Threes

by John Atherton (to be sung by Niels Bohr)


I think that I shall never c
A # lovelier than 3;
For 3 < 6 or 4,
And than 1 it's slightly more.
All things in nature come in 3s,
Like ... , trio's, Q.E.D.s;
While $s gain more dignity
if augmented 3 x 3 --
A 3 whose slender curves are pressed
By banks, for compound interest;
Oh, would that, paying loans or rent,
My rates were only 3%!
3² expands with rapture free,
And reaches toward infinity;
3 complements each x and y,
And intimately lives with pi.
A circle's # of °
Are best ÷ up by 3s,
But wrapped in dim obscurity
Is the square root of -3.
Atoms are split by men like me,
But only God is 1 in 3.

Untouched Meteorite Impact Crater Discovered By Google Earth

A pristine meteorite impact crater has been found in a remote area of the Sahara desert in southwest Egypt. The crater was originally noticed on Google Earth images, and is believed to be only a few thousand years old.
The 45-meter wide, 16-meter deep 'Kamil' crater -- in the Sahara desert -- was discovered by scientists examining Google Earth satellite photos.

"There are only 176 confirmed impact craters on the Earth’s surface, but most wear away quickly, and only 15 of them are smaller than 300 meters in diameter."

A New Possible Linear Accelerator at Cern

A new possible linear accelerator for electrons and positrons -- like the linear (straight line accelerator at Stanford University, now officially called 'SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory') is in the planning stage at CERN.  This straight line -- as opposed to a ring-shaped accelerator like the LHC) would accelerate electrons and their 'opposing' positron particles to almost the speed of light in opposite directions, and then whack them together, potentially yielding much amusement, doctoral theses and maybe even yet another glimpse into what all this universe thing is all about...

There is no gravity...

In what may indeed be only of the most important Physics papers of several decades, Erik Verlinde, 48, a respected mathematician and string theorist at the Unversity of Amsterdam, has pretty much supplied an entirely new phyisical view of that most mysterious of subjects: gravity. In Verlinde's view, gravity is not one of the four fundamental forces in the universe, and in fact, "doesn't really exist." The statement might have been made to be rather a provocation, but in Verlinde's view, as he argued in a recent paper, titled “On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton,” gravity is a consequence of the venerable laws of thermodynamics, which describe the behavior of heat and gases.

There is a public explication of this, in the New York Times article at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/science/13gravity.html?ref=science

Dr. Verlinde's paper is downloadable at:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.0785

Note: according to the Times article, very few scientists claim to fully understand Verlinde's paper. He himself says to pay attention more to the words and the concepts, rather than the maths.

In the coming decades, much of real importance or interest may come from this...

NASA: not that it was ever perfect..

But at least it wasn't utterly, unbelievably, appallingly and increasingly irrelevant, downright stupid and knowingly being used as nothing more than a political tool, by someone who pledged to do better, and not to continue the crap which preceedeth.

Here's the money-shot quote from the current NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, testifying in public before Congress:

"When I became the NASA administrator, [Obama] charged me with three things, One, he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering."

So much for Kennedy's speech, for NASA's original space mission, and for everything else it once stood for, and for which we paid our tax monies for:  and for the most part gladly, since it lead to some of the greatest achievements of mankind as a species.

Now,  our former astronauts and real heros like John Glenn, Neal Armstrong and Eugene Cernan all publicly denounce and express dismay at the current Administration's supposed policies (That would be 'President Obama').

So, from a grand vision of mankind's future in space and the ultimate journey to the stars, ensuring homo sapiens' survival and continued evolution, we are now left with trying to encourage our own children to study more math and science in our failed educational system, and to help Muslim cultures and communities feel
good about themselves. And at the same time admitting that the USA is no longer able to do anything other than reach LEO  (low-earth-orbit) without the help of other countries.

So, since no one reads this anyway, I'll close this rant with a long quote from William James (1842-1910)
"If this be the whole fruit of the victory, we say; if the generations of mankind suffered and laid down their lives;

if prophets confessed and martyrs sang in the fire, and all the sacred tears were shed for no other end than that a race of creatures of such unexampled insipidity should succeed, and protract ... their contented and inoffensive lives,
-- why, at such a rate, better lose than win the battle, or at all events better ring down the curtain before the last act of the play, so that a business that began so importantly may be saved from so singularly flat a winding-up."

And few seem to notice, but this is a species-wide, depressing setback.
We used to be better, and braver.
Sic transit gloria mundi.

Check out the entire universe, from Planck's view...

Basically, the first view of the entire universe scan from the European Space Agency's Planck satellite - the successor to the COBE and WMAP projects. Amazing. The main disk of our galaxy The Milky Way and surrounding gas and dust clouds are the bright horizontal swath and swirl in the center. Even more interesting is the mottled and patterned parts of the image outside the glare of our galaxy. These show the approx 3 Deg. K Cosmic Background Radiation which permeates our view of the universe from all directions. This is the remnant of the 'Big Bang' and subsequent expansion of our universe, from about 13.7 billion years ago.
The Planck satellite will be making multiple scans of the universe over the next few years, and then with the help of computer programs, will mask out the obscuration of our galaxy and nearby stars, to show a more complete view of the structure of this universal remnant of the beginning of our universe. The study of the patterning and clustering in these images will provide crucial evidence about the nature of the universe in its very early 'expansionist' phase, before the formation of stars and galaxies.

PS: In 1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson at the Crawford Hill location of Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel Township, New Jersey, had built a large radio receiver to basically test communications with satellites in space. They discovered the pervasive Cosmic Background Radiation, which they once thought was due to pigeon shit in the receiver. They were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery in 1978

PPS: the interchannel noise you see on television between or on unused channels -- and the static in the radio spectrum -- is also party due to this Cosmic Background Radiation, so you can actually watch something due to the 'early universe' on your TV.

Lines from T. S. Eliot

From "Burnt Norton" - #1 of the "Four Quartets"

Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always—
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.