two different types of parallel universes.

How do fields express their principles? Physicists use terms like photons, electrons, quarks, quantum wave functions, relativity, and energy conservation. Astronomers use terms like planets, stars, galaxies, Hubble shift, and black holes. Thermodynamicists use terms like entropy, first law, second law, and Carnot cycle. Biologists use terms like phylogeny, ontology, DNA, and enzymes. Each of these terms can be considered to be the thread of a story. The principles of a field are actually a set of interwoven stories about the structure and behavior of field elements, the fabric of the multiverse.

Heisenberg's uncertainty relation measures the amount by which the complementary descriptions of the electron, or other fundamental entities, overlap. Position is very much a particle property - particles can be located precisely. Waves, on the other hand, have no precise location, but they do have momentum. The more you know about the wave aspect of reality, the less you know about the particle, and vice versa. Experiments designed to detect particles always detect particles; experiments designed to detect waves always detect waves. No experiment shows the electron behaving like a wave and a particle at the same time.

The color of the emitted light depends on the relative heights of the starting and ending energy levels. A crash between closely spaced levels (such as two and one) releases a pulse of low-energy reddish light, while a crash between more widely spaced levels (say, five and two) releases high-energy purple light.

The old debate between mind and matter is fast becoming as antiquated as a debate about the relative merits of various sorts of fountain pens. “Matter” is going out of style. The electron is turning out to be the Cartesian “pineal gland” which mediates in the obsolete opposition of mind and matter as the lines between these two antagonists in the ancient dualism are blurred by the electronic revolution.

If a photon is emitted by an electron inside of a clock on Earth and it travels to a clock four light years away, time stops for the clock on Earth and time jumps forward eight years for the distant clock, also the electron that will capture the photon becomes infinitely large, relative to the photon but the electron that emitted it does not become infinitely small therefore, time is not perfectly symmetrical.

By habit we perceive ourselves and the world around us as solid, real, and enduring. Yet without much effort, we can easily determine that not one aspect within the whole world’s system exists independent of change. I had just been in one physical location, and now I was in another; I had experienced different states of mind. We have all grown from babies to adults, lost loved ones, watched children grow, known changes in weather, in political regimes, in styles of music and fashion, in everything. Despite appearances, no aspect of life ever stays the same. The deconstruction of any one object—no matter how dense it appears, such as an ocean liner, our bodies, a skyscraper, or an oak tree—will reveal the appearance of solidity to be as illusory as permanence. Everything that looks substantial will break down into molecules, and into atoms, and into electrons, protons, and neutrons. And every phenomenon exists in interdependence with myriad other forms. Every identification of any one form has meaning only in relationship to another. Big only has meaning in relation to small. To mistake our habitual misperceptions for the whole of reality is what we mean by ignorance, and these delusions define the world of confusion, or samsara.

is turning all life into a unified flow experience. If a person sets out to achieve a difficult enough goal, from which all other goals logically follow, and if he or she invests all energy in developing skills to reach that goal, then actions and feelings will be in harmony, and the separate parts of life will fit together—and each activity will “make sense” in the present, as well as in view of the past and of the future. In such a way, it is possible to give meaning to one’s entire life. But isn’t it incredibly naive to expect life to have a coherent overall meaning? After all, at least since Nietzsche concluded that God was dead, philosophers and social scientists have been busy demonstrating that existence has no purpose, that chance and impersonal forces rule our fate, and that all values are relative and hence arbitrary. It is true that life has no meaning, if by that we mean a supreme goal built into the fabric of nature and human experience, a goal that is valid for every individual. But it does not follow that life cannot be given meaning. Much of what we call culture and civilization consists in efforts people have made, generally against overwhelming odds, to create a sense of purpose for themselves and their descendants. It is one thing to recognize that life is, by itself, meaningless. It is another thing entirely to accept this with resignation. The first fact does not entail the second any more than the fact that we lack wings prevents us from flying. From the point of view of an individual, it does not matter what the ultimate goal is—provided it is compelling enough to order a lifetime’s worth of psychic energy. The challenge might involve the desire to have the best beer-bottle collection in the neighborhood, the resolution to find a cure for cancer, or simply the biological imperative to have children who will survive and prosper. As long as it provides clear objectives, clear rules for action, and a way to concentrate and become involved, any goal can serve to give meaning to a person’s life. In the past few years I have come to be quite well acquainted with several Muslim professionals—electronics engineers, pilots, businessmen, and teachers, mostly from Saudi Arabia and from the other Gulf states. In talking to them, I was struck with how relaxed most of them seemed to be even under strong pressure. “There is nothing to it,” those I asked about it told me, in different words, but with the same message: “We don’t get upset because we believe that our life is in God’s hands, and whatever He decides will be fine with us.” Such implicit faith used to be widespread in our culture as well, but it is not easy to find it now. Many of us have to discover a goal that will give meaning to life on our own, without the help of a traditional faith.

No mechanic now for modern cars, no doctor now for modern pathologies. The infinitesimal calculus of viral pathologies, unlocatable by traditional diagnostics, has entirely outstripped the mechanics of the body, just as the electronics of the modern car have outstripped the knowledge of its user. But one can imagine an electronic 'smartness' of the body (like 'smart' cars or houses) that would inform you of all its anomalies, or even, by a kind of GPS effect, of your position in the space of human relations.

The gravitational attraction relative to the electrical repulsion between two electrons is 1 divided by 4.17 times ten to the 42nd power! As an example of something , let us consider the time it takes light to go across a proton, 10 to the negative 24 second. If we compare this time with the age of the universe , 2 times 10 to the tenth power years, the answer is 10 to the negative 42nd power. It has about the same number of zeros going off it, so it has been proposed that the gravitational constant is related to the age of the universe.

Ionizing radiation takes three principal forms: alpha particles, beta particles, and gamma rays. Alpha particles are relatively large, heavy, and slow moving and cannot penetrate the skin; even a sheet of paper could block their path. But if they do manage to find their way inside the body by other means—if swallowed or inhaled—alpha particles can cause massive chromosomal damage and death. Radon 222, which gathers as a gas in unventilated basements, releases alpha particles into the lungs, where it causes cancer. Polonium 210, a powerful alpha emitter, is one of the carcinogens in cigarette smoke. It was also the poison slipped into the cup of tea that killed former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006. Beta particles are smaller and faster moving than alpha particles and can penetrate more deeply into living tissue, causing visible burns on the skin and lasting genetic damage. A piece of paper won’t provide protection from beta particles, but aluminum foil—or separation by sufficient distance—will. Beyond a range of ten feet, beta particles can cause little damage, but they prove dangerous if ingested in any way. Mistaken by the body for essential elements, beta-emitting radioisotopes can become fatally concentrated in specific organs: strontium 90, a member of the same chemical family as calcium, is retained in the bones; ruthenium is absorbed by the intestine; iodine 131 lodges particularly in the thyroid of children, where it can cause cancer. Gamma rays—high-frequency electromagnetic waves traveling at the speed of light—are the most energetic of all. They can traverse large distances, penetrate anything short of thick pieces of concrete or lead, and destroy electronics. Gamma rays pass straight through a human being without slowing down, smashing through cells like a fusillade of microscopic bullets. Severe exposure to all ionizing radiation results in acute radiation syndrome (ARS), in which the fabric of the human body is unpicked, rearranged, and destroyed at the most minute levels. Symptoms include nausea, vomiting, hemorrhaging, and hair loss, followed by a collapse of the immune system, exhaustion of bone marrow, disintegration of internal organs, and, finally, death.

This is what makes the subatomic world unique. It possesses not just physical qualities, but also energetic qualities. In truth, matter on a subatomic level exists as a momentary phenomenon. It’s so elusive that it constantly appears and disappears, appearing into three dimensions—in time and space—and disappearing into nothing—into the quantum field, in no space, no time— transforming from particle (matter) to wave (energy), and vice versa. But where do particles go when they vanish into thin air? [...] Quantum experiments demonstrated that electrons exist simultaneously in an infiniite array of possibilities or probabilities in an invisible field of energy. But only when an observer focuses attention on any location of any one electron does that electron appear. In other words, a particle cannot manifest in reality—that is, ordinary space-time as we know it—until we observe it. Quantum physics calls this phenomenon “collapse of the wave function” or the “observer effect.” We now know that the moment the observer looks for an electron, there is a specific point in time and space when all probabilities of the electron collapse into a physical event. With this discovery, mind and matter can no longer be considered separate; they are intrinsically related, because subjective mind produces measurable changes on the objective, physical world. [...] If your mind can influence the appearance of an electron, then theoretically it can influence the appearance of any possibility. [...] How would your life change if you learned to direct the observer effect and to collapse infinite waves of probability into the reality that you choose? Could you get better at observing the life you want?

The Undivided Wholeness of All Things Most mind-boggling of all are Bohm's fully developed ideas about wholeness. Because everything in the cosmos is made out of the seamless holographic fabric of the implicate order, he believes it is as meaningless to view the universe as composed of "parts, " as it is to view the different geysers in a fountain as separate from the water out of which they flow. An electron is not an "elementary particle. " It is just a name given to a certain aspect of the holomovement. Dividing reality up into parts and then naming those parts is always arbitrary, a product of convention, because subatomic particles, and everything else in the universe, are no more separate from one another than different patterns in an ornate carpet. This is a profound suggestion. In his general theory of relativity Einstein astounded the world when he said that space and time are not separate entities, but are smoothly linked and part of a larger whole he called the space-time continuum. Bohm takes this idea a giant step further. He says that everything in the universe is part of a continuum. Despite the apparent separateness of things at the explicate level, everything is a seamless extension of everything else, and ultimately even the implicate and explicate orders blend into each other. Take a moment to consider this. Look at your hand. Now look at the light streaming from the lamp beside you. And at the dog resting at your feet. You are not merely made of the same things. You are the same thing. One thing. Unbroken. One enormous something that has extended its uncountable arms and appendages into all the apparent objects, atoms, restless oceans, and twinkling stars in the cosmos. Bohm cautions that this does not mean the universe is a giant undifferentiated mass. Things can be part of an undivided whole and still possess their own unique qualities. To illustrate what he means he points to the little eddies and whirlpools that often form in a river. At a glance such eddies appear to be separate things and possess many individual characteristics such as size, rate, and direction of rotation, et cetera. But careful scrutiny reveals that it is impossible to determine where any given whirlpool ends and the river begins. Thus, Bohm is not suggesting that the differences between "things" is meaningless. He merely wants us to be aware constantly that dividing various aspects of the holomovement into "things" is always an abstraction, a way of making those aspects stand out in our perception by our way of thinking. In attempts to correct this, instead of calling different aspects of the holomovement "things, " he prefers to call them "relatively independent subtotalities. "10 Indeed, Bohm believes that our almost universal tendency to fragment the world and ignore the dynamic interconnectedness of all things is responsible for many of our problems, not only in science but in our lives and our society as well. For instance, we believe we can extract the valuable parts of the earth without affecting the whole. We believe it is possible to treat parts of our body and not be concerned with the whole. We believe we can deal with various problems in our society, such as crime, poverty, and drug addiction, without addressing the problems in our society as a whole, and so on. In his writings Bohm argues passionately that our current way of fragmenting the world into parts not only doesn't work, but may even lead to our extinction.

