The Rational Druid

Well, I’ve had several ideas mulling around in my head, and I think they’ve reached the point where I’m ready to start actually working on them. I’ve had two ideas for regular articles: a “What if?” column, and a column of “Maple for Mythbusters”. The first column will be articles where I look at different ideas and say “What if this idea were real? What would it mean?” The first one is going to look at homeopathy, and make the assumption that it is real. Starting there, what else do we have to accept, by logic, due to accepting that homeopathy is real. I’m going to look at a different idea for each article. The second column is going to look at different experiments that the Mythbusters have done and see how we can use Maple to do some scientific computations around those experiments. I really like Maple, and I think more people should be supporting a Canadian made product.

These two columns are going to run on alternate weeks, starting with “What if?” this Friday. If you have any ideas for either column, things you’d like to see covered, please let me know.

OK. Now I know what to do for the next science fair, home made fusion reactor.

http://discovermagazine.com/2010/extreme-universe/18-do-it-yourself-basement-fusion

I so wish I had some spare money and time. Course with my luck, I’d actually get over-unity and blow up my house.

The physics department just had a talk by a researcher from Wilfred Laurier University, discussing the EPR (Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen) Paradox. This is a very counter-intuitive quantum effect which is very difficult to describe. The speaker this afternoon did an excellent job of describing it in regular language. I was very impressed. It really is true, you can only really explain something to someone else once you fully understand it yourself.

In short, Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen were bothered by the weirder conclusion from quantum mechanics. So they proposed an experiment that you could do which would show that the quantum model was incomplete. Unfortunately for them, the counter-intuitive results of the experiment actually did occur, proving that quantum mechanics actually is correct. This experiment was the beginning of quantum entanglement, and all of the wonderful weirdness which grew out of that.

I just saw this site this morning. I found the link in Make magazine (awesome magazine, by the way). There is far too much info here for me to go into. All I can say is that you need to go check this out if you have any interest in physics or science.

This past weekend was really fun.  The math department here at UNB held a mini-conference on general relativity.  The one talk that really got my juices flowing was one on stochastic gravity.  This formulation seems to allow for a bottom up way of tying quantum fields to the metric.  I’m going to use this with a field description of the electron and see what I find.