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In the illustration above, which wave is depicted in the illustrations showing light being polarized?  You have two waves working together.  Which gets polarized by a vertical polarizer?  The sources rarely say.  You have to research that specific question to find that it is the magnetic field that is usually shown in the polarized light illustrations.  If the electric field is oscillating in the same direction as the slit-openings in the filter, the entire photon or wave will be absorbed by the filter (and presumably re-emitted in some random direction away from the filter, although the sources never mention that).

Awhile back, I decided that the electric and magnetic fields of a photon must radiate away from the photon itself.  So, I decided a photon looks something like the image below when one field is half-way contracted and the other field is half-way extended:

Nobody thumps the Constitution like a Right-Wing Republican.  Conservatives love the Constitution, invoking its very name - even more than the Bible and Ronald Reagan - as all the proof they need that God is on their side.  It's not enough that they think they own the Constitution; they act as if they wrote the damn thing.

The Framers wrote the Constitution in order to form a strong central government, giving powers to Congress (not the states) and balanced by an equally strong executive branch.

Nothing in the Constitution suggests, let alone enforces, the concepts of limited government, limited taxes, and limited regulations.

The Framers did not hate taxation.  They needed taxes, desperately.  They had a war to pay off.

Deism: belief in the existence of a supreme being, specifically of a creator who does not intervene in the universe. The term is used chiefly of an intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries that accepted the existence of a creator on the basis of reason but rejected belief in a supernatural deity who interacts with humankind.

The original states, except Rhode Island, collectively appointed 70 individuals to the Constitutional Convention, but a number did not accept or could not attend. Those who did not attend included Richard Henry Lee, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Samuel Adams and, John Hancock.

THEM: The Constitution gives everyone the right to own a gun.
ME: The Framers didn't want everyone to have vote, let alone a gun.

THEM: James Madison is the "author" of the Constitution.
ME: The Constitution is the greatest"cut and paste" job since the New Testament.

THEM: The only way to interpret the Constitution is to determine what the Framers were thinking when they wrote it.
ME: You can't even figure out how the Framers took a piss in pants without a fly.  How do you expect to figure out what they were thinking?     

Well, it is one of the things about how science works, in combination with how law works and legislation works and journalism works, is that even if there are 100 people on one side and two people on the other side, it’s still two sides. And so…

   

Sean Carroll:  You’re optimistic about finding it? By finding it we mean literally taking a picture.

Mike Brown:  Yes. In the end, it’s a hypothesis that I am convinced is true. No one else need believe it until we go see it.

Sean Carroll:  Are people basically optimistic about it? Or are people scoffing?

Mike Brown:  Some of each. There’s a whole group of people who are desperately trying to find it because they’re convinced. We had a workshop here at Cal Tech in late spring of all the people around the globe who are in search of it and exchanged ideas on where we thought it was and who was searching and how they were finding it. There are people who are like … There are the general skeptics, like I think most scientists should be, who’ve probably not looked very hard at the evidence. Until you look at it really carefully your default is always going to, “Come on, really? Planet?”

Sean Carroll:  It should be. Right.

Mike Brown:  That’s right. That’s the way to be. Then there are the no way, it’s impossible, I’m going to prove you wrong. They try.

Sean Carroll:  Yeah, knock yourself out.

Mike Brown:  Yeah. They haven’t succeeded yet.

Carol Tarvis: A person who smokes knows that smoking is dangerous and stupid. So they will be in a state of dissonance, “I smoke, but I’m doing something dangerous and stupid.” This discomfort is cognitive dissonance and Leon Festinger, who developed this theory in the late ’50s, described it as being as uncomfortable as being hungry or thirsty. It’s so uncomfortable that you’re really motivated to reduce it in whatever way you can. Well, if you’re a smoker, you need to quit smoking or you need to justify smoking. You need to say, “Well, it’s unhealthy. But I’ll be thin and being thin is good. And besides that, Myrtle lived to be 97.”

Sean Carroll: “I look cool.”

Carol Tarvis: “And I look really cool.” So cognitive dissonance… You know, I don’t think I took it terribly seriously. I thought it was really an interesting theory, but I didn’t have much appreciation of its depth of application. And then, after George Bush got us into the Iraq War, Elliot and I were sitting around talking about…

Sean Carroll: Sorry, which George Bush and which Iraq War are we…

Carol Tarvis: Oh, Dubya. Dubya. Yeah, so this was, yeah, the 2003. So several years later, when it was abundantly clear that the justifications for going into Iraq were completely wrong, there were no weapons of mass destruction and so forth. And of course the whole country had noticed that Bush did not say, “Gee, we were wrong. So sorry, we made a really bad mistake about spending a trillion dollars in going into Iraq.” Instead, he found other justifications for the war, “Well, we’re bringing democracy to the region,” and so forth. So, Elliot and I are having this conversation, and he said, “You know,” he said, “I disagree with those Democrats who thought that Bush was lying to the country.” He said, “I don’t think he was lying to the country. I think he was lying to himself. He was doing what all of us do when we have made a decision to do something, is we screen out discrepant, dissonant information that suggests our decision is wrong. We focus, we cherry pick the information that tells us our decision is the right one and we go forth. So, we make the decision and then we justify it.”