Everywhere we look in the realm of nature we find polarities, such as electrical and magnetic polarities. These can, if we like, be modeled in terms of gender; for example, positive electrical charge is associated with dense, relative immobile atomic nuclei, a bit like eggs; negative charge is associated with the smaller electrons, moving in swarms, a bit like sperm. But sexual gender is only one of many kinds of natural polarity and only one of the ways we experience polarity in our own lives. Others include the polarities of up and down, in and out, front and back, right and left, past and future, sleeping and waking, friend and foe, sweet and sour, hot and cold, pleasure and pain, good and bad.

The power of the deductive network produced in physics has been illustrated in a delightful article by Victor F. Weisskopf. He begins by taking the magnitudes of six physical constants known by measurement: the mass of the proton, the mass and electric charge of the electron, the light velocity, Newton's gravitational constant, and the quantum of action of Planck. He adds three of four fundamental laws (e.g., de Broglie's relations connecting particle momentum and particle energy with the wavelength and frequency, and the Pauli exclusion principle), and shows that one can then derive a host of different, apparently quite unconnected, facts that happen to be known to us by observation separately ....

The twenty-first century physicist Carlo Rovelli theorized that quantum mechanics was, fundamentally, about relationships. That no element of nature exists alone. Everything acts and is acted upon in turn. A minuscule electron jumping an orbit can change an entire element or cause a chain reaction that leads to devastation. But without such reactions, there would be no universe at all. There would be no stars, no sun, no planets, no living creatures, no way of even knowing about such things as quantum mechanics. Isn't it beautiful that the underlying theory of our entire universe is predicated on the ways the smallest particles relate to each other? We collided in a sea of endless shifting probabilities.

Shadow is the blue patch where the light doesn’t hit. It is mystery itself, and mystery is the ancients’ ultima Thule, the modern explorer’s Point of Relative Inaccessibility, that boreal point most distant from all known lands. There the twin oceans of beauty and horror meet. The great glaciers are calving. Ice that sifted to earth as snow in the time of Christ shears from the pack with a roar and crumbles to water. It could be that our instruments have not looked deeply enough. The RNA deep in the mantis’s jaw is a beautiful ribbon. Did the crawling Polyphemus moth have in its watery heart one cell, and in that cell one special molecule, and that molecule one hydrogen atom, and round that atom’s nucleus one wild, distant electron that split showed a forest, swaying?

Evil people relate more to the black pole. It's - this is not exact, of course, as the science of magic is as complex as the magic of electronics - it's like traveling past a mountain. The white pole is at the apex, and it is an exhilarating height, but it takes a lot of work and few missteps to ascend it. The black pole is at the nadir, and it is easy to walk downhill; sometimes you can just sit down and slide or roll and, if you fall, you can get there very fast indeed. If you don't pay attention to where you're going, you'll tend to go down, because it is the course of least resistance. Since the average person has only the vaguest notion where he is going and tends to shut out awareness of the consequence of evil, he inevitably drifts downward. There is much more space at the base of the mountain than at the peak!

Music of the Grid: A Poem in Two Equations _________________________ The masses of particles sound the frequencies with which space vibrates, when played. This Music of the Grid betters the old mystic mainstay, "Music of the Spheres," both in fantasy and in realism. LET US COMBINE Einstein's second law m=E/C^2 (1) with another fundamental equation, the Planck-Einstein-Schrodinger formula E = hv The Planck-Einstein-Schrodinger formula relates the energy E of a quantum-mechanical state to the frequency v at which its wave function vibrates. Here h is Planck's constant. Planck introduced it in his revolutionary hypothesis (1899) that launched quantum theory: that atoms emit or absorb light of frequency v only in packets of energy E = hv. Einstein went a big step further with his photon hypothesis (1905): that light of frequency v is always organized into packets with energy E = hv. Finally Schrodinger made it the basis of his basic equation for wave functions-the Schrodinger equation (1926). This gave birth to the modern, universal interpretation: the wave function of any state with energy E vibrates at a frequency v given by v = E/h. By combining Einstein with Schrodinger we arrive at a marvelous bit of poetry: (*) v = mc^2/h (*) The ancients had a concept called "Music of the Spheres" that inspired many scientists (notably Johannes Kepler) and even more mystics. Because periodic motion (vibration) of musical instruments causes their sustained tones, the idea goes, the periodic motions of the planets, as they fulfill their orbits, must be accompanied by a sort of music. Though picturesque and soundscape-esque, this inspiring anticipation of multimedia never became a very precise or fruitful scientific idea. It was never more than a vague metaphor, so it remains shrouded in equation marks: "Music of the Spheres." Our equation (*) is a more fantastic yet more realistic embodiment of the same inspiration. Rather than plucking a string, blowing through a reed, banging on a drumhead, or clanging a gong, we play the instrument that is empty space by plunking down different combinations of quarks, gluons, electrons, photons,... (that is, the Bits that represent these Its) and let them settle until they reach equilibrium with the spontaneous activity of Grid. Neither planets nor any material constructions compromise the pure ideality of our instrument. It settles into one of its possible vibratory motions, with different frequencies v, depending on how we do the plunking, and with what. These vibrations represent particles of different mass m, according to (*). The masses of particles sound the Music of the Grid.

Oh, were we talking about dinner? Well, let me say this: I don’t take it lightly if when I write the word beef someone chooses to read lamb. People talking about a book as if it were just another thing, like a dish, or a product like an electronic device or a pair of shoes, to be rated for consumer satisfaction—that was just the goddamn trouble, you said. Even those aspiring writers your students seemed never to judge a book on how well it fulfilled the author’s intentions but solely on whether it was the kind of book that they liked. And so you got papers stating things like “I hate Joyce, he’s so full of himself,” or “I don’t see why I should have to read about white people problems.” You got customer reviews full of umbrage, suggesting that if a book didn’t affirm what the reader already felt—what they could identify with, what they could relate to—the author had no business writing the book at all. Those hilarious stories that people loved, and loved to share—the book clubber who said, When I read a novel I want someone to die in it; the complaint against Anne Frank’s diary, in which nothing much happens and then the story just breaks off—did not make you laugh.

Louis de Broglie, who carried the title of prince by virtue of being related to the deposed French royal family, studied history in hopes of being a civil servant. But after college, he became fascinated by physics. His doctoral dissertation in 1924 helped transform the field. If a wave can behave like a particle, he asked, shouldn’t a particle also behave like a wave? In other words, Einstein had said that light should be regarded not only as a wave but also as a particle. Likewise, according to de Broglie, a particle such as an electron could also be regarded as a wave. “I had a sudden inspiration,” de Broglie later recalled. “Einstein’s wave-particle dualism was an absolutely general phenomenon extending to all of physical nature, and that being the case the motion of all particles—photons, electrons, protons or any other—must be associated with the propagation of a wave.”46 Using Einstein’s law of the photoelectric affect, de Broglie showed that the wavelength associated with an electron (or any particle) would be related to Planck’s constant divided by the particle’s momentum. It turns out to be an incredibly tiny wavelength, which means that it’s usually relevant only to particles in the subatomic realm, not to such things as pebbles or planets or baseballs.

Zaphod paused for a while. For a while there was silence. Then he frowned and said, “Last night I was worrying about this again. About the fact that part of my mind just didn’t seem to work properly. Then it occurred to me that the way it seemed was that someone else was using my mind to have good ideas with, without telling me about it. I put the two ideas together and decided that maybe that somebody had locked off part of my mind for that purpose, which was why I couldn’t use it. I wondered if there was a way I could check. “I went to the ship’s medical bay and plugged myself into the encephalographic screen. I went through every major screening test on both my heads—all the tests I had to go through under Government medical officers before my nomination for presidency could be properly ratified. They showed up nothing. Nothing unexpected at least. They showed that I was clever, imaginative, irresponsible, untrustworthy, extrovert, nothing you couldn’t have guessed. And no other anomalies. So I started inventing further tests, completely at random. Nothing. Then I tried superimposing the results from one head on top of the results from the other head. Still nothing. Finally I got silly, because I’d given it all up as nothing more than an attack of paranoia. Last thing I did before I packed it in was take the superimposed picture and look at it through a green filter. You remember I was always superstitious about the color green when I was a kid? I always wanted to be a pilot on one of the trading scouts?” Ford nodded. “And there it was,” said Zaphod, “clear as day. A whole section in the middle of both brains that related only to each other and not to anything else around them. Some bastard had cauterized all the synapses and electronically traumatized those two lumps of cerebellum.” Ford stared at him, aghast. Trillian had turned white. “Somebody did that to you?” whispered Ford. “Yeah.” “But have you any idea who? Or why?” “Why? I can only guess. But I do know who the bastard was.” “You know? How do you know?” “Because they left their initials burned into the cauterized synapses. They left them there for me to see.” Ford stared at him in horror and felt his skin begin to crawl. “Initials? Burned into your brain?” “Yeah.” “Well, what were they, for God’s sake?” Zaphod looked at him in silence again for a moment. Then he looked away. “Z.B.,” he said quietly. At that moment a steel shutter slammed down behind them and gas started to pour into the chamber. “I’ll tell you about it later,” choked Zaphod as all three passed out.

When we put an electron in an electric field, we say it is "pulled." We then have two rules: (a) charges make a field, and (b) charges in fields have forces on them and move. The reason for this will be- come clear when we discuss the following phenomena: If we were to charge a body, say a comb, electrically, and then place a charged piece of paper at a distance and move the comb back and forth, the paper will respond by always pointing to the comb. If we shake it faster, it will be discovered that the paper is a little behind, there is a delay in the action. (At the first stage, when we move the comb rather slowly, we find a complication which is magnetism. Magnetic influences have to do with charges in relative motion, so magnetic forces and electric forces can really be attributed to one field, as two different aspects of exactly the same thing. A changing electric field cannot exist without magnetism.) If we move the charged paper farther out, the delay is greater. Then an interesting thing is observed. Although the forces between two charged objects should go inversely as the square of the distance, it is found, when we shake a charge, that the influence extends very much farther out than we would guess at first sight. That is, the effect falls off more slowly than the inverse square.

If dimensions are virtual like the particles in quantum foam are virtual then, entanglement is information that is in more than one location (hologram). There are no particles, they may be wave packets but the idea of quantum is, a precise ratio of action in relationship to the environment. Feynman's path integral is not infinite, it is fractal. If you look at a star many light years away, the photon that hits your eye leaves the star precisely when the timing for the journey will end at your eye because the virtual dimension of the journey is zero distance or zero time. Wheeler said that if your eye is not there to receive the photon then it won't leave the star in the distant past. If the dimension in the direction of travel is zero, you have a different relationship then if it is zero time in terms of the property of the virtual dimensions. Is a particle really a wave packet? Could something like a "phase transition" involve dimensions that are more transitory then we imagined. Example; a photon as a two dimensional sheet is absorbed by an electron so that the photon becomes a part of the geometry of the electron in which the electrons dimensions change in some manner. Could "scale" have more variation and influence on space and time that our models currently predict? Could information, scale, and gravity be intimately related?

