Of Bosons and Paradigms

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Last month scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (which is probably a front for supervillany; think about it: it's a large mysterious underground science facility that some people say could destroy the world; sounds like a Batman villan to me) announced that it may have possibly seen the first observable evidence of the Higgs boson, the theoretical elementary particle responsible for mass.

The LHC, which was built specifically to find the Higgs boson, is anticipating that it will be able to claim discovery sometime within the year, which would be huge for theoretical physics because it would validate the last half century of work in quantum mechanics, which has been really important to theoretical and particle physics for the past century. But I think it would be way more interesting, and have much more profound implications, if they didn't find the Higgs, or if they found evidence that it didn't exist.

I'm no expert on theoretical particle physics, or really anything at all, but I have taken enough science classes to understand that most of what we think we know about the universe at any given point is usually wrong. Sometimes, all the equations work out, and we think we finally understand what is going on, provided we ignore some of the nagging problems that the theory can't explain, and we still turn out to be wrong. The most enduring example of this is Newtonian gravity versus general relativity. As a complete outsider to physics, that where it seems like we are standing right now with quantum mechanics. There are a lot of things that work out really well, and many more that it is most likely correct about because we have things like advance electronics that work based on the principles of quantum mechanics, so it must be mostly correct. But still, we don't have a unified field theory, and there are other problems, meaning that there are still pieces missing. Those pieces may not be in the current directions of research, they may be in the complete opposite direction, or in a direction that we haven't found yet. Not finding the Higgs, could completely overturn a lot of the research and theories from the last fifty or sixty years of work, and it would force a paradigm shift the likes of which we haven't seen since the development of quantum mechanics at the turn of the last century. And just maybe, the answers we have been searching for would be found the new paradigm that would be generated.

That's one of the things that I find so exciting about science: there's always something we don't know, and it's always possible that what we think we know is wrong. It illustrates the difference between knowledge and understanding. We know the equations and the experimental facts and what we have observed, but we don't always understand what they mean on an intuitive level, or even any level at all. That's the gap we are constantly trying to bridge.

Skeptical scientist is skeptical (via)

I have no idea what the future of scientific research holds, and what the coming discoveries will mean, and I suspect that no one does. Who knows what finding the Higgs boson will mean in terms of future research (assuming they find it), and what doors it could open, in terms of both research and technology. I could be incredibly significant or it could only matter to the people writing scientific papers and never have a wider impact. (Equivocation much?).

We have this need to explain the world around us, whether it has the potential to improve it or not, but we can't seem to settle on an explanation that we are happy with. So, we settle for smashing protons into each other at near the speed of light just to see what happens. I don't know about you, Imaginary Readers, but I'm okay with that.

Interlude: Flying Cars

It's 2012! Weird. Where are the flying cars you ask? Actually, that's a dumb question because smart phones exist. Think about how crazy that is. Your phone (assuming you, Imaginary Readers, have a smart phone) can communicate with dozens of satellites which function based on the principles of special relativity, is a more powerful computer than a PC from five years ago, and is also a really nice camera, phone, and musical device. It is also more advanced than any communicator ever shown on various Star Trek series which are all set three to four hundred years in the future. I think that is absolutely amazing. And that's just consumer technology. Think about all the crazy shit that must exist in labs and for military and academic use right now that we, as consumers, won't see for several year if at all. We are living in the future (except not really because then it wouldn't be the future and we as of yet have no evidence of time travel that I, as a random mid-westerner who would never be told of it's existence outside of seeing something posted online, am aware of).

This will never happen

Also, the sheer amount of energy required to generate enough lift to make a car fly precludes the possibility of having "flying cars" because they would never be efficient enough to be economically viable (which is saying something because stretch Hummers exist). All current concept cars, based on a brief Google image search for "flying cars" seem to operate based on the idea of having a small plane with foldable wings whose cabin has road wheels. The problem with this is that it is essentially an airplane, which requires a decent amount of space for take-off/ landing, as well as not being able to hover. Anyone who has ever driven a car on an actual road (racing notwithstanding) knows that driving requires a good deal of standing still waiting in traffic or at a light or stop sign. There is a very good reason why there are no plane equivalent of a stop sign: much like sharks, planes cannot stop without dying (in this case falling out of the air). (I should probably say at this point that I actually know nothing about the logistics of flying or planes, I just like to talk about things with authority about things I know nothing about and back it up with some intro physics level physics knowledge.)

Additionally, driving is difficult enough with only two dimensions to worry about. Think about what it would be like if you also had to worry about what the people above and below you were doing. And the existing infrastructure would never be able to support flying cars. We would need three dimensional lanes/streets, which would require some sort of holographic technology or the ability to paint lane lines on the air.

