Back in 1904, a young man by the name of David Evans Strickler was working as an apprentice pharmacist in Latrobe, Pennsylvania and enjoyed creating different kinds of sundaes. He created the banana split based on a triple scoop sundae.

My Quest to Understand Infinity

 

To Infinity and Beyond

By our third year, most of us will have learned to count. Once we know how, it seems as if there would be nothing to stop us counting forever. But, while infinity might seem like an perfectly innocent idea, keep counting and you enter a paradoxical world where nothing is as it seems.

Mathematicians have discovered there are infinitely many infinities, each one infinitely bigger than the last. And if the universe goes on forever, the consequences are even more bizarre. In an infinite universe, there are infinitely many copies of the Earth and infinitely many copies of you. 

Older than time, bigger than the universe and stranger than fiction. This is the story of infinity.

Infinity (symbol: ∞) is a concept in many fields, most predominantly mathematics and physics,

that refers to a quantity without bound or end. People have developed various ideas throughout history about the nature of infinity. The word comes from the Latin infinitas or "unboundedness".

In mathematics, "infinity" is often treated as if it were a number (i.e., it counts or measures things Infinity (symbol: ∞) is a concept in many fields, most predominantly mathematics and physics,: "an infinite number of terms") but it is not the same sort of number as the real numbers. In number systems incorporating infinitesimals, the reciprocal of an infinitesimal is an infinite number, i.e. a number greater than any real number. Georg Cantor formalized many ideas related to infinity and infinite sets during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the theory he developed, there are infinite sets of different sizes (called cardinalities).[1] For example, the set of integers is countably infinite, while the set of real numbers is uncountably infinite.

http://vimeo.com/23001671

WhatWillBe.Com

Mathematical Infinity and Human Destiny

There are two approaches to mathematical infinity. It can be seen as defining limiting cases that can never be realized or as existing in some philosophical sense. These mathematical approaches parallel approaches to meaning and value that I call absolutist and evolutionary.  The absolutist sees ultimate meaning as something that exists most commonly in the form of an all powerful infinite God.  The evolutionary sees life and all of a creation as an ever expanding journey with no ultimate or final goal. There is only the journey. There is no destination.  This video argues for an evolutionary view in our sense of meaning and values and in our mathematical understanding. There is a deep connection between the two with profound implications for the evolution of consciousness and human destiny.  Learn more at WhatWillBe.com

Shaking hands with the devil Sergio Vieira de Mello

When you are my age it takes a truly remarkable person to evoke such feelings of awe.  Sergio was a truly remarkable man.

Gates Warns Against Any More Wars Like Iraq or Afghanistan

 
WEST POINT, N.Y. — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates bluntly told an audience of West Point cadets on Friday that it would be unwise for the United States to ever fight another war like Iraq or Afghanistan, and that the chances of carrying out a change of regime in that fashion again were slim.

“In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it,” Mr. Gates told an assembly of Army cadets here.

Carl Sagan Cosmos "The Edge of Forever"

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The King of Kings Struts and Frets His Time Upon The Stage Then Is Heard No More

                           `My name is Muammar, King of Kings:
                      Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'

         
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: " A headless Lion
Roars in the desert. Near him, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things.
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Muammar, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away ... So is it becoming
Thanks Shakespear and Shelly

The Roman Catholic Church and All Religion in General - Let it All Hang Out!

The Intelligence² Debate - Stephen Fry (Unedited)
Uploaded by Xrunner17. - Classic TV and last night's shows, online.



Bill Maher on Religion (From his new HBO Special 2-13-10)
Uploaded by Xrunner17. - Sitcom, sketch, and standup comedy videos.

Doctors Blackburn and Greider Relate Their Nobel Prizewinning Study of Telemeres and Long Healthy Life

 Professor Blackburn just won the 2009 Nobel Prize in medicine (along with Carol Greider (of Johns Hopkins) and Jack Szostak (of Harvard University Medical School).