Space Rockets as Power Symbols The moon rocket is the climactic expression of the power system: the maximum utilization of the resources of science and technics for the achievement of a relatively miniscule result: the hasty exploration of a barren satellite. Space exploration by manned rockets enlarges and intensifies all the main components of the power system: increased energy, accelerated motion, automation, cyber-nation, instant communication, remote control. Though it has been promoted mainly under military pressure, the most vital result of moon visitation so far turns out to be an unsought and unplanned one-a full view of the beautiful planet we live on, an inviting home for man and for all forms of life. This distant view on television evoked for the first time an active, loving response from many people who had hitherto supposed that modern technics would soon replace Mother Earth with a more perfect, scientifically organized, electronically controlled habitat, and who took for granted that this would be an improvement. Note that the moon rocket is itself necessarily a megastructure: so it naturally calls forth such vulgar imitations as the accompanying bureaucratic obelisk (office building) of similar dimensions, shown here (left). Both forms exhibit the essentially archaic and regressive nature of the science-fiction mind.

One of the string theory pioneers, the Italian physicist Daniele Amati, characterized it as "part of the 21st century that fell by chance into the 20th century." Indeed, there is something about the very nature of the theory at present that points to the fact that we are witnessing the theory's baby steps. Recall the lesson learned from all the great ideas since Einstein's relativity-put the symmetry first. Symmetry originates the forces. The equivalence principle-the expectation that all observers, irrespective of their motions, would deduce the same laws-requires the existence of gravity. The gauge symmetries-the fact that the laws do not distinguish color, or electrons from neutrinos-dictate the existence of the messengers of the strong and electroweak forces. Yet supersymmetry is an output of string theory, a consequence of its structure rather than a source for its existence. What does this mean? Many string theorists believe that some underlying grander principle, which will necessitate the existence of string theory, is still to be found. If history is to repeat itself, then this principle may turn out to involve an all-encompassing and even more compelling symmetry, but at the moment no one has a clue what this principle might be. Since, however, we are only at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Amati's characterization may still turn out to be an astonishing prophecy.

Along the way to Seattle, he wrote his business plan. He identified several reasons why the book category was underserved and well suited to online commerce. He outlined how he could create a new and compelling experience for book-buying customers. To begin with, books were relatively lightweight and came in fairly uniform sizes, meaning they would be easy and inexpensive to warehouse, pack, and ship. Second, while more than 100 million books had been written and more than a million titles were in print in 1994, even a Barnes & Noble mega-bookstore could stock only tens of thousands of titles. An online bookstore, on the other hand, could offer not just the books that could fit in a brick-and-mortar store but any book in print. Third, there were two large book-distribution companies, Ingram and Baker & Taylor, that acted as intermediaries between publishers and retailers and maintained huge inventories in vast warehouses. They kept detailed electronic catalogs of books in print to make it easy for bookstores and libraries to order from them. Jeff realized that he could combine the infrastructure that Ingram and Baker & Taylor had created—warehouses full of books ready to be shipped, plus an electronic catalog of those books—with the growing infrastructure of the Web, making it possible for consumers to find and buy any book in print and get it shipped directly to their homes. Finally, the site could use technology to analyze the behavior of customers and create a unique, personalized experience for each one of them.

The shift from precious metals to paper in retrospect clarifies that artifacts serving as money tokens are no more than representations of abstract exchange value—they are thus ultimately coveted for their potential use in social transaction, nor for some imagined, essential value intrinsic to the money tokens themselves. If it were not for international agreements such as those of Bretton Woods, gold could conceivably be as useless a medium of exchange in some cultural contexts as seashells are to modern Europeans. This understanding of money, however, simultaneously implies that there is no such thing as intrinsic value. If value ubiquitously pertains to social relations, any notion of intrinsic value is an illusion. Although the European plundering and hoarding of gold and silver, like the Melanesian preoccupation with kula and the Andean reverence for Spondylus, has certainly been founded on such essentialist conceptions of value, the recent representation of exchange value in the form of electronic digits on computer screens is a logical trajectory of the kind of transformation propagated by [Marco] Polo. It is difficult to imagine how money appearing as electronic information could be perceived as possessing intrinsic value. This suggests that electronic money, although currently maligned as the root of the financial crisis, could potentially help us rid ourselves of money fetishism. Paradoxically, the progressive detachment of money from matter, obvious in the transitions from metals through paper to electronics, is simultaneously a source of critique and a source of hope.

Seth Godin, author of more than a dozen bestsellers, including Purple Cow and Permission Marketing, understands the importance of frequency and consistency in a book marketing and public relations campaign. He practices these through following these seven steps: Permission marketing. This is a process by which marketers ask permission before sending ads to prospects. Godin pioneered the practice in 1995 with the founding of Yoyodyne, the Web’s first direct mail and promotions company (it used contests, online games, and scavenger hunts to market companies to participating users). He sold it to Yahoo! three years later. Editorial content. Godin was a long-time contributing editor to the popular Fast Company magazine. Blogging. Seth's Blog is one of the most-frequented blogs. Public speaking. Successful Meetings magazine named Godin one of the top 21 speakers of the 21st century. Words used to describe his lectures include "visual," "personal," and "dynamic." Community-building. His latest company, Squidoo.com, ranked among the top 125 sites in the U.S. (by traffic) by Quantcast, allows people to build a page about any topic that inspires them. The site raises money for charity and pays royalties to its million-plus members. E-books. Godin took a step to publish all his books electronically, then worked with Amazon on his own imprint, Domino, which published 12 books. Recently, Godin ended that project – since as he said in a blog, it was a "project" and he is always looking for more and different opportunities. Continuous improvement. Godin is always on the lookout for more ideas, more business opportunities and more engagement with his community.

Andrei Yanuaryevich (one longs to blurt out, “Jaguaryevich”) Vyshinsky, availing himself of the most flexible dialectics (of a sort nowadays not permitted either Soviet citizens or electronic calculators, since to them yes is yes and no is no), pointed out in a report which became famous in certain circles that it is never possible for mortal men to establish absolute truth, but relative truth only. He then proceeded to a further step, which jurists of the last two thousand years had not been willing to take: that the truth established by interrogation and trial could not be absolute, but only, so to speak, relative. Therefore, when we sign a sentence ordering someone to be shot we can never be absolutely certain, but only approximately, in view of certain hypotheses, and in a certain sense, that we are punishing a guilty person. Thence arose the most practical conclusion: that it was useless to seek absolute evidence-for evidence is always relative-or unchallengeable witnesses-for they can say different things at different times. The proofs of guilt were relative, approximate, and the interrogator could find them, even when there was no evidence and no witness, without leaving his office, “basing his conclusions not only on his own intellect but also on his Party sensitivity, his moral forces” (in other words, the superiority of someone who has slept well, has been well fed, and has not been beaten up) “and on his character” (i.e., his willingness to apply cruelty!)… In only one respect did Vyshinsky fail to be consistent and retreat from dialectical logic: for some reason, the executioner’s bullet which he allowed was not relative but absolute…

If we ascribe the ejection of the proton to a Compton recoil from a quantum of 52 x 106 electron volts, then the nitrogen recoil atom arising by a similar process should have an energy not greater than about 400,000 volts, should produce not more than about 10,000 ions, and have a range in the air at N.T.P. of about 1-3mm. Actually, some of the recoil atoms in nitrogen produce at least 30,000 ions. In collaboration with Dr. Feather, I have observed the recoil atoms in an expansion chamber, and their range, estimated visually, was sometimes as much as 3mm. at N.T.P. These results, and others I have obtained in the course of the work, are very difficult to explain on the assumption that the radiation from beryllium is a quantum radiation, if energy and momentum are to be conserved in the collisions. The difficulties disappear, however, if it be assumed that the radiation consists of particles of mass 1 and charge 0, or neutrons. The capture of the a-particle by the Be9 nucleus may be supposed to result in the formation of a C12 nucleus and the emission of the neutron. From the energy relations of this process the velocity of the neutron emitted in the forward direction may well be about 3 x 109 cm. per sec. The collisions of this neutron with the atoms through which it passes give rise to the recoil atoms, and the observed energies of the recoil atoms are in fair agreement with this view. Moreover, I have observed that the protons ejected from hydrogen by the radiation emitted in the opposite direction to that of the exciting a-particle appear to have a much smaller range than those ejected by the forward radiation. This again receives a simple explanation on the neutron hypothesis.

Sinyukhin began by cutting one branch from each of a series of tomato plants. Then he took electrical measurements around the wound as each plant healed and sent out a new shoot near the cut. He found a negative current—a stream of electrons—flowing from the wound for the first few days. A similar "current of injury" is emitted from all wounds in animals. During the second week, after a callus had formed over the wound and the new branch had begun to form, the current became stronger and reversed its polarity to positive. The important point wasn't the polarity—the position of the measuring electrode with respect to a reference electrode often determines whether a current registers as positive or negative. Rather, Sinyukhin's work was significant because he found a change in the current that seemed related to reparative growth. Sinyukhin found a direct correlation between these orderly electrical events and biochemical changes: As the positive current increased,cells in the area more than doubled their metabolic rate, also becoming more acidic and producing more vitamin C than before. Sinyukhin then applied extra current, using small batteries, to a group of newly lopped plants, augmenting the regeneration current.These battery-assisted plants restored their branches up to three times faster than the control plants. The currents were very small—only 2 to 3 microamperes for five days. (An ampere is a standard unit of electric current, and a microampere is one millionth of an ampere.) Larger amounts of electricity killed the cells and had no growth-enhancing effect. Moreover, the polarity had to match that normally found in the plant. When Sinyukhin used current of the opposite polarity, nullifying the plant's own current, restitution was delayed by two or three weeks.

One of the earliest studies found that using an iPad—an electronic tablet enriched with blue LED light—for two hours prior to bed blocked the otherwise rising levels of melatonin by a significant 23 percent. A more recent report took the story several concerning steps further. Healthy adults lived for a two-week period in a tightly controlled laboratory environment. The two-week period was split in half, containing two different experimental arms that everyone passed through: (1) five nights of reading a book on an iPad for several hours before bed (no other iPad uses, such as email or Internet, were allowed), and (2) five nights of reading a printed paper book for several hours before bed, with the two conditions randomized in terms of which the participants experienced as first or second. Compared to reading a printed book, reading on an iPad suppressed melatonin release by over 50 percent at night. Indeed, iPad reading delayed the rise of melatonin by up to three hours, relative to the natural rise in these same individuals when reading a printed book. When reading on the iPad, their melatonin peak, and thus instruction to sleep, did not occur until the early-morning hours, rather than before midnight. Unsurprisingly, individuals took longer to fall asleep after iPad reading relative to print-copy reading. But did reading on the iPad actually change sleep quantity/quality above and beyond the timing of melatonin? It did, in three concerning ways. First, individuals lost significant amounts of REM sleep following iPad reading. Second, the research subjects felt less rested and sleepier throughout the day following iPad use at night. Third was a lingering aftereffect, with participants suffering a ninety-minute lag in their evening rising melatonin levels for several days after iPad use ceased—almost like a digital hangover effect. Using LED devices at night impacts our natural sleep rhythms, the quality of our sleep, and how alert we feel during the day.

