Let us do Science!

Exactly.

OK: interesting science thing -> What is sleep? It it something that is switched on or off from central control areas, or is it a local process? Can some parts of you be asleep while others are awake?

edited 24th May '11 6:51:23 AM by robintherose

dRoy: another good book for quantum mechanics stuff is QED, which is a compilation of Feynman's talks on quantum electro-dynamics. It covers the basics, and it starts from principles and concepts instead of throwing you straight into the math. (I freaking hate Dirac notation and wish courses in QM wouldn't start with those and the Schrödinger Equation right off the bat).

For relativity, try Relativity: the Special and General Theory, by (who else) Albert Einstein. It's how I first learned about it, and the language is pretty clear (though he does still have to get into co-ordinate systems and all that). This book is the written source of the railway and lightning strike example.

edited 24th May '11 8:54:46 AM by GoggleFox

Best thing about my lab: Receiving lab-wide emails with the subject "Sexy ninja goggles".

I'm trying to decide if I want an explanation for that or not...

:I definitely probably want an explanation for that.

OK then: There are really cool steampunky goggles that you use when you want to check whether a genetically engineered brain that's supposed to expressing GFP is actually expressing GFP. That is, does it glow green when you look at it through the goggles?

These goggles are awesome, so people play around with them. The arms are pretty fragile, however, so the email was a warning about not breaking them even though they are very sexy ninja goggles indeed.

Ah. That's awesome.

It is. :)

I'm going into a secondary school next week to give an informal talk about brains. What would you guys like to see covered in an intro course for interested students?

Depends on what you're able to cover, and what the students there are likely to have already learned by that point.

looks like I'm a little late, but I may as well start now.

I'm an aspiring theoretical physicist, and I looked at the scale of the universe on page 2, and I have one thing to say about it. on the "wrong" one, technically it's right about one thing, wherever the universe is placed, since we can only view things from the inside, things seem on the normal scale to us, however, as far as I can see, if someone were to hypothetically see it from outside, it may be smaller than an atom. any thoughts on this?

edited 26th Aug '11 12:23:39 AM by hotdog285

"Smaller than an atom" would have no meaning from outside the universe.

ah, but that's the beauty of everything, we may just be inside of another universe, which has many more inside of it, and it's inside of another, with more inside of that one, repeating endlessly...

I'm doing science and I'm still alive...

edited 3rd Sep '11 8:01:15 PM by hotdog285

Snails cross continents by flying inside birds.

Also, this blog is omg like totally awesome and other ridiculously over the top expressions of approval.

edited 16th Sep '11 4:25:41 AM by AnEditor

Everything that is, is (and is within) the universe. You cannot, by definition, have something be outside of the universe.

A few years back, the university gaming club was arguing the physics and possibility of a planet having a double sunset. Those who said it was possible have been proven right. This made me very happy.

I'm getting The Little Prince vibes.

edited 16th Sep '11 12:26:27 PM by AnEditor

@ Goggle Fox and robintherose: Ah, many thanks. I will look it up later.

By the way, is "Nothing is perfect" an important axiom in science like "Nothing is permanent?"

Not necessarily. It's purely philosophical, at this point - both the concept of perfection, and whether anything lives up to that concept. I like to think that what we can observe is perfect as it is - and science is our way of discovering and understanding that perfection in the world around us.

edited 20th Sep '11 7:47:37 AM by ekuseruekuseru

Oh. Well, I asked that question because in my writing project, there's a centuries old scientist who wants to end humanity (he's the good guy, btw) because how it seems that it never learns from its mistakes, at which another guy (the Big Bad) refutes that by telling him that as a scientist, he should know that there is no such thing as perfection.

Well, crap.

Perfection, from a scientific standpoint, does not exist. It's based on a comparison, or possibly some sort of completioning thingy.

It's actually the end... In science the end is perfect...

What's there, purely scientifically, to stop me from calling the structure of the atom "perfect"?

edited 21st Sep '11 1:30:18 AM by ekuseruekuseru

Nothing, but that's because language is a silly thing.

And because talking about perfection makes me want to quote Mayuri Kurotsuchi's rant.

Oh yeah. That quote was very thought invoking.