The Universe is a Strange Place by Frank Wilczek

Perhaps the universe is not so much strange as brimming with lovely paradox. The search for such beauty seems to lie at the heart of Frank Wilczek’s work. Twentieth century physics, from Einstein through Wilczek’s own Nobel Prize-winning efforts, involves demonstrating the existence of a topsy-turvy reality: for instance, that such sub-atomic particles as quarks and gluons, which have little or no mass, “orchestrate themselves into not just protons and neutrons but you and me,” according to Wilczek. “How is it possible to construct heavy objects out of objects that weigh nothing?,” he asks. Only by “creating mass out of pure energy.” These particles are essentially “excitations in otherwise empty space.” Says Wilczek: “That suggests something …beautiful and poetic: the masses of particles are not like, or similar to or metaphorically suggested by—they are the tones or frequencies of vibration patterns in dynamical voids.” The theory of quarks and gluons and the strong interaction accounts quantitatively for “the mass of protons, neutrons and ultimately you and me and everything around us.” But physics has not yet squared away all aspects of the universe. Wilzcek says that “in cosmology, we meet our match, and don’t know what’s going on.” This is because scientists can’t account for much of the mass in the cosmos. 70% of this mass is in “dark energy,” which is pushing the universe apart. Wilczek hopes that explanations for the dark stuff will emerge through improving equations, unifying theories of different interactions and extending their symmetries. “Beautifying equations leads not to ugly consequences but beautiful surprises,” he concludes.

Reagan and Reality

But when all is said and done, it is the economic revolution that gained steam during the Reagan years and is still squeezing the life out of the middle class and the poor that is Reagan’s most significant legacy. A phony version of that legacy is relentlessly promoted by right-wingers who shamelessly pursue the interests of the very rich while invoking the Reagan brand to give the impression that they are in fact the champions of ordinary people.

Reagan’s son, Ron, says in the film that he believes his father “was vulnerable to the idea that poor people were somehow poor because it was their fault.” A clip is then shown of Ronald Reagan referring to, “The homeless who are homeless, you might say, by choice.”

“Reagan,” an HBO documentary, will be shown on Presidents’ Day

If I Can Master This Material As An Informed Individual I Will Have Come A Long Way

About the Lecture
A stunning roster of awards all identify Frank Wilczek as one of the most profound and influential theoretical physicists alive today. This lecture proves the point, as Wilczek goes after one of the deepest questions in science: What is the origin of mass? Rewriting Einstein’s famous equation as m=E / c2 dramatizes that energy is the source of mass; energetic but massless quarks and gluons, Wilczek argues, give rise to mass by finding quasi-stable equilibrium states, better know as protons and neutrons.


Having reinterpreted the theory of quantum chromodynamics in a brisk half hour, Wilczek plunges into another brain-straining question: What makes gravity so feeble? Here the more tentative answer derives from the unimaginably tiny dimensions of the Planck scale. Fundamental forces make sense in that realm; gravity is weak only relative to the enormously larger scales we live on. Wilczek looks forward to testing some of these speculations via experimental results as early as 2009.

“The way you write equations suggests different things. … Right from the very beginning, Einstein was thinking about the question of whether he could get rid of the
concept of mass in favor of the concept of energy.”

Frank Wilczek





The Discovery of Asymptotic Freedom

The 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded to David Gross, Frank Wilczek, and David Politzer, recognizes the key discovery that explained how quarks, the elementary constituents of the atomic nucleus, are bound together to form protons and neutrons. In 1973, Gross and Wilczek, working at Princeton, and Politzer, working independently at Harvard, showed that the attraction between quarks grows weaker as the quarks approach one another more closely, and correspondingly that the attraction grows stronger as the quarks are separated. This discovery, known as “asymptotic freedom,” established quantum chromodynamics (QCD) as the correct theory of the strong nuclear force, one of the four fundamental forces in Nature.

