[lit-ideas] Sunday Sermon
- From: Mike Geary <jejunejesuit.geary2@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2010 12:45:13 -0500
ScienceDaily (Oct. 31, 2010) — Researchers at Oregon State University have
solved a quest in fundamental material science that has eluded scientists
since the 1960s, and could form the basis of a new approach to electronics.
"This is a fundamental change in the way you could produce electronic
products, at high speed on a huge scale at very low cost, even less than
with conventional methods," Keszler said. "It's a basic way to eliminate the
current speed limitations of electrons that have to move through materials."
Also on the horizon are "energy harvesting" technologies such as the
nighttime capture of re-radiated solar energy, a way to produce energy from
the Earth as it cools during the night.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101029152751.htm
IT'S A SQUIGGLY-WIGGLY WORLD
"O that this too too solid flesh would thaw, melt, resolve itself into a
dew..."
Billy Boy had it right and long before we knew of the nothingness of what
is.
I read once of a physicist who wore snow shoes wherever he went fearing that
he might otherwise sink into the earth.
I often feel like that. Who remembers Buckaroo Bonzai and the car that
could drive through solid rock? Hey, if a cosmic ray can do it, why not
Buckaroo?
Is existence an illusion? There's nothing there but energy, right? Slow it
all down and you can have a 5 billion year old planet -- but not the same,
not the same one even for an instant. It's constantly, instantly changing,
subatomically at least, as are our own bodies, Muons and pions shoot out
from us like fireworks, and others jump in to take their place.
Sayeth Billy Boy:
*Hamlet: To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination
trace the noble dust of Alexander, till he find it stopping a bung-hole?**
Horatio: 'Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so.**Hamlet: No,
faith, not a jot; but to follow him thither with modesty enough, and
likelihood to lead it: as thus: Alexander died, Alexander was buried,
Alexander returneth into dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam; and
why of that loam, whereto he was converted, might they not stop a
beer-barrel?*
Billy Boy didn't know about subatomic particles, but his instincts were
right. We are each of us wads of what once was. Some object to
reductionism insisting that we are more than positive and negative
electrical charges. For me, lightening proves there's a god and that he is
the Omnipotent Squiggly Wiggly of existence.
Mike Geary
throwing off hadrons in Memphis
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