It turns out that in that terrible year Andrei Yanuaryevich (one longs to blurt out, “Jaguaryevich”) Vyshinsky, availing himself of the most flexible dialectics (of a sort nowadays not permitted either Soviet citizens or electronic calculators, since to them yes is yes and no is no), pointed out in a report which became famous in certain circles that it is never possible for mortal men to establish absolute truth, but relative truth only. He then proceeded to a further step, which jurists of the last two thousand years had not been willing to take: that the truth established by interrogation and trial could not be absolute, but only, so to speak, relative. Therefore, when we sign a sentence ordering someone to be shot we can never be absolutely certain, but only approximately, in view of certain hypotheses, and in a certain sense, that we are punishing a guilty person. Thence arose the most practical conclusion: that it was useless to seek absolute evidence—for evidence is always relative—or unchallengeable witnesses—for they can say different things at different times. The proofs of guilt were relative, approximate, and the interrogator could find them, even when there was no evidence and no witness, without leaving his office, “basing his conclusions not only on his own intellect but also on his Party sensitivity, his moral forces” (in other words, the superiority of someone who has slept well, has been well fed, and has not been beaten up) “and on his character” (i.e., his willingness to apply cruelty!). In only one respect did Vyshinsky fail to be consistent and retreat from dialectical logic: for some reason, the executioner’s bullet which he allowed was not relative but absolute. . . . Thus it was that the conclusions of advanced Soviet jurisprudence, proceeding in a spiral, returned to barbaric or medieval standards. Like medieval torturers, our interrogators, prosecutors, and judges agreed to accept the confession of the accused as the chief proof of guilt.

Prisons are racism incarnate. As Michelle Alexander points out, they constitute the new Jim Crow. But also much more, as the lynchpins of the prison-industrial complex, they represent the increasing profitability of punishment. They represent the increasingly global strategy of dealing with populations of people of color and immigrant populations from the countries of the Global South as surplus populations, as disposable populations. Put them all in a vast garbage bin, add some sophisticated electronic technology to control them, and let them languish there. And in the meantime, create the ideological illusion that the surrounding society is safer and more free because the dangerous Black people and Latinos, and the Native Americans, and the dangerous Asians and the dangerous White people, and of course the dangerous Muslims, are locked up! And in the meantime, corporations profit and poor communities suffer! Public education suffers! Public education suffers because it is not profitable according to corporate measures. Public health care suffers. If punishment can be profitable, then certainly health care should be profitable, too. This is absolutely outrageous! It is outrageous. It is also outrageous that the state of Israel uses the carceral technologies developed in relation to US prisons not only to control the more than eight thousand Palestinian political prisoners in Israel but also to control the broader Palestinian population. These carceral technologies, for example, the separation wall, which reminds us of the US-Mexico border wall, and other carceral technologies are the material constructs of Israeli apartheid. G4S, the organization, the corporation G4S, which profits from the incarceration and the torturing of Palestinian prisoners, has a subsidiary called G4S Secure Solutions, which was formerly known as Wackenhut. And just recently a subsidiary of that just have one more page of notes corporation, GEO Group, which is a private prison company, attempted to claim naming rights at Florida Atlantic University by donating something like $6 million, right? And, the students rose up. They said that our football stadium will not bear the name of a private prison corporation! And the students won. The students won; the name came down from the marquee.

Two Types of Subatomic Particles Fermions (matter) Bosons (forces) electron, quark, photon, graviton, neutrino, proton Yang-Mills Bunji Sakita and Jean-Loup Gervais then demonstrated that string theory had a new type of symmetry, called supersymmetry. Since then, supersymmetry has been expanded so that it is now the largest symmetry ever found in physics. As we have emphasized, beauty to a physicist is symmetry, which allows us to find the link between different particles. All the particles of the universe could then be unified by supersymmetry. As we have emphasized, a symmetry rearranges the components of an object, leaving the original object the same. Here, one is rearranging the particles in our equations so that fermions are interchanged with bosons and vice versa. This becomes the central feature of string theory, so that the particles of the entire universe can be rearranged into one another. This means that each particle has a super partner, called a sparticle, or super particle. For example, the super partner of the electron is called the selectron. The super partner of the quark is called the squark. The superpartner of the lepton (like the electron or neutrino) is called the slepton. But in string theory, something remarkable happens. When calculating quantum corrections to string theory, you have two separate contributions. You have quantum corrections coming from fermions and also bosons. Miraculously, they are equal in size, but occur with the opposite sign. One term might have a positive sign, but there is another term that is negative. In fact, when they are added together, these terms cancel against each other, leaving a finite result. The marriage between relativity and the quantum theory has dogged physicists for almost a century, but the symmetry between fermions and bosons, called supersymmetry, allows us to cancel many of these infinities against each other. Soon, physicists discovered other means of eliminating these infinities, leaving a finite result. So this is the origin of all the excitement surrounding string theory: it can unify gravity with the quantum theory. No other theory can make this claim. This may satisfy Dirac’s original objection. He hated renormalization theory because, in spite of its fantastic and undeniable successes, it involved adding and subtracting quantities that were infinite in size. Here, we see that string theory is finite all by itself, without renormalization

THEORY OF ALMOST EVERYTHING After the war, Einstein, the towering figure who had unlocked the cosmic relationship between matter and energy and discovered the secret of the stars, found himself lonely and isolated. Almost all recent progress in physics had been made in the quantum theory, not in the unified field theory. In fact, Einstein lamented that he was viewed as a relic by other physicists. His goal of finding a unified field theory was considered too difficult by most physicists, especially when the nuclear force remained a total mystery. Einstein commented, “I am generally regarded as a sort of petrified object, rendered blind and deaf by the years. I find this role not too distasteful, as it corresponds fairly well with my temperament.” In the past, there was a fundamental principle that guided Einstein’s work. In special relativity, his theory had to remain the same when interchanging X, Y, Z, and T. In general relativity, it was the equivalence principle, that gravity and acceleration could be equivalent. But in his quest for the theory of everything, Einstein failed to find a guiding principle. Even today, when I go through Einstein’s notebooks and calculations, I find plenty of ideas but no guiding principle. He himself realized that this would doom his ultimate quest. He once observed sadly, “I believe that in order to make real progress, one must again ferret out some general principle from nature.” He never found it. Einstein once bravely said that “God is subtle, but not malicious.” In his later years, he became frustrated and concluded, “I have second thoughts. Maybe God is malicious.” Although the quest for a unified field theory was ignored by most physicists, every now and then, someone would try their hand at creating one. Even Erwin Schrödinger tried. He modestly wrote to Einstein, “You are on a lion hunt, while I am speaking of rabbits.” Nevertheless, in 1947 Schrödinger held a press conference to announce his version of the unified field theory. Even Ireland’s prime minister, Éamon de Valera, showed up. Schrödinger said, “I believe I am right. I shall look an awful fool if I am wrong.” Einstein would later tell Schrödinger that he had also considered this theory and found it to be incorrect. In addition, his theory could not explain the nature of electrons and the atom. Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli caught the bug too, and proposed their version of a unified field theory. Pauli was the biggest cynic in physics and a critic of Einstein’s program. He was famous for saying, “What God has torn asunder, let no man put together”—that is, if God had torn apart the forces in the universe, then who were we to try to put them back together?

During this same period of his life Bohm also continued to refine his alternative approach to quantum physics. As he looked more carefully into the meaning of the quantum potential he discovered it had a number of features that implied an even more radical departure from orthodox thinking. One was the importance of wholeness. Classical science had always viewed the state of a system as a whole as merely the result of the interaction of its parts. However, the quantum potential stood this view on its ear and indicated that the behavior of the parts was actually organized by the whole. This not only took Bohr's assertion that subatomic particles are not independent "things, " but are part of an indivisible system one step further, but even suggested that wholeness was in some ways the more primary reality. It also explained how electrons in plasmas (and other specialized states such as superconductivity) could behave like interconnected wholes. As Bohm states, such "electrons are not scattered because, through the action of the quantum potential, the whole system is undergoing a co-ordinated movement more like a ballet dance than like a crowd of unorganized people. " Once again he notes that "such quantum wholeness of activity is closer to the organized unity of functioning of the parts of a living being than it is to the kind of unity that is obtained by putting together the parts of a machine. "6 An even more surprising feature of the quantum potential was its implications for the nature of location. At the level of our everyday lives things have very specific locations, but Bohm's interpretation of quantum physics indicated that at the subquantum level, the level in which the quantum potential operated, location ceased to exist All points in space became equal to all other points in space, and it was meaningless to speak of anything as being separate from anything else. Physicists call this property "nonlocality. " The nonlocal aspect of the quantum potential enabled Bohm to explain the connection between twin particles without violating special relativity's ban against anything traveling faster than the speed of light. To illustrate how, he offers the following analogy: Imagine a fish swimming in an aquarium. Imagine also that you have never seen a fish or an aquarium before and your only knowledge about them comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium's front and the other at its side. When you look at the two television monitors you might mistakenly assume that the fish on the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch you will eventually realize there is a relationship between the two fish. When one turns, the other makes a slightly different but corresponding turn. When one faces the front, the other faces the side, and so on. If you are unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might wrongly conclude that the fish are instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is not the case. No communication is taking place because at a deeper level of reality, the reality of the aquarium, the two fish are actually one and the same. This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between particles such as the two photons emitted when a positronium atom decays (see fig. 8).

During the more than 70 years of independence of Pakistan, none of the governments established its resources to argue and defend its disputes and political and diplomatic relations in civilized societies. For that purpose, the English print and electronic media would have the appropriate and suitable ways to execute its concerns, for the security and economic achievements. Unfortunately, all institutions fail, to draw attention towards that insight and point. Pakistan has not a lack of talented figures, who may devote their services voluntarily, for that cause. It is a key to the state of Pakistan, for its advocacy of peace and harmony with other nations, and defending tool, to opponents, who try to damage the dignity and prestige of Pakistan, with negative propaganda. If we realize that, the small nations and political, or religious groups, have a hold on such tools, and ways, for their propaganda. While Pakistan is out of that picture; consequently, we face isolation, and humiliation by wrong elements.

The small surplus of matter over antimatter was only one of the asymmetries. Equally profound, engendering structure out of the matter that remained, was gravitational energy that broke out of the unified energy field at the beginning of the universe we inhabit. Following inflation, gravity amplified its effects throughout space in response to the stretched quantum fluctuations that first set the patterns into which structure would evolve. Matter began to concentrate in some regions, leaving other areas relatively less dense. The distribution of galaxies would later correlate with this initial pattern of lumpiness. In other ways, the early shaping of our universe may have progressed through discontinuities emerging out of symmetrical force fields that then took particular forms within the wrinkled "quantum fabric" of spacetime. One seminal example that led out of physics to chemistry and, ultimately, biology was a unified particle symmetry that concerned an electron-neutrino unity. These particles assume a smooth, uniform identity-virtually pure energy at an extremely high temperature-but, upon cooling to a certain threshold, suddenly break into unique entities, with the electron assuming much more of its energy as mass and the potential to build the emergent complexity of chemistry around elemental matter. Thus, the early breaking of symmetries led to various subsequent processes to shape the universe on all scales with an inexorable potential for the emergence of everything.

