This is where I collect things. Maybe you'd also be interested in reading a few things that I've written, or viewing some of my photos, or even some of my videos. If you're feeling especially voyeuristic, you might even want to look through my links, listening habits, and social connections.
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The idea is that if a gravitational wave passes through GEO600, it will alternately stretch space in one direction and squeeze it in another. To measure this, the GEO600 team fires a single laser through a half-silvered mirror called a beam splitter. This divides the light into two beams, which pass down the instrument’s 600-metre perpendicular arms and bounce back again. The returning light beams merge together at the beam splitter and create an interference pattern of light and dark regions where the light waves either cancel out or reinforce each other. Any shift in the position of those regions tells you that the relative lengths of the arms has changed.
Damn, science is cool. Oh, by the way, our world may be a giant hologram.
(h/t Joe O’Sullivan)
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… Buddhism considers itself as an empirical approach of the functioning of the mind, the mechanism of happiness and suffering. And so, empirical means, you know, we can certainly work with scientist without any risk of feeling threatened by that because if something is false, it’s false. What’s the problem with that?
Video reblogged from SOF Observed with 5 notes
Seriously, don’t let the “Bobby McFerrin” part scare you off — this video is awesome.
“Playing” The Audience
Andy Dayton, Associate Web ProducerNancy just sent around a link to this video of Bobby McFerrin presenting at the 2009 World Science Festival (we’re hoping they’ll also release video of Xavier Le Pichon’s presentation soon). I don’t really know much about McFerrin, but admittedly my impression of him in the past has been cynical — his late-80’s chart-topper “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” was always a little too earnest for my ears. But I was pleasantly surprised to see McFerrin give this simple, fun, and extremely effective demonstration of the universality of the pentatonic scale.
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I don’t know anything, but I do know that everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough
Video reblogged from SOF Observed with 3 notes
Dr. Feynman’s Father
Andy Dayton, Associate Web Producer
Right now I’m reading (or listening to, rather — in audio book form) The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, a collection of physicist Richard P. Feynman’s short works. Feynman was a unique and fascinating figure — not only was he a genius (he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965), but he was also a skilled explainer, storyteller, prankster, and bongo player (among other things).
The video above is from a 1981 BBC interview with Feynman, and includes some of his thoughts on religion, doubt, and uncertainty. Watching this, I couldn’t help thinking of our program “A History of Doubt.” His enthusiasm lies in the act of questioning rather than in belief: “I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.”
This same interview is also excerpted in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, and one thing that stood out to me was how much Feynman referenced his father’s teaching. I’m excited by Feynman’s ideas, but in some ways I’m even more fascinated to hear him trace those ideas back to his father. With “The Spirituality of Parenting” broadcasting this week, it seemed fitting to share a few of these stories — to catch a glimpse of how Feynman acquired his faith in doubting, as he tells it in the following video:
(written for SOF Observed)
