#physics feels

[wiggle-boy]

Kind of want to get a cosmology tat but idfk what I'd get It just makes me very emotional. There are tears in my eyes right now because I thought of the ratio of neutrons to protons when the Universe was very, very new. What is wrong with me.

[captainmwai]

Two married theoretical physicists get a visit from an experimenter who has proved that they were right about everything and that something they've been predicting was true for 30 years now actually has a good, solid experiment backing it up.

[wiggle-boy]

the masses of protons and neutrons make my eyes misty somebody please hold me while i read out of my cosmology notebook

[wiggle-boy]

Planning my outfit for when I meet one of the 6 men who predicted the existence of the Higgs Boson on the 1st of October!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[wiggle-boy]

This morning on the radio I heard a segment featuring Neil deGrasse Tyson saying that we’re kind of egomaniacs, imagining that we are the only life forms that exist in the Universe.

The newscasters introduced the clip saying, "[…] we may not be so special after all."

But I don’t think of it like that. As a student of cosmology and a resident of this planet, I’m overjoyed! Not because we’ll be communicating with extraterrestrials or any rubbish like that, but because when you consider the planet upon which we live, just the sheer diversity of its species, climates, habitats, ecosystems; the forests, the moors, the mountains, the seas, the deserts, the plains, the tundra; the diversity of life and culture, human and otherwise — you realise that the world is so breathtakingly beautiful in so many ways.

We know that there are planets that orbit other stars within the habitable zone — they are capable of supporting life as we know it — which means that there is potential for life. We’ve discovered over 800 exoplanets (though not all of them are in their star’s/stars’ habitable zone), and those are just the ones we can detect in the patch of our galaxy that we can actually monitor. There are roughly 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and an estimated >170 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Just in the observable universe, which is about about 13.8 billion lightyears across. There was an estimate that the entire Universe is 47 billion lightyears across, and it’s still expanding — with increasing acceleration, at that. I found some of the figures I used in this article: http://www.universetoday.com/102630/how-many-stars-are-there-in-the-universe/

So, when you consider even just the potential, it’s mind-blowing.

But I urge you to imagine a planet that supports life, be it only vegetation or animals, even if the life forms are primitive — imagine the planet itself. What majesty might it contain? What formations and climates and habitats might it contain? How would the life forms work with the planet, how would their beauty enhance the whole picture?

It’s an exercise of imagination, yes, but it always brings out a sense of awe in me, and I’m glad that somewhere in the Universe, there is almost certainly someone else out there enjoying their home planet just as much as I enjoy mine. (Although that someone else is not necessarily a homo sapiens — and actually, I’d argue they’re probably not a homo sapiens; but that’s for another post.)

[wiggle-boy]

You shape the space around you. The shape tells mass how to move. Thanks to relativity, I’m attracted to you.

Terrible poetry is fun okay

[wiggle-boy]

Bad physics teachers incense me more than anything else. I sat in on a friend's physics class, and it was devastating. There's beauty in physics, just as there is beauty in art, in a masterful author's use of language, in a perfected foreign accent, in music, in geometry, and in everything. Anyone can see the beauty; whether they devour it as I do is an entirely different matter. The universe works in astounding ways, and it's tragic when all of that wonder is wasted on students. Most students take physics once, if at all. A teacher has one chance to show a student the radiant beauty of the universe. And yet, so many people leave the physics classroom detesting the subject. It makes me sad.

[wiggle-boy]

Y'all can have your celebrities. I wanna meet astrophysicists/cosmologists/physicists. To get a picture with them, or even just an autograph, would be so amazing. I already have photos with Saul Perlmutter and Jerome Friedman. Walter Lewin would be a crowning achievement.