In the above equation, p is the momentum of the electron as it moves around the center of the nucleus and is the wavelength. It is amazing that this equation is a physical reality, for it states that an electron's "orbital" wavelength, a wave-like property, is related to how fast it is going around the nucleus, its momentum. The larger the wavelength, the slower and lighter the particle-recall that momentum is the product of the mass and velocity of a particle.

Supergravity is a version of Einstein's theory of general relativity, dressed up with supersymmetry-a symmetry that draws a connection between bosons and fermions, matching one boson for every fermion into "superpartners." Bosons are the entities responsible for transmitting forces, such as the photon that transmits the electromagnetic force. On the other hand, fermions are both matter particles, such as electrons and quarks, and the antiparticles of all these subatomic entities. Looking in the mirror is an example of how symmetry works. The image you see closely resembles how you appear to others because of your bilateral symmetry, even though the mirror switches your left side for your right. Think of supersymmetry as a mirror that switches Bosons for fermions without changing the behavior of the physical system.

Your laptop is a note in a symphony currently being played by an orchestra of incalculable size. It’s a very small part of a much greater whole. Most of its capacity resides beyond its hard shell. It maintains its function only because a vast array of other technologies are currently and harmoniously at play. It is fed, for example, by a power grid whose function is invisibly dependent on the stability of a myriad of complex physical, biological, economic and interpersonal systems. The factories that make its parts are still in operation. The operating system that enables its function is based on those parts, and not on others yet to be created. Its video hardware runs the technology expected by the creative people who post their content on the web. Your laptop is in communication with a certain, specified ecosystem of other devices and web servers. And, finally, all this is made possible by an even less visible element: the social contract of trust—the interconnected and fundamentally honest political and economic systems that make the reliable electrical grid a reality. This interdependency of part on whole, invisible in systems that work, becomes starkly evident in systems that don’t. The higher-order, surrounding systems that enable personal computing hardly exist at all in corrupt, third-world countries, so that the power lines, electrical switches, outlets, and all the other entities so hopefully and concretely indicative of such a grid are absent or compromised, and in fact make little contribution to the practical delivery of electricity to people’s homes and factories. This makes perceiving the electronic and other devices that electricity theoretically enables as separate, functional units frustrating, at minimum, and impossible, at worst. This is partly because of technical insufficiency: the systems simply don’t work. But it is also in no small part because of the lack of trust characteristic of systemically corrupt societies. To put it another way: What you perceive as your computer is like a single leaf, on a tree, in a forest—or, even more accurately, like your fingers rubbing briefly across that leaf. A single leaf can be plucked from a branch. It can be perceived, briefly, as a single, self-contained entity—but that perception misleads more than clarifies. In a few weeks, the leaf will crumble and dissolve. It would not have been there at all, without the tree. It cannot continue to exist, in the absence of the tree. This is the position of our laptops in relation to the world. So much of what they are resides outside their boundaries that the screened devices we hold on our laps can only maintain their computer-like façade for a few short years. Almost everything we see and hold is like that, although often not so evidently

[T]he world is a system of inseparable relationships and not a mere juxtaposition of things. The verbal, piecemeal and analytic mode of perception has blinded us to the fact that things and events do not exist apart from each other. The world is a whole greater than the sum of its parts because the parts are not merely summed - thrown together - but related. The whole is a pattern which remains, while the parts come and go, just as the human body is a dynamic pattern which persists despite the rapid birth and death of all its individual cells. The pattern does not, of course, exist disembodiedly apart from individual forms, but exists precisely through their coming and going - just as it is through the structured motion and vibration of its electrons that a rock has solidity.

For font sizes and related parameters such as padding, we use relative units (em). It means that we set these values relative to the parent

This curve, which looks like an elongated S, is variously known as the logistic, sigmoid, or S curve. Peruse it closely, because it’s the most important curve in the world. At first the output increases slowly with the input, so slowly it seems constant. Then it starts to change faster, then very fast, then slower and slower until it becomes almost constant again. The transfer curve of a transistor, which relates its input and output voltages, is also an S curve. So both computers and the brain are filled with S curves. But it doesn’t end there. The S curve is the shape of phase transitions of all kinds: the probability of an electron flipping its spin as a function of the applied field, the magnetization of iron, the writing of a bit of memory to a hard disk, an ion channel opening in a cell, ice melting, water evaporating, the inflationary expansion of the early universe, punctuated equilibria in evolution, paradigm shifts in science, the spread of new technologies, white flight from multiethnic neighborhoods, rumors, epidemics, revolutions, the fall of empires, and much more. The Tipping Point could equally well (if less appealingly) be entitled The S Curve. An earthquake is a phase transition in the relative position of two adjacent tectonic plates. A bump in the night is just the sound of the microscopic tectonic plates in your house’s walls shifting, so don’t be scared. Joseph Schumpeter said that the economy evolves by cracks and leaps: S curves are the shape of creative destruction. The effect of financial gains and losses on your happiness follows an S curve, so don’t sweat the big stuff. The probability that a random logical formula is satisfiable—the quintessential NP-complete problem—undergoes a phase transition from almost 1 to almost 0 as the formula’s length increases. Statistical physicists spend their lives studying phase transitions.

The S curve is not just important as a model in its own right; it’s also the jack-of-all-trades of mathematics. If you zoom in on its midsection, it approximates a straight line. Many phenomena we think of as linear are in fact S curves, because nothing can grow without limit. Because of relativity, and contra Newton, acceleration does not increase linearly with force, but follows an S curve centered at zero. So does electric current as a function of voltage in the resistors found in electronic circuits, or in a light bulb (until the filament melts, which is itself another phase transition). If you zoom out from an S curve, it approximates a step function, with the output suddenly changing from zero to one at the threshold. So depending on the input voltages, the same curve represents the workings of a transistor in both digital computers and analog devices like amplifiers and radio tuners. The early part of an S curve is effectively an exponential, and near the saturation point it approximates exponential decay. When someone talks about exponential growth, ask yourself: How soon will it turn into an S curve? When will the population bomb peter out, Moore’s law lose steam, or the singularity fail to happen? Differentiate an S curve and you get a bell curve: slow, fast, slow becomes low, high, low. Add a succession of staggered upward and downward S curves, and you get something close to a sine wave. In fact, every function can be closely approximated by a sum of S curves: when the function goes up, you add an S curve; when it goes down, you subtract one. Children’s learning is not a steady improvement but an accumulation of S curves. So is technological change. Squint at the New York City skyline and you can see a sum of S curves unfolding across the horizon, each as sharp as a skyscraper’s corner. Most importantly for us, S curves lead to a new solution to the credit-assignment problem. If the universe is a symphony of phase transitions, let’s model it with one. That’s what the brain does: it tunes the system of phase transitions inside to the one outside. So let’s replace the perceptron’s step function with an S curve and see what happens.

Carlton Church review – Why Tokyo is populated? How Tokyo became the largest city? Apparently Tokyo Japan has been one of the largest global cities for hundreds of years. One of the primary reasons for its growth is the fact that it has been a political hotspot since they Edo period. Many of the feudal lords of Japan needed to be in Edo for a significant part of the year and this has led to a situation where increasing numbers of the population was attracted to the city. There were many people with some power base throughout Japan but it became increasingly clear that those who have the real power were the ones who were residing in Edo. Eventually Tokyo Japan emerged as both the cultural and the political center for the entire Japan and this only contributed to its rapid growth which made it increasingly popular for all people living in Japan. After World War II substantial rebuilding of the city was necessary and it was especially after the war that extraordinary growth was seen and because major industries came especially to Tokyo and Osaka, these were the cities where the most growth took place. The fact remains that there are fewer opportunities for people who are living far from the cities of Japan and this is why any increasing number of people come to the city. There are many reasons why Japan is acknowledged as the greatest city The Japanese railways is widely acknowledged to be the most sophisticated railway system in the world. There is more than 100 surface routes which is operated by Japan’s railways as well as 13 subway lines and over the years Japanese railway engineers has accomplished some amazing feats which is unequalled in any other part of the world. Most places in the city of Tokyo Japan can be reached by train and a relatively short walk. Very few global cities can make this same boast. Crossing the street especially outside Shibuya station which is one of the busiest crossings on the planet with literally thousands of people crossing at the same time. However, this street crossing symbolizes one of the trademarks of Tokyo Japan and its major tourism attractions. It lies not so much in old buildings but rather in the masses of people who come together for some type of cultural celebration. There is also the religious centers in Japan such as Carlton Church and others. Tokyo Japan has also been chosen as the city that will host the Olympics in 2020 and for many reasons this is considered to be the best possible venue. A technological Metropolitan No other country exports more critical technologies then Japan and therefore it should come as no surprise that the neighborhood electronics store look more like theme parks than electronic stores. At quickly becomes clear when one looks at such a spectacle that the Japanese people are completely infatuated with technology and they make no effort to hide that infatuation. People planning to visit Japan should heed the warnings from travel organizations and also the many complaints which is lodged by travelers who have become victims of fraud. It is important to do extensive research regarding the available options and to read every possible review which is available regarding travel agencies. A safe option will always be to visit the website of Carlton Church and to make use of their services when travelling to and from Japan.

There's a caveat here: what I've just described was our understanding of electricity, magnetism and light in classical physics. Quantum mechanics complicates this picture, but without making it any less mathematical, replacing classical electromagnetism with quantum field theory, the bedrock of modern particle physics. In quantum field theory, the wavefunction specifies the degree to which each possible configuration of the electric and magnetic fields is real. This wavefunction is itself a mathematical object, an abstract point in Hilbert space. As we saw in Chapter 7, quantum field theory says that light is made of particles called photons, and, crudely speaking, the numbers constituting the electric and magnetic fields can be thought of as specifying how many photons there are at each time and place. Just as the strength of the electromagnetic field corresponds to the number of photons at each time and place, there are other fields corresponding to all the other elementary particles known. For example, the strengths of the electron field and the quark field relate to the numbers of electrons and quarks at each time and place. In this way, all motions of all particles in all of spacetime correspond, in classical physics, to a bunch of numbers at each point in a four-dimensional mathematical space-a mathematical structure. In quantum field theory, the wavefunction specifies the degree to which each possible configuration of each of these fields is real.

A famous thorny issue in philosophy is the so-called infinite regress problem. For example, if we say that the properties of a diamond can be explained by the properties and arrangements of its carbon atoms, that the properties of a carbon atom can be explained by the properties and arrangements of its protons, neutrons and electrons, that the properties of a proton can be explained by the properties and arrangements of its quarks, and so on, then it seems that we're doomed to go on forever trying to explain the properties of the constituent parts. The Mathematical Universe Hypothesis offers a radical solution to this problem: at the bottom level, reality is a mathematical structure, so its parts have no intrinsic properties at all! In other words, the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis implies that we live in a relational reality, in the sense that the properties of the world around us stem not form properties of its ultimate building blocks, but from the relations between these building blocks. The external physical reality is therefore more than the sum of its parts, in the sense that it can have many interesting properties while its parts have no intrinsic properties at all.

