The Ladder

Fundamentally, you can start off with the Standard Model. It's not perfect, but it's a pretty good description of the particles and forces of nature especially at the mostly low energies of our soar system. Using quantum mechanics you can built up those particles into distinct nuclei, and calculate how they can fuse to form new nuclei. Tack on even a rudimentary Newtonian understanding of gravity and you're already able to describe stars from scratch.

Keep going with atoms and eventually things move out of the physics building into the chemistry building as those atoms combine to form compounds. If there's carbon involved you can keep progressing up the ladder of interaction complexity to organic chemistry, and if there's not complicated carbon molecules you can describe inorganic reactions such as those that eventually lead to geophysics, geology, meteorology, you name it.

But those complicated carbon molecules get very complicated and they form proteins. You usually have to move buildings again to this point until you find the biology building. Proteins form organelles of cells, and those cells form plants and animals. Those animals form groups and suddenly you move departments again and you end up in the ecology building. But if those animals happen to be people, they get even more complicated and the tools of analytical science begin to overload with the sheer volume of variables and you have to settle for a phenomenological description, which has its own buildings with names like psychology and sociology.

In theory though, the chain of steps from the Standard Model all the way up is unbroken. Not every step is understood, but for any given science, the one "below" and the one "above" are usually pretty well connected.

So in theory you can start with the quantum mechanics and derive the logistics of a hurricane evacuation. It might take a while.

Regardless of the chain of steps, I'm looking at the end result. Gustav is pointed right at south Louisiana where a lot of my friends are, and its end point actually passes pretty much right over College Station. My apartment's going to be occupied with some evacuee friends for a day or two and this weekend has been a little scrambled with me getting prepared. Here's what the track looks as of this writing (via Weather Underground), though of course as time passes the actual and the predicted may not look the same.

So tomorrow and the next day could conceivably not have updates to this site due to the busyness. If that happens, don't worry because I'm unlikely to be dead or anything.

Happy Labor Day (Dirty Jobs marathon on Discovery!), stay safe, and if you're not in the hurricane path now's a good time to think about planning ahead for whatever natural disaster might be in your area's future. Once it's on its way you're usually too late.