Carol Tarvis: He said, “I think that George Bush had made the decision to go into Iraq and therefore ignored the arguments from his own intelligence community that that might not be a good thing to do.”

The average Republican thinks over a third of Democrats are gays or lesbians and the correct answer is closer to 6%.

The average Democrat thinks that 44% of Republicans earn more than $250,000 a year, and the real number is 2%

Diffraction refers to various phenomena that occur when a wave encounters an obstacle or a slit. It is defined as the bending of waves around the corners of an obstacle or aperture into the region of geometrical shadow of the obstacle.

Refraction: deflection from a straight path undergone by a light ray or energy wave in passing obliquely from one medium (such as air) into another (such as glass) in which its velocity is different

The Stones, a family of "Loonies" (residents of the Moon, known as "Luna" in the book [from the Roman goddess]), purchase and rebuild a used spaceship and go sightseeing around the Solar System.

The twin teenage boys, Castor and Pollux, buy used bicycles on Luna to sell on Mars, their first stop, where they run afoul of local regulations but are freed by their grandmother Hazel Stone. While on Mars, the twins buy their brother Buster a native Martian creature called a flat cat, which produces a soothing vibration, as a pet.

In preparation for the asteroid belt, where the equivalent of a gold rush is in progress prospecting for "core material" and radioactive ores, the twins obtain supplies and luxury goods on Mars to sell at their destination, on the principle that it is shopkeepers, not miners, who get rich during gold rushes. En route, the flat cat and its offspring overpopulate the ship so the family places them in hibernation and later sells them to the miners.

The novel ends with the family setting out to see the rings of Saturn.

Can magnetism affect how stars form? Recent analysis of Orion data from the HAWC+ instrument on the airborne SOFIA observatory indicate that, at times, it can. HAWC+ is able to measure the polarization of far-infrared light which can reveal the alignment of dust grains by expansive ambient magnetic fields. In the featured image, these magnetic fields are shown as curvy lines superposed on an infrared image of the Orion Nebula taken by a Very Large Telescope in Chile. Orion's Kleinmann-Low Nebula is visible slightly to the upper right of the image center, while bright stars of the Trapezium cluster are visible just to the lower left of center. The Orion Nebula at about l300 light years distant is the nearest major star formation region to the Sun.

There are two kinds of elementary particles in the universe: bosons and fermions. Bosons don’t mind sitting on top of each other, sharing the same space. In principle, you could pile an infinite number of bosons into the tiniest bucket. Fermions, on the other hand, don’t share space: only a limited number of fermions would fit into the bucket.

Matter, as you might guess, is made of fermions, which stack to form three-dimensional structures. The force fields that bind fermions to each other are made of bosons. Bosons are the glue holding matter together.

In quantum mechanics, a boson is a particle that follows Bose–Einstein statistics. Bosons make up one of the two classes of particles, the other being fermions.  ... Examples of bosons include fundamental particles such as photons, gluons, and W and Z bosons (the four force-carrying gauge bosons of the Standard Model), the recently discovered Higgs boson, and the hypothetical graviton of quantum gravity. ... An important characteristic of bosons is that their statistics do not restrict the number of them that occupy the same quantum state.

Photons are what hold electrons together with atomic nuclei.

Force-carrying particles are called bosons after Satyendra Nath Bose; photons and gluons are examples.  Unlike fermions, bosons can pile up on top of each other, which is exactly what happens when we observe a macroscopic force field, such as an electric or magnetic field. Such a field is a large number of bosons, each contributing just a little bit, that combine to create a noticeable amount of force. One of the great conceptual unifications of physics is the realization that photons, in various configurations, can account for so much—electric and magnetic fields, light waves and other forms of electromagnetic radiation, as well as radiative heat.

For millennia before clocks, our only regular way of measuring time had been the alternation of day and night. The rhythm of day followed by night also regulates the lives of plants and animals. Diurnal rhythms are ubiquitous in the natural world. They are essential to life, and it seems to me probable that they played a key role in the very origin of life on Earth, since an oscillation is required to set a mechanism in motion. Living organisms are full of clocks of various kinds—molecular, neuronal, chemical, hormonal—each of them more or less in tune with the others. There are chemical mechanisms that keep to a twenty-four-hour rhythm even in the biochemistry of single cells.