Realistically, flying car technology would be nothing like in the movies where one or two zoom around sky scrapers or just overhead in an establishing shot. There would be just as much traffic, probably more, but it would completely encase you in a three dimensional cage of cars. Like in that Doctor Who episode "Gridlock."

Currently, when you drive, you have eight distinct positions around your car that you have to worry about, shown in Figure 1, which form a square of immediate spaces around your vehicle where various obstacles could be. This is just the immediate spaces that your car can occupy in the next instant, and does not include the ever extending 2D disk of space you need to worry about and keep track of.  Now extend that to three dimensions. That means that you know occupy the center of a cube rather than a square and have 26 distinct spaces surrounding you to worry about, plus a sphere extending to infinity of possible obstacles and whatever the flying equivalent of pedestrians are to contend with. That means that in heavy traffic, you are surrounded by 26 cars, with little to no visibility. Think of the mirror system required to cover the blind spots alone. How do you keep track the cars/lanes directly below you? At what point does the human neck reach it's craning limits? These are questions that proponents of fly cars have yet to answer (and by proponents I mostly mean science fiction because no one cares about futurists).

Figure 1: Or: I Should Stop Ranting And Go To Bed (also that double colon is somewhat questionable)

It seems I have spent far too much time thinking about why flying cars aren't viable, because what started as a "I have nothing better to do tonight than to attempt to post with a time stamp from midnight on New Years" post turned into a rant about flying cars including diagrams and some math. It's possible that I am just a little bit bored during break. I should probably try to find something a bit more productive to do...

Anyways, Happy New Years! Here's hopping that the Mayans didn't really have it all figured out and that the world doesn't end this year! (Spoilers: It doesn't). ((Double Spoilers: I know this because I'm a sane, rational human being, and not because I'm a time traveler, but bonus points to anyone who thought that last comment was because I'm a time traveler.)) (((Also, double and triple parenthesis are definitely questionable punctuation, and I'll stop now.)))

Obligatory Holiday Post

Click to enlarge

As the end of the year quickly approaches, I decided to make another graph for you, Imaginary Readers, to illustrate how I think about years. It shows stress as a function of time, and it clearly depicts the year as a periodic function with a period of roughly a semester. The school year is just the calendar year phase shifted by negative three months, roughly. This is important, because even though 2011 is about to end, I am in the middle of the school year, so it doesn't feel like a new year; it just feels like a new semester.

It's difficult to think of the past year as anything more than the past semester, which was the best/worst semester so far, but it was more than that, because this past year also included the previous semester and May Term and the summer (yes, I did just define a year). A lot happened, and I know that this past year was pretty good, overall, but the way the school year is structured makes it difficult for me to view December as the end of the year. I am so entrenched in the academic system right now, that the semester seems to be the only possible organizational structure that matters, at least is matters much more to me right now than an arbitrary dating system that doesn't make much sense anyways. (I think they could have come up with a better calendar system than just picking how many days will be in a month seemingly at random. Some months have 30 days, others 31, but they don't perfectly alternate, and February can't decide if it wants to be weirdly short or just really short.)

So, on that note, here I am at the end of another semester. A lot happened in the past four months, both personally and academically, the details of which I will not bore you with in this post, Imaginary Readers, because you probably already know them (I am going to stop whining about that now, promise). And now it's the holidays, which are good, if somewhat of a family overload, after which comes the better part of a month which I have historically spent bored and wanting to go back to school, because at school I have things to do and people to do them with, which, not counting my family, I don't have at home. I don't want this year's break to be like breaks have been in the past where I spend it sitting at home feeling sorry for myself, because that's boring and I'm done feeling sorry for myself. After the New Year, I do have some stuff to occupy myself with: people who are still in town and my research. I just have to get through the rest of this week without imploding from boredom. At least my family got a kitten a couple of months ago whom I can play with. Because kittens really do make everything better.

Cell Bio Win!

This is what happens in every one of your cells all of the time! This is exactly why the biological sciences are so awesome!

The full version of this is eight minutes, but for your sake, Imaginary Readers, I only posted the three minute version. If you like it, you should go YouTube the full version, because it is epically awesome.

Oh! The Places I've Been

Stuck in a Lurch

When I was in ninth grade, I copied out the full text of Dr. Seuss' Oh! The Places You'll Go, and I've carried it in my wallet ever since. After the better part of five years, it's a little worse for wear, but I still have it with me. It's my favorite book, out of everything I've read (which isn't saying much: I have read quite a few Star Trek novels, which are not known for their quality), because it's about life, in a really concise, rhyming way. Ultimately, it has a hopeful message, but it doesn't pull punches, which I think is why I like it so much. 