As Sommerfeld said in his famous text "Spectral Lines and Atomic Constitution," on which a generation of physicists learned the subject, "In the fine structure constant e is the representative of the electron theory, h the appropriate representative of the quantum theory, c comes from relativity and characterizes it in contrast to classical theory.

The principles of relativity and quantum mechanics are almost incompatible with each other and can coexist only in a limited class of theories. In the nonrelativistic quantum mechanics of the 1920s we could imagine almost any kind of force among electrons and nuclei, but as we shall see, this is not so in a relativistic theory: forces between particles can arise only from the exchange of other particles. Furthermore, all these particles are bundles of the energy, or quanta, of various sorts of fields. A field like an electric or magnetic field is a sort of stress in space, something like the various sorts of stress that are possible within a solid body, but a field is a stress in space itself. There is one type of field for each species of elementary particle; there is an electron field in the standard model, whose quanta are electrons; there is an electromagnetic field (consisting of electric and magnetic fields) , whose quanta are the photons; there is no field for atomic nuclei, or for particles (known as protons and neutrons) of which the nuclei are composed, but there are fields for various types of particles called quarks, out of which the proton and neutron are composed; and there are a few other fields I need not go into right now. The equations of a field theory like the standard model deal not with particles but with fields; the particles appear as manifestations of these fields. The reason that ordinary matter is composed of electrons, protons, and neutrons is simply that all the other massive particles are violently unstable. The standard model qualifies as an explanation because it is not merely what computer hackers call a kludge, an assortment of odds and ends thrown together in whatever way works. Rather, the structure of the standard model is largely fixed once one specifies the menu of fields that it should contain and the general principles (like the principles of relativity and quantum mechanics) that govern their interactions.

How could the vacuum, which has nothing in it, have any energy at all? The answer comes from another equation: Einstein's famous E=mc^2. This simple formula relates mass and energy: the mass of an object is equivalent to a certain amount of energy. (In fact, particle physics don't measure the mass of the electron, say, in kilograms or pounds or any of the usual units of mass or weight. They say that the electron's rest mass is .511 MeV [million electron volts]- a lump of energy.) The fluctuation in the energy in the vacuum is the same thing as a fluctuation in the amount of mass. Particles are constantly winking in and out of existence, like tiny Cheshire cats. The vacuum is never truly empty. Instead, it is seething with these virtual particles; at every point in space, an infinite number are happily popping up and disappearing. This is the zero-point energy, an infinity in the formulas of quantum theory. Interpreted strictly, the zero-point energy is limitless. According to the equations of quantum mechanics, more power than is stored in all the coal mines, oil fields, and nuclear weapons in the world is sitting in the space inside your toaster.

Quantum mechanics has a similar problem, a problem related to the zero-point energy. The laws of quantum mechanics treat particles such as the electron as points; that is, they take up no space at all. The electron is a zero-dimensional object, and its very zerolike nature ensures that scientists don't even know the electron's mass or charge.

Fiscal Numbers (the latter uniquely identifies a particular hospitalization for patients who might have been admitted multiple times), which allowed us to merge information from many different hospital sources. The data were finally organized into a comprehensive relational database. More information on database merger, in particular, how database integrity was ensured, is available at the MIMIC-II web site [1]. The database user guide is also online [2]. An additional task was to convert the patient waveform data from Philips’ proprietary format into an open-source format. With assistance from the medical equipment vendor, the waveforms, trends, and alarms were translated into WFDB, an open data format that is used for publicly available databases on the National Institutes of Health-sponsored PhysioNet web site [3]. All data that were integrated into the MIMIC-II database were de-identified in compliance with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act standards to facilitate public access to MIMIC-II. Deletion of protected health information from structured data sources was straightforward (e.g., database fields that provide the patient name, date of birth, etc.). We also removed protected health information from the discharge summaries, diagnostic reports, and the approximately 700,000 free-text nursing and respiratory notes in MIMIC-II using an automated algorithm that has been shown to have superior performance in comparison to clinicians in detecting protected health information [4]. This algorithm accommodates the broad spectrum of writing styles in our data set, including personal variations in syntax, abbreviations, and spelling. We have posted the algorithm in open-source form as a general tool to be used by others for de-identification of free-text notes [5].

Chasing tax cheats using normal procedures was not an option. It would take decades just to identify anything like the majority of them and centuries to prosecute them successfully; the more we caught, the more clogged up the judicial system would become. We needed a different approach. Once Danis was on board a couple of days later, together we thought of one: we would extract historical and real-time data from the banks on all transfers taking place within Greece as well as in and out of the country and commission software to compare the money flows associated with each tax file number with the tax returns of that same file number. The algorithm would be designed to flag up any instance where declared income seemed to be substantially lower than actual income. Having identified the most likely offenders in this way, we would make them an offer they could not refuse. The plan was to convene a press conference at which I would make it clear that anyone caught by the new system would be subject to 45 per cent tax, large penalties on 100 per cent of their undeclared income and criminal prosecution. But as our government sought to establish a new relationship of trust between state and citizenry, there would be an opportunity to make amends anonymously and at minimum cost. I would announce that for the next fortnight a new portal would be open on the ministry’s website on which anyone could register any previously undeclared income for the period 2000–14. Only 15 per cent of this sum would be required in tax arrears, payable via web banking or debit card. In return for payment, the taxpayer would receive an electronic receipt guaranteeing immunity from prosecution for previous non-disclosure.17 Alongside this I resolved to propose a simple deal to the finance minister of Switzerland, where so many of Greece’s tax cheats kept their untaxed money.18 In a rare example of the raw power of the European Union being used as a force for good, Switzerland had recently been forced to disclose all banking information pertaining to EU citizens by 2017. Naturally, the Swiss feared that large EU-domiciled depositors who did not want their bank balances to be reported to their country’s tax authorities might shift their money before the revelation deadline to some other jurisdiction, such as the Cayman Islands, Singapore or Panama. My proposals were thus very much in the Swiss finance minister’s interests: a 15 per cent tax rate was a relatively small price to pay for legalizing a stash and allowing it to remain in safe, conveniently located Switzerland. I would pass a law through Greece’s parliament that would allow for the taxation of money in Swiss bank accounts at this exceptionally low rate, and in return the Swiss finance minister would require all his country’s banks to send their Greek customers a friendly letter informing them that, unless they produced the electronic receipt and immunity certificate provided by my ministry’s web page, their bank account would be closed within weeks. To my great surprise and delight, my Swiss counterpart agreed to the proposal.19

The Quiet Revolution Detroit, 1979. U.S. auto companies were being threatened by foreign competition, and the Motor City became a symbol of American industrial decline. Chrysler would be subjected to its first (but not last) government bailout; the Ford Motor Co. was about to lose $1 billion for that fiscal year, and at least as much again in 1980; and GM’s profits were expected to plunge by a breathtaking $2.5 billion. Meanwhile, Japanese automakers were gaining market share; Toyota would soon surpass GM as the world’s largest car company. (A similar scenario played out in other industries too, especially consumer electronics and the copier industry.) Then, as now, the convenient scapegoat was the rank-and-file employees—in Detroit’s case, the unionized workers whose relatively high wages and ostensibly poor work ethic were initially blamed for the automakers’ problems. Only as Japanese wage rates reached parity with those in the United States and Japanese automakers began hiring American workers for their U.S. plants did some Detroit auto executives begin rethinking the narrative of blue-collar failure.

But perhaps most of us all, magnetism has aroused humanity’s basic curiosity. The image in Figure 1 of the pattern produced in iron filings from a magnet shows an experiment that can be done by a child. But that experiment illustrates relativity (magnetic fields are a relativistic correction of moving charges), quantum mechanics (the Bohr–van Leeuwen theorem forbids magnetism in classical systems), the mystery of spin (it is electron spin which produces the magnetism), exchange symmetry (which keeps the spins aligned), and emergent phenomena (many spins doing what a single spin cannot). With this in mind, one cannot escape the conclusion that magnetism itself is emblematic of the mystery, the wonder and the richness of the physical world.

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Again and again, it has been an essential feature of scientific progress to understand which problems are ripe for study and which are not. For instance, leading physicists at the turn of the twentieth century, including Hendrik Lorentz and Max Abraham, devoted themselves to understanding the structure of the recently discovered electron. It was hopeless; no one could have made progress in understanding the nature of electron before the advent of quantum mechanics two decades later. The development of the special theory of relativity by Albert Einstein was made possible by Einstein’s refusal to worry about what electrons are. Instead he worried about how observations of anything (including electrons) depend on the motion of the observer. Then Einstein himself in his later years addressed the problem of unification of the forces of nature, and made no progress because no one at the time knew enough about these forces.

Twenge finds that there are just two activities that are significantly correlated with depression and other suicide-related outcomes (such as considering suicide, making a plan, or making an actual attempt): electronic device use (such as smartphone, tablet, or computer) and watching TV. On the other hand, there are five activities that have inverse relationships with depression (meaning that kids who spend more hours per week on these activities show lower rates of depression): sports and other forms of exercise, attending religious services, reading books and other print media, in-person social interactions, and doing homework. Notice anything about the difference between the two lists? Screen versus nonscreen. When kids use screens for two hours of their leisure time per day or less, there is no elevate risk of depression. But above two hours per day, the risks grow larger with each additional hour of screen time. Conversely, kids who spend more time off screens, especially if they are engaged in nonscreen social activities, are at lower risk for depression and suicidal thinking.

Migraine, like my patient Sarah had, also correlates closely to poor metabolic health. In the ENT otology clinic, we often saw this condition and had limited success in treating it. Sufferers of this debilitating neurological disease—about 12 percent of people in the United States—tend to have higher insulin levels and insulin resistance. A comprehensive review of fifty-six research articles identified links between migraine and poor metabolic health, pointing out that “migraine sufferers tend to have impaired insulin sensitivity.” The review supports the “neuro-energetic” theory of migraine. Additionally, evidence suggests that micronutrient deficiencies in key mitochondrial cofactors may also be a contributing factor of migraine. Research has suggested that migraines could be treated by restoring levels of vitamins B and D, magnesium, CoQ10, alpha lipoic acid, and L-carnitine. Vitamin B12, for instance, is involved in the electron transport chain responsible for the final steps of ATP generation in the mitochondria, and studies have indicated that high doses of B12 can help prevent migraine. These micronutrients usually have fewer side effects than other drugs used to treat migraines, making them a promising option for relief, which can be obtained through a diet rich in these micronutrients, or supplementation. Having high markers of oxidative stress, a key Bad Energy feature, is associated with a significantly higher risk of migraine in women, with some studies suggesting that migraine attacks are a symptomatic response to increased levels of oxidative stress. Less painful and more common tension-type headaches are also linked to high variability (excess peaks and crashes) in blood sugar. Hearing Loss The same story of metabolic ignorance in the ENT department unfolded for auditory problems and hearing loss, one of the most common issues presented to our ENT clinic. We’d typically tell our patients that their auditory decline was inevitable, due to aging and loud concerts in their youth, and we would suggest interventions like hearing aids. Yet insulin resistance is a little-known link to hearing problems. If you have insulin resistance, you are more likely to lose hearing as you age because of poor energy production in the delicate hearing cells and blockage of the small blood vessels that supply the inner ear. One study showed that insulin resistance is associated with age-related hearing loss, even when controlling for weight and age. The likely mechanism for this is that the auditory system requires high energy utilization for its complex signal processing. In the case of insulin resistance, glucose metabolism is disturbed, leading to decreased energy generation. The impact of Bad Energy on hearing is not subtle: A study showed that the prevalence of high-frequency hearing impairment among subjects with elevated fasting glucose levels was 42 percent compared to 24 percent in those with normal fasting glucose. Moreover, insulin resistance is associated with high-frequency mild hearing impairment in the male population under seventy years of age, even before the onset of diabetes. These papers suggest that assessing early metabolic function and levels of insulin resistance is essential in the ENT clinic and counseling individuals on the potential warning signs is paramount.

