I became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity.
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so
What I have been telling you, from alpha to omega, what is the one great thing the sigil taught me — that everything in life is miraculous. For the sigil taught me that it rests within the power of each of us to awaken at will from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits, to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness. If the sigil were proved to be the top of a tomato-can, it would not alter that big fact, nor my fixed faith. No Harrowby, the common names we call things by do not matter — except to show how very dull we are ...
November 30, 2008 - 1:12 p.m.
I'm going to jump right into this without my usual preliminaries.
Damn, that was a preliminary wasn't it?
So what happened yesterday. Not too much. I left the apartment to get pizza. The local pizza place is good. That�s important. I have to learn the local business. I have learned the Italian bakery next door. I have to learn how to resist it. Last night I had tiramisu.
I started to set up my stereo last night and got foiled when I couldn't find an important part. I'll keep looking. Have i mentioned that I hate movies?
The real highlight of yesterday was listening to The Kennedys on Idiot's Delight, Vin Scelsa's show. Marshall Crenshaw was the other guest. There were there to promote the annual John Lennon Tribute. Pete, Maura, Vin, Marshall, John, how can you beat that? This is the first time I've heard Pete and Maura do their solo material on the radio. The best thing is that they are all such fun people. It was great just hearing them talk.
OK so that's yesterday taken care of. My ratings have been plummeting. I have to come up with something to write about that will grab you. So I have two things I've been wanting to discuss, the Wal-Mart's trampling tragedy and E=mc�. They don't actually go together do they? Actually I just saw how they do so I'll write about both.
First I'm assuming all of my Gentle Readers have heard about it. If not read about it now; Wal-Mart Employee Trampled To Death
It was a terrible thing but it isn't a general condemnation of people or American culture. No one can remember it happening before at a shopping mall. Things like it too happen sometimes when there are large crowds trying to get into someplace. It's happened at rock concerts, sporting events, and religious festivals. Considering how many of these things happen in the world it really isn't a common thing. When people come together in large numbers, are in an emotional state, and are force to wait for a long period of time sometimes something snaps. It might be someone irritable becoming overly aggressive. It might just be an accident that causes someone to bump into someone else and that's interpreted as a push.
While these things happen and we hear about them not that infrequently considering how many people there are in the world they are pretty rare. The odds of dying in a crowd stampede are microscopic. I guarantee you that more people died driving to the stores on Friday than died by trampling.
Should the store have foreseen this? Well why the death is unusual injuries aren't. They should have realized the potential for disaster and made serious efforts at crowd control.
I should point out that the same conditions exist at the land rush at Falcon Ridge. I have been worried about them for years. If you take part do you think of the potential for injury and accident? There is a good chance you don't. Nobody has been killed before, right? Nobody had been killed as the door opened at a store before either. I have felt for years that a new system should be enacted before disaster strikes. Nobody ever takes me seriously when I bring it up. That is how these things happen.
OK so what does that have to do with E=mc�? It is that the history of both has been misinterpreted. So lets talk Einstein. I've always wanted to write a science essay here ala Isaac Asimov and gosh darn I'm going to do it.
This was all triggered by a science documentary I watched with Larry when I was staying with him. It said equated E=mc� with the theory of relativity and said it published in 1905. It wasn't, that was when the original paper on the theory came out. It is not central to the theory at all. It was a corollary of the theory of Special Relativity and the theory of the photon that Einstein derived in 2007. So the first thing you have to unlearn is that the E=mc� is the theory of relativity.
The second thing is that when the first atom bomb was exploded it was the first time people converted mass (m) into energy (E) as per the equation. It wasn't, not by a long shot. Your chronology is off by hundreds of thousands of years.
The quick version that you learn in school is that a nuclear device works by converting mass to energy. That gives you the notion that somehow particles are being turned into energy. That isn't what happens. This is.
The basic building blocks of atomic nuclei are protons and neutrons. Collectively they are known as nucleons. The protons are all positively charged so they repel each other. What holds it together is the strong force which is much stronger than the electromagnetic force, thus its name. Sometimes it takes energy to overcome the force and bring nucleons together. Other times energy is released when they are brought together. This is strong force potential energy which is exactly analogous to gravitational potential energy. It takes energy to lift something above the earth and energy is release when it falls. With the strong force we don't usually refer to it as potential energy but as binding energy. So here is what happens in an atomic (fission) bomb? A nucleus of Uranium 235 absorbs a neutron which causes it to fission, break into fragments. The sum of the binding energy of the fragments is less than that of the original Uranium 235 nucleus. That binding energy is released as gamma ray photons. So where does the turning mass into energy come from? The energy released is so great that its mass equivalent m=E/c� is actually measurable. The total mass of the fractions is less than the mass of the original Uranium 235 nucleus and neutron. That missing mass is converted to energy. That mass was of course always energy, it was binding energy. The whole point of E=mc� is that mass and energy are equivalent, always. Energy is conserved in the process, the sum of the energy of the mass of the resulting particles, their kinetic energy (energy of motion) and the gamma photon exactly equals the initial energy in the form of the mass of the nucleus and neutron.
In a hydrogen (fusion) bomb, the two Hydrogen 2 (deuterium) nuclei are fused to make a helium nucleus. Have you figured out that the helium nucleus has less binding energy and therefore less mass so energy is released?
So how was this done hundreds of thousands of years ago? It wasn't, but the secret of making fire was discovered. Fire? What does that have to do with this? Everything. Lets talk about the simplest reaction that makes a fire, the burning of hydrogen. The chemical reaction is written 2H2 + O2 => 2H2O + energy. That is two hydrogen molecules combine with one oxygen to produce two molecules of water and energy. Where does the energy come from? Binding energy! This time it isn't nuclear binding energy but electromagnetic. Chemical reactions are dominated by the electromagnetic interactions of the electrons in the molecules. And here is the kicker. The resultant water molecules have less mass than the original oxygen and hydrogen. That mass is converted to energy and released as a photon. Once again the energy is conserved. The energy (both mass and kinetic) of the water exactly equals the energy of the original oxygen and hydrogen.
So the two processes are exactly analogous. The only difference is that the binding energy in a nuclear reaction is from the strong force and in a chemical reaction it is electromagnetic. So you can truthfully tell people that you've converted mass to energy, you've done it every time you lit a match, drove your car, or lit your stove.
Einstein's original 1907 paper was actually based on a thought experiment about electromagnetic energy. In it he discusses not turning mass into energy but energy into mass. He simply worked out the consequence of an object absorbing a proton. The conservation laws lead to the conclusion that the object gains mass when it does so. So every time you heat something up you are increasing it's mass. When you stand by the fire and warm yourself up you increase your mass. Don't worry it will not show up on the bathroom scale or make you look fatter.
So the whole thing isn't really that mysterious. It also doesn't have much to do with the nuts and bolts of making an atomic bomb. You can make a fire without knowing about the conversion of mass to energy and they could have made an atomic bomb too though the energy released would have been discovered empirically instead of being calculated in advance.
So did I lose everybody? Was anybody interested? I'd love some feedback on this. Should I do it again?
I signed the Pro-Truth Pledge:
please hold me accountable.
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On The Road Again - May 26, 2018
Oliver the Three-Eyed Crow - May 25, 2018
creative commons
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Horvendile November 30, 2008
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