For a long time, my favorite line from it was possibly the most depressing passage in the entire thing:

I’m afraid that some times you’ll play lonely games too. Games you can’t win ‘cause you’ll play against you. All Alone! Whether you like it or not, Alone will be something you’ll be quite a lot.

I can't tell you how many notebook pages I covered with those lines in high school. The sentiment of it really resonated with me at the time, and to a certain extent still does, because I have always been aware of my issues with feeling my feelings, and because I didn't have anyone in my life who I was willing to really try to be close to, I spent a lot of time feeling really isolated and alone. It was comforting to me for someone (Dr. Seuss) to tell me that was okay; that maybe I wasn't as different from everyone else as it seemed. But that was just an excuse, in a way, to not deal with the things that were making me feel so isolated; the things that I'm just starting to deal with now. Because it was so much easier not to deal with my issues; to not get close to people, and just continue on by myself, like I always had.

I have this very clear memory of being about eleven or twelve years old and thinking that I was probably gay, but then deciding not to deal with it, not to figure out what that meant, and who I was at that time. And then I proceeded not to continue not dealing with it for several years, until I consciously could not allow myself to no longer deal with it, and I had to admit it to myself. I think that was the moment that I stopped dealing with my feelings, when I started suppressing everything and always being okay, even when I wasn't. Because in that moment, I made the conscious decision to not deal with something fairly important because it was easier not to, and once the precedent was set, it was so much more difficult to go back and unravel the mess that I had made than to continue to not deal with things. I took the easy way out, and it worked for a long time, because I had nothing else so big to deal with that I couldn't just pretend to be okay, and I got really good at pretending to be okay.

And now I'm finally starting to deal with my feelings, and going back and cleaning up some of the mess I made, to the extent that I can. But the only reason I'm doing so now is that I've finally had things happen that have made me realize that I can't go on not dealing with things. I want to be friends with [Львица], I am friends with her, but I don't want it to be weird, what with everything that's happened, which means that I have to work through all of my feelings for her and about what happened. I know that if I don't, if I just pretend like everything's fine, my usual modus operandi, I will lose her completely, because I won't be able to really be friends, I'll just pine for her and that's not good for anyone. I want to be able to look her in the eye and honestly tell her that I'm okay, with all of it, and with everything that happened. I want to be able to see her in that dress without it making me feel weird for the rest of the night, and then feel bad about feeling weird. I don't want the fact that we dated for a bit to define my relationship with her, because it is so much more than that to me. 

And so, attempt to deal with it I have, and am, even though I have no idea what I'm doing. It's difficult for me to reconcile the inherently irrational nature of emotions with the part of me that needs a rational explanation for everything. I've been trying to let myself to really experience my feelings, and not try to suppress them, and I've been trying to talk to people about it, and I have talked to [Totally A Cat] some, as well as [Keeper of All Knowledge] and [Fuckin' Magnets], which is a really big deal for me, given that I normally never talk about my feelings with anyone.

And it is helping, I think. The past couple of weeks have been better. I've been feeling more like myself, and the ratio of good days to bad days has greatly increased. I know that time heals all wounds and all that, but I'm trying to prevent the build up of scar tissue in this case. I am trying to be a mature, functioning adult about this, and behaving the same way as I did when I was twelve when presented with something that scares me and is difficult to deal with is not the way to accomplish that particular goal. I'm attempting to use this whole thing to grow as a person (like a plant), but that just complicates things because I'm only just realizing what a mess I've made for myself. I feel kind of lost, like I have no idea what I've gotten myself into, or how I'm going to sort it all out. Once again, Dr. Seuss says it much more articulately (and much more rhyme-y) than I can:

 You will come to a place where the streets are not marked. Some windows are lighted. But mostly they’re darked. A place you could sprain both your elbow and chin! Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in? How much can you lose? How much can you win?

I'm out of my depth with this whole dealing with my emotions thing, but I know, or at least I hope, that will change as I get more comfortable with it. In many ways I'm still twelve, because I haven't really emotionally matured since then, so I've got a lot of catching up to do, and I'm trying to cram it all into a couple of weeks and expecting it to work like that. I have so many awesome people in my life right now, and I feel like I owe it to them to get my shit sorted out and not wallow in my pain or pine after something that's not going to happen, so that is what I'm trying to do. It's just been more difficult than I anticipated. But I'm trying not to let that deter me.

Comic Book Wednesday: Nerd Culture

This article has been making the rounds recently (I qualify seeing two people link to it on Facebook as making the rounds), and for those of you who didn't read it, it's about male privilege in nerd culture and why it's a bad thing for geeky girls. The author makes some good points about how the geek culture caters nearly exclusively to men, particularly in the comics and videogame sectors.