There is one further attribute of language that places it at a higher level than any existing technological organization or facility; and that is, to function at all, it demands a reciprocal relation between producer and consumer, between sayer and listener: an inequality of advantage destroys in some degree the integrity and common value of the product. Unlike any historic economic system, the demand for words may be limited without embarrassing the supply: the capital reserves (vocabulary) may become huger and the capacity for production (speech, literature, sharable meanings) continue to increase without imposing any collective duty to consume the surplus. This relationship, embedded in the special form of language, the dialogue, is at last being undermined by a new system of control and one-way communication that has now found an electronic mode of operation; and the grave issues that have thus been raised must now be faced.

Archivist / Circuit Bender For the figure of the artist, technical media has meant nods both toward engineering and the archive, as Huhtamo has noted: “the role of the artist-engineer, which rose into prominence in the 1960s (although its two sides rarely met in one person), has at least partly been supplanted by that of the artist-archaeologist.”23 Yet methodologies of reuse, hardware hacking, and circuit bending are becoming increasingly central in this context as well. Bending or repurposing the archive of media history strongly relates to the pioneering works of artists such as Paul DeMarinis, Zoe Beloff, or Gebhard Sengmüller—where a variety of old media technologies have been modified and repurposed to create pseudo-historical objects from a speculative future.

Some popular simulator programs include Electronics Workbench, CircuitMaker, and MicroSim/Pspice. Electronics Workbench and CircuitMaker are relatively easy to use, while Pspice is a bit more technical.

Heightened capacity for visual imagery and fantasy “Was able to move imaginary parts in relation to each other.” “It was the non-specific fantasy that triggered the idea.” “The next insight came as an image of an oyster shell, with the mother-of-pearl shining in different colors. I translated that in the idea of an interferometer—two layers separated by a gap equal to the wavelength it is desired to reflect.” “As soon as I began to visualize the problem, one possibility immediately occurred. A few problems with that concept occurred, which seemed to solve themselves rather quickly…. Visualizing the required cross section was instantaneous.” “Somewhere along in here, I began to see an image of the circuit. The gates themselves were little silver cones linked together by lines. I watched the circuit flipping through its paces….” “I began visualizing all the properties known to me that a photon possesses and attempted to make a model for a photon…. The photon was comprised of an electron and a positron cloud moving together in an intermeshed synchronized helical orbit…. This model was reduced for visualizing purposes to a black-and-white ball propagating in a screwlike fashion through space. I kept putting the model through all sorts of known tests.” 5. Increased ability to concentrate “Was able to shut out virtually all distracting influences.” “I was easily able to follow a train of thought to a conclusion where normally I would have been distracted many times.” “I was impressed with the intensity of concentration, the forcefulness and exuberance with which I could proceed toward the solution.” “I considered the process of photoconductivity…. I kept asking myself, ‘What is light? and subsequently, ‘What is a photon?’ The latter question I repeated to myself several hundred times till it was being said automatically in synchronism with each breath. I probably never in my life pressured myself as intently with a question as I did this one.” “It is hard to estimate how long this problem might have taken without the psychedelic agent, but it was the type of problem that might never have been solved. It would have taken a great deal of effort and racking of the brains to arrive at what seemed to come more easily during the session.” 6. Heightened empathy with external processes and objects “…the sense of the problem as a living thing that is growing toward its inherent solution.” “First I somehow considered being the needle and being bounced around in the groove.” “I spent a productive period …climbing down on my retina, walking around and thinking about certain problems relating to the mechanism of vision.” “Ability to grasp the problem in its entirety, to ‘dive’ into it without reservations, almost like becoming the problem.” “Awareness of the problem itself rather than the ‘I’ that is trying to solve it.” 7. Heightened empathy with people “It was also felt that group performance was affected in …subtle ways. This may be evidence that some sort of group action was going on all the time.” “Only at intervals did I become aware of the music. Sometimes, when I felt the other guys listening to it, it was a physical feeling of them listening to it.” “Sometimes we even had the feeling of having the same thoughts or ideas.” 8. Subconscious data more accessible “…brought about almost total recall of a course that I had had in thermodynamics; something that I had never given any thought about in years.” “I was in my early teens and wandering through the gardens where I actually grew up. I felt all my prior emotions in relation to my surroundings.

due to the precision of the optical electron oscillation frequency within strontium or aluminium. 30. Train of identical nearly single-cycle optical pulses. The spectrum of the pulse train looks like the teeth of a comb, hence it is called a frequency comb. ‘Optical clockwork’ of this kind allows the comparison of disparate frequencies with such remarkable precision that it provides a means to test the tenets of relativity, and thus to understand better the role of light in defining space and time. Frequency, and thus time, is the physical quantity that can be measured with the highest precision of any quantity, by far. Optical telecommunications Frequency combs are also important in telecommunications links based on light. In Chapter 3, I described how optical waves could be guided along a fibre or in a glass ‘chip’. This phenomenon underpins the long-distance telecommunications infrastructure that connects people across different continents and powers the Internet. The reason it is so effective is that light-based communications have much more capacity for carrying information than do electrical wires, or even microwave cellular networks. This makes possible massive data transmission, such as that needed to deliver video on demand over the Internet. Many telecommunications companies offer ‘fibre optic broadband’ deals. A key feature of these packages is the high speed—up to 100 megabytes per second (MBps)—at which data may be received and transmitted. A byte is a number of bits, each of which is a 1 or a 0. Information is sent over fibres as a sequence of ‘bits’, which are decoded by your computer or mobile phone into intelligible video, audio, or text messages. In optical communications, the bits are represented by the intensity of the light beam—typically low intensity is a 0 and higher intensity a 1. The more of these that arrive per second, the faster the communication rate. The MBps speed of the package specifies how rapidly we can transmit and receive information over that company’s link.

The agents of imperial demise would certainly be backed up by military power—the Chinese have never wavered in that view—but the agents would be many and varied: economic, legal, public relations—and electronic sabotage. The success of George Soros’s then recent speculative attack on the currencies of several East Asian nations impressed but appalled the Chinese (who have pegged their own currency to the dollar in part to discourage such tactics). Soros and his traders had driven down the value of these currencies, forcing them into line with their true worth! But that point was lost on Qiao and Wang, as it was lost on noncapitalists (i.e., most people) around the world, who saw only economic chaos in Asia created by Western capitalists. To the authors of Unrestricted Warfare, these attacks were a form of economic terrorism on par with bin Laden’s bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa, Aum Shinrikyo’s sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway, and the depredations of malicious hackers on the Internet. They “represent semi-warfare, quasi-warfare, and sub-warfare, that is, the embryonic form of another kind of warfare.” Such warfare knows no boundaries, and against it, borders have no meaning.

Bellevue and its satellites were not suburbs so much as—in the rising term—an Edge City, with its own economy, sociology, and architecture. Things made on the Eastside were odorless, labor-intensive, and credit-card thin, like computer software and aerospace-related electronics gear. They were assembled in low, tree-shaded factories, whose large grounds were known as “campuses”—for in Bellevue all work was graduate work, and the jargon of school and university leaked naturally into the workplace. Seen from an elevated-freeway distance, Bellevue looked like one of its own products: a giant circuit board of color-coded diodes and resistors, connected by a mazy grid of filaments.

for several years starting in 2004, Bezos visited iRobot’s offices, participated in strategy sessions held at places like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and became a mentor to iRobot chief executive Colin Angle, who cofounded the company in 1990. “He recognized early on that robots were a very disruptive game-changer,’’ Angle says of Bezos. “His curiosity about our space led to a very cool period of time where I could count upon him for a unique perspective.’’ Bezos is no longer actively advising the company, but his impact on the local tech scene has only grown larger. In 2008, Bezos’ investment firm provided initial funding for Rethink Robotics, a Boston company that makes simple-to-program manufacturing robots. Four years later, Amazon paid $775 million for North Reading-based Kiva, which makes robots that transport merchandise in warehouses. Also in 2012, Amazon opened a research and software development outpost in Cambridge that has done work on consumer electronics products like the Echo, a Wi-Fi-connected speaker that responds to voice commands. Rodney Brooks, an iRobot cofounder who is now chief technology officer of Rethink, says he met Bezos at the annual TED Conference. Bezos was aware of work that Brooks, a professor emeritus at MIT, had done on robot navigation and control strategies. Helen Greiner, the third cofounder of iRobot, says she met Bezos at a different technology conference, in 2004. Shortly after that, she recruited him as an adviser to iRobot. Bezos also made an investment in the company, which was privately held at the time. “He gave me a number of memorable insights,’’ Angle says. “He said, ‘Just because you won a bet doesn’t mean it was a good bet.’ Roomba might have been lucky. He was challenging us to think hard about where we were going and how to leverage our success.’’ On visits to iRobot, Greiner recalls, “he’d shake everyone’s hand and learn their names. He got them engaged.’’ She says one of the key pieces of advice Bezos supplied was about the value of open APIs — the application programming interfaces that allow other software developers to write software that talks to a product like the Roomba, expanding its functionality. The advice was followed. (Amazon also offers a range of APIs that help developers build things for its products.) By spending time with iRobot, Bezos gave employees a sense they were on the right track. “We were all believers that robotics would be huge,’’ says former iRobot exec Tom Ryden. “But when someone like that comes along and pays attention, it’s a big deal.’’ Angle says that Bezos was an adviser “in a very formative, important moment in our history,’’ and while they discussed “ideas about what practical robots could do, and what they could be,’’ Angle doesn’t want to speculate about what, exactly, Bezos gleaned from the affiliation. But Greiner says she believes “there was learning on both sides. We already had a successful consumer product with Roomba, and he had not yet launched the Kindle. He was learning from us about successful consumer products and robotics.’’ (Unfortunately, Bezos and Amazon’s public relations department would not comment.) The relationship trailed off around 2007 as Bezos got busier — right around when Amazon launched the Kindle, Greiner says. Since then, Bezos and Amazon have stayed mum about most of their activity in the state. His Bezos Expeditions investment team is still an investor in Rethink, which earlier this month announced its second product, a $29,000, one-armed robot called Sawyer that can do precise tasks, such as testing circuit boards. The warehouse-focused Kiva Systems group has been on a hiring tear, and now employs more than 500 people, according to LinkedIn. In December, Amazon said that it had 15,000 of the squat orange Kiva robots moving around racks of merchandise in 10 of its 50 distribution centers. Greiner left iRo

The following sections survey some of the many US federal computer crime statutes, including         •  18 USC 1029: Fraud and Related Activity in Connection with Access Devices         •  18 USC 1030: Fraud and Related Activity in Connection with Computers         •  18 USC 2510 et seq.: Wire and Electronic Communications Interception and Interception of Oral Communications         •  18 USC 2701 et seq.: Stored Wire and Electronic Communications and Transactional Records Access         •  The Digital Millennium Copyright Act         •  The Cyber Security Enhancement Act of 2002

For relatively small stars, the Pauli exclusion principle keeps the electrons in a star sufficiently separated to prevent the star from contracting further after it has spent its fuel. In other words, the electrons counteract the crushing gravitational force. However, for stars more than about 1.5 times the mass of the sun (a mass known as the Chandrasekhar limit), this repulsive force would not be enough to stop stellar collapse.