At the time of the discovery, Wilczek was a 21-year-old graduate student working under Gross’s supervision at Princeton, while Politzer was a 23-year-old graduate student at Harvard. Currently Gross is the Director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Wilczek is the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at MIT. Politzer is Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech; he joined the Caltech faculty in 1976.

Of the four fundamental forces --- the others besides the strong nuclear force are electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force (responsible for the decay of radioactive nuclei), and gravitation --- the strong force was by far the most poorly understood in the early 1970s. It had been suggested in 1964 by Caltech physicist Murray Gell-Mann that protons and neutrons contain more elementary objects, which he called quarks. Yet isolated quarks are never seen, indicating that the quarks are permanently bound together by powerful nuclear forces. Meanwhile, studies of high energy collisions between electrons and protons performed at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) had probed the internal structure of the proton, and Caltech’s Richard Feynman had suggested in 1969 that the results of these experiments could be explained if quarks inside a proton are nearly free, not subject to any force. Feynman’s suggestion, together with the observation that quarks are unable to escape from nuclear particles, posed a deep puzzle: how could nuclear forces be both strong enough to account for the permanent confinement of quarks and weak enough to account for the SLAC experiments?

The discovery of asymptotic freedom provided a highly satisfying resolution of this puzzle. The calculations of Gross, Wilczek, and Politzer showed that in QCD quarks are held together strongly when separated by a distance comparable to the size of a proton, explaining quark confinement. Yet for the smaller separations explored in the high-energy SLAC experiments, the attraction is weaker, supporting Feynman’s proposal.

Before this development, many physicists had anticipated that understanding the strong nuclear force would require revolutionary new concepts. But surprisingly, QCD has a remarkable mathematical similarity to quantum electrodynamics (QED), the theory that successfully explains electromagnetic phenomena. In QED the force between two electrically charged particles is mediated by the exchange of a photon (a particle of light) between the two particles; in QCD, the quarks carry a different kind of charge, called “color,” and the force between two colored particles is mediated by the exchange of a “gluon” between the particles. The crucial difference between the two theories is that while the photons of QED carry no charge of their own, the gluons of QCD are themselves colored particles. A quark is surrounded by a sea of “virtual” gluons that arise due to quantum fluctuations, and the color of the virtual gluons enhances the quarks own color. A probe coming closer and closer to the quark is influenced less and less by the virtual gluons, so that the effective color charge of the quark seems to weaken; this is asymptotic freedom.

Gross, Wilczek, and Politzer used pencil and paper to perform their breakthrough calculation. In 1973, the methods they needed were newly developed and fraught with subtleties. Today, the calculation is routinely assigned to physics graduate students as a homework exercise.

QCD predicts that the strength of the force between quarks changes with distance in a particular calculable way that has been well confirmed in experiments studying high energy collisions of elementary particles. The theory makes other detailed predictions, such as the masses of various strongly interacting nuclear particles, that can be extracted only through large-scale numerical computations performed using supercomputers; these too are in satisfying agreement with experiment.

Because QCD, the theory of the strong nuclear force, turned out to be so similar to QED and to the theory of the weak nuclear force, it became possible after the discovery of asymptotic freedom to conceive of unified theories that incorporate all three forces into a common framework. Such theories have been proposed, but still await experimental confirmation. A further challenge, being pursued by many physicists today, is to achieve an even broader unification that encompasses the gravitational force as well.

John Preskill

Johnny Lobo is Really John Trudell

Soccer Was My Love I Coached It 30 Years

MY LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES TODAY

444.

HIGHLIGHT (what's this?)

David Evans

Reisterstown, MD

February 10th, 2011

5:23 pm

It now appears that the immediate future for Egypt is solely in the hands of the military. The military could come down heavily on the protesters and end the problem for now. The military could do what they have been doing which is to permit demonstrations and allow the street to bring down the regime or it could usher the ruler to the airport and watch him fly away. I believe the military will opt for the first course, repression.