Aristotle is the first we are aware of to have asked himself the question “What is time?,” and he came to the following conclusion: time is the measurement of change. Things change continually. We call “time” the measurement, the counting of this change.

So if nothing changes, if nothing moves, does time therefore cease to pass?

Aristotle believed that it did. If nothing changes, time does not pass — because time is our way of situating ourselves in relation to the changing of things: the placing of ourselves in relation to the counting of days. Time is the measure of change: if nothing changes, there is no time.

The time measured by a clock is “quantified,” that is to say, it acquires only certain values and not others. It is as if time were granular rather than continuous.

The “quantization” of time implies that almost all values of time t do not exist. If we could measure the duration of an interval with the most precise clock imaginable, we should find that the time measured takes only certain discrete, special values. It is not possible to think of duration as continuous. We must think of it as discontinuous: not as something that flows uniformly but as something that in a certain sense jumps, kangaroo-like, from one value to another.

In other words, a minimum interval of time exists. Below this, the notion of time does not exist—even in its most basic meaning.

I'm always trying to use my unconscious as much as possible in order to avoid extra labor. I think one of the great [mumble] about people is whether they've learned to use their unconscious to solve problems.  I use it every day.

I review all the things I'm working on just before I go to sleep, and when I wake up in the morning I do not open my eyes, I lie there and recall what I was working on.  And about one time in three there is an idea there - for free - and it almost always works!  And it's been produced by your unconscious, which has still been working while you were asleep.

We evolved with an unconscious.  Why?  Why did we evolve with an unconscious mind?

Barium (Ba) has a radius of 0.253 nanometers (253 picometers)
Strontium (Sr) has a radius of 0.215 nanometers (215 picometers)
Calcium (Ca) has a radius of 0.197 nanometers (197 picometers)
Sodium (Na) has a radius of 0.190 nanometers (190 picometers)
Lithium (Li) has a radius of 0.167 nanometers (167 picometers)
Silver (Ag) has a radius of 0.165 nanometers (165 picometers)
Copper (Cu) has a radius of 0.145 nanometers (145 picometers)

During the fall from high energy to normal energy, the electron emits a photon -- a packet of energy -- with very specific characteristics. The photon has a frequency, or color, that exactly matches the distance the electron falls.

You can see this phenomenon quite clearly in gas-discharge lamps. Fluorescent lamps, neon signs and sodium-vapor lamps are common examples of this kind of electric lighting, which passes an electric current through a gas to make the gas emit light. The colors of gas-discharge lamps vary widely depending on the identity of the gas and the construction of the lamp.

Sodium $\text{Na}$ produces yellow color,
Copper $\text{Cu}$ gives blue.
Barium $\text{Ba}$ emits green and
Strontium salts and lithium salts produce:
Lithium carbonate, ${\text{Li}}_2{\text{CO}}_3$ emits red
Strontium carbonate, ${\text{SrCO}}_3$ emits bright red.

I’m pretty sure there is no possible answer to that question. A photon is a wave — usually a wave packet, which limits and fuzzily defines its net “length”, but it can occupy any number of different volumes and still be the same quantum.

What is the size or volume of a shout?

Physicists had known for nearly three decades that something was wrong, that a change was desperately needed to understand what was happening in the world of the very small—the world of atoms. But they were working blind. Atoms are simply too small to see through any normal microscope, no matter the magnification. The wavelength of visible light is thousands of times larger than the size of an individual atom.

Despite the fact that every physicist agrees that quantum physics works, a bitter debate has raged over its meaning for the past ninety years, since the theory was first developed. And one position in that debate—held by the majority of physicists and purportedly by Bohr—has continually denied the very terms of the debate itself. These physicists claim that it is somehow inappropriate or unscientific to ask what is going on in the quantum realm, despite the phenomenal success of the theory. To them, the theory needs no interpretation, because the things that the theory describes aren’t truly real. Indeed, the strangeness of quantum phenomena has led some prominent physicists to state flatly that there is no alternative, that quantum physics proves that small objects simply do not exist in the same objectively real way as the objects in our everyday lives do. Therefore, they claim, it is impossible to talk about reality in quantum physics. There is not, nor could there be, any story of the world that goes along with the theory.

The popularity of this attitude to quantum physics is surprising. Physics is about the world around us. It aims to understand the fundamental constituents of the universe and how they behave. Many physicists are driven to enter the field out of a desire to understand the most basic properties of nature, to see how the puzzle fits together. Yet, when it comes to quantum physics, the majority of physicists are perfectly willing to abandon this quest and instead merely “shut up and calculate,” in the words of physicist David Mermin. 