I've already discussed my feeling on the portrayal of women in comics, which relies on arguments that the article dismisses as products of male privilege, which does have some merit, but I still think that comics are a business, and should not be vilified by for catering to their primary audience.

Anyways, my feelings about female comic book characters aside, the main gist of the article is that many women are alienated by the geek/nerd community because they are treated differently, and often weirdly, by the community because they are girls in a traditionally male only space. This is a fair point, and his arguments about why this is a bad thing are pretty solid.

I found this whole issue somewhat interesting, because while I know it's true to a great extent, it is fairly far removed from my experience in the nerd community as a female comic book fan (if you didn't get that by now, Imaginary Readers, you have obviously been skipping Comic Book Wednesdays, for shame, I am currently shaking my head disapprovingly at you). Only one on occasion have I ever felt like I was treated differently because I'm a girl at a comic book shop, and that only entailed a guy assuming I was buying manga rather than mainstream American comics because I was a teenage girl. I wasn't particularly offended by this assumption, because it seemed to me that The Source's extensive manga collection was what drew in most of their teenage girl clientele. Maybe that was my own concession to male privilege, but it does seem to me like making an assumption based on observed patterns is not necessarily sexist, it's just pattern recognition.

It is true that most times I have been in a comic shop, I've been the only girl there, also, very often the only person under 40, but it's never bothered me. Granted, I've never been totally immersed in the culture, as my interest in comics seems to follow a sinusoidal pattern with a period of about 2 years. And The Source, the store where I've primarily gotten my comics, is a mixed comics and games shop, so it serves a more diverse clientele than say, Big Brain, the exclusively comic book store I pull from when I'm at school, where I've only ever seen one other human being aside from the guy behind the counter.

I can't honestly say the male privilege isn't a problem in the nerd community, it's just something that I've never really experienced (at least to my knowledge; I'm not the most perceptive person). You should definitely read the article, because, if nothing else, it's food for thought.

Greeting Seasons

It's December, Imaginary Readers, and it has been for a couple of days now, much to my confusion, because in my head it was just Halloween. And, as always, with the start of December, winter decided to rear its head. Actually, winter was a little late in coming this year, with only one meager snow fall in November, and it actually being temperate on Thanksgiving. Usually, it's solidly winter about half way through November, but not so this year, as it didn't really get cold (below 25 F (or -4 C)) until this week.

It's rarely actually this pretty. Snow in the city is mostly just gross (via)

I have mixed feelings about the winter. It is infinitely better than the summer, which is mostly due to my intolerance of heat and humidity which make me feel claustrophobic and irritable. I like the cold weather and I love it when it snows, because walking during a snow fall is just plain magical, but winter does get a bit long for me. December is great, and it should be snowy and cold on Christmas, because there do need to be some benefits to living in Minnesota. January is fine too, despite the inevitable spate of -10 F with -20 F windchill (that's approximately -23 C with -29 C windchill for those of you who understand the inherent superiority of Celsius over Fahrenheit because why the fuck would water freeze at 32 degrees and boil at 212?), because it's January, and that's how it's supposed to be.

But then, somewhere around the middle of February, I get tired of it. I get sick of the bitter cold that makes it impossible to warm up and requires 12 layers of clothing to not freeze to death; I get sick of everything being so covered in ice that it takes me twice as long to get anywhere on foot; I get sick of having to sleep with my socks on to keep my feet from freezing, because I don't really like wearing socks to being with, so wearing them to bed is one of my least favorite things to do (it just feels weird and unnatural). I just feel like it should be spring, or at least be somewhat warmer, by late February. Unfortunately, this is not generally the case in Minnesota, where it doesn't usually feel like spring until midway through April.

I love the seasons (expect for summer which can go die in a hole somewhere) and I don't think I could live somewhere that didn't have snow on Christmas for any length of time, but the winter here gets long. And while I don't hate the winter, I am always sad to see it start, because it means the end of autumn, which is by far my favorite time of year. It's cold enough to sleep without being life threatening, and I can break out my wonderful collection of striped long sleeve shirts. I just love the way that fall feels, and so it's always bittersweet to see the autumn turn into winter.

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The good things about December are snow and Christmas, my absolute favorite holiday, second only to Arbor Day (just kidding, not one care about Arbor Day), but December also means non-stop work leading up to finals. My professors like to take our normal work load (which is soul crushing at best) and add onto that another midterm exam, a bunch more homework to prepare for the final, and then a final project/paper/exam. And I have to do all of this immediately after Thanksgiving break has sucked all of my motivation away. That's the problem with the end of the semester for me: I have lots of work to do in preparation for finals, but I don't care in the slightest about any of it. I always manage to get through it with my GPA intact, but, for such a magical time of year, it is really damn annoying.