Random Thought Thread

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ferider said:
At the risk of someone calling Mme Curie a dude, here is a nice one I came across this morning:

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An interesting backstory to the 1927 Solvay Conference with all the titans of sciences, physics, quantum mechanics, chemistry, mathematics, knife making, etc... One person missing from the picture who later on earned his own deserved due recognition was a young Belgian Catholic priest and mathematician/astrophysicist (yes, both a man of cloth and of sciences!) by the name Georges Lemaître who definitely was a dude! Lemaître had applied Einstein's own theories in his equations and had come up with the theory of expanding Universe through math (apparently there was also a Russian scientist named Friedmann who was also working on a parallel track who passed away a couple of years earlier in 1925) which he had published a couple of years before Edwin Hubble's 1929 verification of these expansion theories, something which is by and large attributed to Hubble.

During that 1927 Conference, Lemaître managed to briefly meet with Einstein outside of the conference to discuss his papers and Einstein was just as critical about Lemaître's papers as he was reportedly critical of Friedmann's prior to his death, telling Lemaître something to the effect that although his mathematical equations were quite elegant, his physics was "abominable". You see, even when Einstein himself had realized through his own work that the Universe could be expanding as opposed to being stable and eternal, he introduced an arbitrary constant valued named Lambda in his equations, an act which he immensely regretted later on after Hubble was able to prove the expansion theorists to be correct through his meticulous observations, calculations and findings.
 
^ hovering overhead? More like heading up overhead, LOL. Who knew we had Johannes Kepler (Jr.) among our mix?

Jest aside, I love cosmology and my current favorite astrophysicist is Professor Brian Cox. That MoFo has the rare combination of looks and brains plus his mannerism being very engaging as opposed to our own Neil deGrasse Tyson who is an utter hot mess, LOL. Sadly, I am way too dense to understand the math side of things but I love the history of it all.

ETA: have you noticed that some physicists also seem to be very talented musicians? It seems that if you are good at mathematics, you can also understand music but I have never seen it the other way around or else Tommy-Lee, for instance, would've won the Nobel science prize for physics! I wonder if Nathan is good at music? He has the looks for it ;-)
 
Harmonics...I guess it's a thing. (Music of the Spheres etc.) I read string theory and eventually my brain starts to ache right after I think I've grasped the nutshell of the concepts. (I'm not as smart as I once thought I was.)

I took classes at the Hayden Planetarium, was accepted to Bronx High School of Science, (turned it down), and had scholarships to study astrophysics.

I became a "Fed".

And so it goes...


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