This is an astonishing state of affairs, and hardly anyone outside of physics knows about it. But why should anyone else care? After all, quantum physics certainly works. For that matter, why should physicists care? Their mathematics makes accurate predictions; isn’t that enough? 

“I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”

In case we didn’t get the point, Feynman drove it home in his artful Everyman style. ‘I was born not understanding quantum mechanics,’ he exclaimed merrily, ‘[and] I still don’t understand quantum mechanics!’ Here was the man who had just been anointed one of the foremost experts on the topic, declaring his ignorance of it.

Feynman’s much-quoted words help to seal the reputation of quantum mechanics as one of the most obscure and difficult subjects in all of science. Quantum mechanics has become symbolic of ‘impenetrable science’, in the same way that the name of Albert Einstein (who played a key role in its inception) acts as shorthand for scientific genius.

Feynman clearly didn’t mean that he couldn’t do quantum theory. He meant that this was all he could do. He could work through the math just fine – he invented some of it, after all. That wasn’t the problem. Sure, there’s no point in pretending that the math is easy, and if you never got on with numbers then a career in quantum mechanics isn’t for you. But neither, in that case, would be a career in fluid mechanics, population dynamics, or economics, which are equally inscrutable to the numerically challenged.

No, the equations aren’t why quantum mechanics is perceived to be so hard. It’s the ideas. We just can’t get our heads around them. Neither could Richard Feynman. His failure, Feynman admitted, was to understand what the math was saying. It provided numbers: predictions of quantities that could be tested against experiments, and which invariably survived those tests. But Feynman couldn’t figure out what these numbers and equations were really about: what they said about the ‘real world’.

 

Robert Heinlein is the legendary author of such classic works as Starship Troopers, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, and Stranger in a Strange Land. His books have influenced generations of artists and scientists, including physicist and science fiction writer Gregory Benford.

“He was one of the people who propelled me forward to go into the sciences,” Benford says in Episode 348 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “Because his depiction of the prospect of the future of science, engineering—everything—was so enticing. He was my favorite science fiction writer.”

 

    

The mechanism by which a light wave is transported through a medium occurs in a manner that is similar to the way that any other wave is transported - by particle-to-particle interaction.    

Particles can pass though objects. For example, right now there are 100 billion solar neutrinos per second passing through every square centimeter of your body. The neutrinos are particles that only have VERY weak interactions with the matter that our bodies are made of so almost all of them pass through without interacting. So, in general, there is no problem with particles passing through matter if they do not interact with the matter - there is lots of space between the nuclei of atoms.

The separation between atoms in glass is measured in picometers. The wavelength of visible light is measured in nanometers. That should tell you something. Yep. The wavelength of that passing electric field disturbance covers hundreds if not thousands of atoms. Think about that when you start to talk about “interactions”.

When light falls on glass, the photons are absorbed by the electrons of the atoms on the surface of glass. But then then almost immediately these electrons transmit this photon by giving out the same energy it had previously absorbed and returns to the ground state.

With a series of these absorption-transmission steps, the light photons exit on the other side of the glass. 

Light (photons) actually pass through a-lot of things. Air for instance. In fact there is one and only one thing in the entire universe that can stop a light wave or particle. Without this one thing a photon will fly off to the edge of the universe and/or a black hole, whichever happens first. You are bathed daily in ancient photons born at the universe’s creation.

Intrigued? Ready? The only thing “powerful” enough to stop [absorb] a light beam is a charged particle. In everyday practical terms this will be an electron. Further not every electron will do, the electron needs to be “special” in that it is in a special state that allows it to effect the photon. Specifically: the photon’s energy [i.e. the light’s color] must be within the range of energy that the electron is allowed to absorb. This range is governed by the wacky laws of quantum theory.

White light is composed of all the visible colors in the electromagnetic spectrum, a fact that can be easily proven through the use of a prism. As light passes through a prism, it is bent, or refracted, by the angles and plane faces of the prism and each wavelength of light is refracted by a slightly different amount. Violet has the highest frequency and is refracted the most. Red has the lowest frequency and is refracted the least. Because each color is refracted differently, each bends at a different angle, resulting in a fanning out and separation of white light into the colors of the spectrum.

The explanation for the colours separating out is that the light is made of waves. Red light has a longer wavelength than violet light. The refractive index for red light in glass is slightly different than for violet light. Violet light slows down even more than red light, so it is refracted at a slightly greater angle.

The amount of refraction increases as the wavelength of light decreases. Shorter wavelengths of light (violet and blue) are slowed more and consequently experience more bending than do the longer wavelengths (orange and red).