 Recommend  Recommended by 5 Readers

SAY GOODBY CHRISTOPHER, "GOODBY CHRISTOPHER"

WHAT ABOUT INFINITY?

Think of me as a squirrel and this video as an acorn.  I am storing here for future consideration.

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dr Leonard Suskind Lectures on Partical Physics for Hours On End

I Have Discovered A Physics Teacher That I Understand

Comment:

I know you're much older, experienced, intelligent and educated than me and you might look down, but these are very important matters to be voiced out. Religion is between life and death.

Response:

Rest assured, I don't look down on anyone. I do realize we will never agree. Science, particularly biology, is all about the struggle between life and death. Nature is both harsher and creative with respect to life and death. There are seeds that can do nothing for a thousand years, then come to life. There are baby worms that eat their way through there mother to go free. I am a skeptic, so cannot trust myself, there is always more the scientific process can teach me. Good luck.

Difference between bizarre and weird... Now that is a creepy question.
Speaking slowly when giving important information and pivotal argument is fine. Talking slowly as if you were forcing yourself is creepy ; it looks like you are playing a trick to little children. And joking about drugs is forgetting the victims, moron.
By the way, why this "double limit" in the equation ?
Plus, we can't hear the words at 23:20 because of the bad editing (music is fine, except when it becomes a barrier).

Hello WisdomVendor:

General relativity does treat gravity as exclusively being about spacetime curvature, so from that perspective, your comment is correct.  My proposal suggests gravity can be treated as only spactime curvature, only a 4-potential, or a combination of both. There is a relativistic force for EM, and for my proposal with gravity, but not so in GR which is geodesics.

Freddie Died of Aids and Other Things From The Past

Elaine was my wind...always and forever...

David My Son's EMail Message to Me

Ok.  I found this information while I was searching stuff on creativity. I am sending you an abstract from

the article. I think you will enjoy it.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music. He is among the most enduringly popular of classical composers.

Mozart: “When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer–say, traveling in a carriage or walking after a good meal or during the night when I cannot sleep–it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly.”

Albert Einstein – theoretical physicist, philosopher and author who is widely regarded as one of the most influential and best known scientists and intellectuals of all time. He is often regarded as the father of modern physics.

Einstein: “On the other hand, although I have a regular work schedule, I take time to go for long walks on the beach so that I can listen to what is going on inside my head. If my work isn’t going well, I lie down in the middle of a workday and gaze at the ceiling while I listen and visualize what goes on in my imagination.”

Franz Kafka – one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Novelist and writer of short stories whose works came to be regarded as one of the major achievements of 20th century literature.

Kafka: “You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”

Nikola Tesla – inventor, one of the most important contributors to the birth of commercial electricity, best known for his many revolutionary developments in the field of electromagnetism.

Tesla: “The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone—that is the secret of invention: be alone, that is when ideas are born.”

Joseph Haydn: A life-long resident of Austria, Haydn spent much of his career as a court musician for the wealthy Hungarian aristocratic Esterházy family on their remote estate. Isolated from other composers and trends in music until the later part of his long life, he was, as he put it, “forced to become original”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – German writer and polymath. Goethe’s works span the fields of poetry, drama, literature, theology, philosophy, and science.

His magnum opus, lauded as one of the peaks of world literature, is the two-part drama Faust.

Goethe: “One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.”

Pablo Picasso – Spanish painter best known for co-founding the Cubist movement and for the wide variety of styles embodied in his work. His revolutionary artistic accomplishments brought him universal renown and immense fortunes throughout his life, making him one of the best-known figures in twentieth century art.

Picasso: “Without great solitude no serious work is possible.”

Carl Sandburg – American writer and editor, best known for his poetry.

He won three Pulitzer Prizes, two for his poetry and another for a biography of Abraham Lincoln. H. L. Mencken called Carl Sandburg “indubitably an American in every pulse-beat.”

Sandburg: “One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.”

Thomas Mann – German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual.

Mann: “Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous — to poetry.”