I googled "rabbits and dragons", having never seen this seemingly obvious pairing. Before long, I encountered these two exciting paragraphs:
"Gravitation was the first kind of interaction described by a mathematical theory. In ancient times, Aristotle theorized that objects of different masses fall at different rates. During the Scientific Revolution, Galileo Galilei experimentally determined that this was not the case--if friction due to air resistance is neglected, all objects accelerate toward the ground at the same rate. Isaac Newton's law of Universal Gravitation (1687) was a good approximation of the general behaviour of gravity. In 1915, Albert Einstein completed the General Theory of Relativity, a more accurate description of gravity in terms of the geometry of space-time...
Electrical and magnetic phenomena have been observed since ancient times, but it was only in the 1800s that scientists discovered that electricity and magnetism are two aspects of the same fundamental interaction. By 1864, Maxwell's equations had rigorously quantified the unified phenomenon. In 1905, Einstein's theory of special relativity resolved the issue of the constancy of the speed of light, and Einstein also explained the photoelectric effect by theorizing that light was transmitted in quanta, which we now call photons. Starting around 1927, Paul Dirac unified quantum mechanics with the relativistic theory of electromagnetism; the theory of quantum electrodynamics was completed in the 1940s by Richard Feynman, Freeman Dyson, Julian Schwinger, and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga."
The more recent items are of course exciting in a romantic "The Right Stuff" kind of way, in which our young forebears, wearing rougher tweedier versions of the same outfits we wear, codified unintuitable things by developing brain-based technologies and deploying them in the same breath. That's cool and everything, but please shun that kind of narrative. The exciting thing to notice is that we have scientists. The ones mentioned above are mostly in their graves but we have thousands more living ones who are discovering, inventing and teaching weird, awesome, totally boring mysterious stuff all the time. Picking furiously at the inscrutable. Venturing deep into the imaginary. Buffering us from science fiction and constantly making up words. So be curious and creative. Whatever. Live on a boat. Rabbits and dragons. If we smoked out, scientists is gonna be smoked out. Metaphors are technology. Don't be lame!
1 Comments
-- - 2008-10-17 21:51:48
Bonus scientific, not cultural: "Electromagnetism is also an infinite-ranged force, but it is much stronger than gravity, and therefore describes almost all phenomena of our everyday experience, ranging from the impenetrability of macroscopic bodies, to lasers and radios, to the structure of atoms and metals, to phenomena such as friction and rainbows."