Special relativity killed the classical dream of using the energy-momentum-velocity relations of a particle as a means of probing the dynamic origins of its mass. The relations are purely kinematic. The classical picture of a particle as a finite little sphere is also gone for good. Quantum field theory has taught us that particles nevertheless have structure, arising from quantum fluctuations. Recently, unified field theories have taught us that the mass of the electron is certainly not purely electromagnetic in nature. But we still do not know what causes the electron to weigh.

The foregoing remarks illustrate the fact that the 'tilting' of light cones, i.e. the distortion of causality, due to gravity, is not only a subtle phenomenon, but a real phenomenon, and it cannot be explained away by a residual or 'emergent' property that arises when conglomerations of matter get large enough. Gravity has its own unique character among physical processes, not directly discernible at the level of the forces that are important for fundamental particles, but nevertheless it is there all the time. Nothing in known physics other than gravity can tilt the light cones, so gravity is something that is simply different from all other known forces and physical influences, in this very basic respect. According to classical general relativity theory, there must indeed be an absolutely minute amount of light-cone tilting resulting from the material in the tiniest speck of dust. Even individual electrons must tilt the light cones. But the amount of tilting in such objects is far too ridiculously tiny to have any directly noticeable effect whatsoever.

But, as I indicated in the historical overview, many of these same physicists quickly realized that the story for nature's remaining force, gravity, was far subtler. Whenever the equations of general relativity commingled with those of quantum theory, the mathematics balked. Use the combined equations to calculate the quantum probability of some physical process- such as the chance of two electrons ricocheting off each other, given both their electromagnetic repulsion and their gravitational attraction-and you'd typically get the answer infinity. While some things in the universe can be infinite, such as the extent of space and the quantity of matter that may fill it, probabilities are not among them. By definition, the value of a probability must be between 0 and 1 (or, in terms of percentages, between 0 and 100). An infinite probability does not mean that something is very likely to happen, or is certain to happen; rather, it's meaningless, like speaking of the thirteenth egg in an even dozen. An infinite probability sends a clear mathematical message: the combined equations are nonsense.

e=mc^2. I know. I promised there would be no equations and, except for a few footnotes, I've kept my promise. But I think you will forgive me for making an exception for the world's most famous equation-the only equation to have its biography written. And the thing is this: e = mc^2 pops right out of QFT. Einstein had to work hard to find it (it was published in a separate paper that followed his breakthrough paper on relativity theory in 1905), but in QFT it appears as an almost trivial consequence of the two previous results. Since both mass and energy are associated with oscillations in the field, it doesn't take an Einstein to see that there must be a relationship between the two. Any schoolboy can combine the two equations and find (big drum roll, please) e = mc^2. Not only does the equation tumble right out of QFT, its meaning is seen in the oscillations or "shimmer" of the fields. Frank Wilczek calls these oscillations "a marvelous bit of poetry" that create a "Music of the Grid" (Wilczek's term for space seen as a lattice of points): Rather than plucking a string, blowing through a reed, banging on a drumhead, or clanging a gong, we play the instrument that is empty space by plunking down different combinations of quarks, gluons, electrons, photons,...and let them settle until they reach equilibrium with the spontaneous activity of Grid...These vibrations represent particles of different mass m...The masses of particles sound the Music of the Grid. ----- Frank Wilczek

At the laboratory, Turing designed the first relatively complete electronic stored-program digital computer for code breaking in 1945. Darwin deemed it too ambitious, however, and after several years Turing left in disgust. When the laboratory finally built his design in 1950, it was the fastest computer in the world and, astonishingly, had the memory capacity of an early Macintosh built three decades later.

This was de Broglie's great insight: if the electron in an atom is made of waves then the number of waves must be an integer, and the corresponding frequencies must be discrete. And since the frequency of oscillation is related to the energy of the electron field, the energy states must be discrete.

In response to my ex-Valet’s email, I wrote: Hi Andy, I am surprised by your honesty and openness in relating your early relationship with Toby. I had not expected such frank soliloquy from a ‘perfect’ gentleman like you. Although we often discussed everything candidly in the old days, we had never written down our thoughts and opinions in black and white. Are we finally reaching an Age of Aquarius where truth and freedom are here to enlighten humanity? I am gladdened that we are able to communicate quickly and efficiently in this electronic age. I know you are aware that I am writing my memoirs. Aren’t you concerned that I may reveal the true nature of your feelings you confided to me in my writings? One thing I can promise you; I will never do anything unsavory or conduct myself in an ungentlemanly fashion towards those I love, respect and trust. My dearest Andy, I value your love greatly and laurel you in the highest esteem in my pantheon of cultivated beings. Moreover we are soul mates and as past E.R.O.S. members we also have a duty to our forebears to continue living spiritually and intellectually. To be illustrious examples in the chaotic world we reside…

As with Japanese keiretsu, the member firms in a Korean chaebol own shares in each other and tend to collaborate with each other on what is often a nonprice basis. The Korean chaebol differs from the Japanese prewar zaibatsu or postwar keiretsu, however, in a number of significant ways. First and perhaps most important, Korean network organizations were not centered around a private bank or other financial institution in the way the Japanese keiretsu are.8 This is because Korean commercial banks were all state owned until their privatization in the early 1970s, while Korean industrial firms were prohibited by law from acquiring more than an eight percent equity stake in any bank. The large Japanese city banks that were at the core of the postwar keiretsu worked closely with the Finance Ministry, of course, through the process of overloaning (i.e., providing subsidized credit), but the Korean chaebol were controlled by the government in a much more direct way through the latter’s ownership of the banking system. Thus, the networks that emerged more or less spontaneously in Japan were created much more deliberately as the result of government policy in Korea. A second difference is that the Korean chaebol resemble the Japanese intermarket keiretsu more than the vertical ones (see p. 197). That is, each of the large chaebol groups has holdings in very different sectors, from heavy manufacturing and electronics to textiles, insurance, and retail. As Korean manufacturers grew and branched out into related businesses, they started to pull suppliers and subcontractors into their networks. But these relationships resembled simple vertical integration more than the relational contracting that links Japanese suppliers with assemblers. The elaborate multitiered supplier networks of a Japanese parent firm like Toyota do not have ready counterparts in Korea.9

There are other problems more closely related to the question of culture. The poor fit between large scale and Korea’s familistic tendencies has probably been a net drag on efficiency. The culture has slowed the introduction of professional managers in situations where, in contrast to small-scale Chinese businesses, they are desperately needed. Further, the relatively low-trust character of Korean culture does not allow Korean chaebol to exploit the same economies of scale and scope in their network organization as do the Japanese keiretsu. That is, the chaebol resembles a traditional American conglomerate more than a keiretsu network: it is burdened with a headquarters staff and a centralized decision-making apparatus for the chaebol as a whole. In the early days of Korean industrialization, there may have been some economic rationale to horizontal expansion of the chaebol into unfamiliar lines of business, since this was a means of bringing modern management techniques to a traditional economy. But as the economy matured, the logic behind linking companies in unrelated businesses with no obvious synergies became increasingly questionable. The chaebol’s scale may have given them certain advantages in raising capital and in cross-subsidizing businesses, but one would have to ask whether this represented a net advantage to the Korean economy once the agency and other costs of a centralized organization were deducted from the balance. (In any event, the bulk of chaebol financing has come from the government at administered interest rates.) Chaebol linkages may actually serve to hold back the more competitive member companies by embroiling them in the affairs of slow-growing partners. For example, of all the varied members of the Samsung conglomerate, only Samsung Electronics is a truly powerful global player. Yet that company has been caught up for several years in the group-wide management reorganization that began with the passing of the conglomerate’s leadership from Samsung’s founder to his son in the late 1980s.72 A different class of problems lies in the political and social realms. Wealth is considerably more concentrated in Korea than in Taiwan, and the tensions caused by disparities in wealth are evident in the uneasy history of Korean labor relations. While aggregate growth in the two countries has been similar over the past four decades, the average Taiwanese worker has a higher standard of living than his Korean counterpart. Government officials were not oblivious to the Taiwanese example, and beginning in about 1981 they began to reverse somewhat their previous emphasis on large-scale companies by reducing their subsidies and redirecting them to small- and medium-sized businesses. By this time, however, large corporations had become so entrenched in their market sectors that they became very difficult to dislodge. The culture itself, which might have preferred small family businesses if left to its own devices, had begun to change in subtle ways; as in Japan, a glamour now attached to working in the large business sector, guaranteed it a continuing inflow of Korea’s best and brightest young people.73

Much of our internal heat is generated by dissipating the proton gradient across the mitochondrial membranes (see page 183). Since the proton gradient can either power ATP production or heat production, we are faced with alternatives: any protons dissipated to produce heat cannot be used to make ATP. (As we saw in Part 2, the proton gradient has other critical functions too, but if we assume that these remain constant, they don’t affect our argument.) If 30 per cent of the proton gradient is used to produce heat, then no more than 70 per cent can be used to produce ATP. Wallace and colleagues realized that this balance could plausibly shift according to the climate. People living in tropical Africa would gain from a tight coupling of protons to ATP production, so generating less internal heat in a hot climate, whereas the Inuit, say, would gain by generating more internal heat in their frigid environment, and so would necessarily generate relatively little ATP. To compensate for their lower ATP production, they would need to eat more. Wallace set out to find any mitochondrial genes that might influence the balance between heat production and ATP generation, and found several variants that plausibly affected heat production (by uncoupling electron flow from proton pumping). The variants that produced the most heat were favoured in the Arctic, as expected, while those that produced the least were found in Africa.

Relativity works in the realm of the large. It deals with gravity and mass and speed. Quantum mechanics deals with the very small. Elementary particles. Like electrons. Both paint a picture of a universe that seems ridiculous. Crazier than something out of a fantasy novel.” “For instance?” prompted Elovic. “Relativity shows that as an object speeds up, time itself passes more and more slowly for it. At the speed of light, time stops altogether.