Here's an extremely dorky Dorky Poll topic. I can't believe I haven't used this one before:
Choose only one.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
It's going to be a very busy day, in ways that will keep me away from the Internet for most of the day, so you'll need to entertain yourselves. Here's a question for the science-minded:
What's your favorite science textbook of all time?
It could be your favorite book from when you were a student,…
Welcome to the laboratory graveyard:
This picture shows the back room in one of the labs, and most of the gear in it is broken or useless. There's a computer that's so old it has a 5 1/4" floppy drive, the skeleton of a vacuum evaporator, a crappy student STM system, and an electrometer that's so…
Well, the extremely dorky poll on favorite fundamental constants seems to have petered out at 48 comments, two short of the threshold at which it would've become non-dorky. Still, that was a good effort.
Since that worked pretty well, here's another dorky poll question: What's your favorite…
Ok, folks, I'm taking a poll - what do you call a society and an economy that can't keep growing, but can get better in ways that haven't been part of the conventional measures. What I'm looking for is a word or a couple of words that are evocative, not boring, not too wordy or wonky and appealing…
ha! I refuse to subject myself to potential annihilation...
Anti-Dork.
Matter. Because you always have to go with the side that lets you eat bacon. Which is made of matter.
Sparticles. And if you're dubious about supersymmetry, I like ambiplasma. Say, equal amounts of electrons and positrons, rippling with Alfven waves and 511 Kev gamma rays...
Brrr, such questions make me feel uncomfortable.
What about bosons vs. fermions?
Jeff Kooistra, whom you've read in Analog, made a good suggestion when I posted a link to this thread on Facebook. "Vortex knots."
http://www.math.buffalo.edu/~menasco/Knottheory.html
In the nineteenth century physicists were speculating about the underlying principles of atoms. In 1867, Lord Kelvin put forward a comprehensive theory of atoms which, through heuristic reasoning, seemed to explain several of the essential qualities of the chemical elements. Kelvin's theory conjectured that atoms were knotted tubes of ether. (To a topologist a knot in 3-space is any closed loop having no self-intersections and a link is any collection of non-intersecting closed loops.) The topological stability and the variety of knots were thought to mirror the stability of matter and the variety of chemical elements.
Kelvin's theory of vortex atoms was taken seriously for about two decades. Maxwell thought that ``it satisfies more of the conditions than any atom hitherto considers''. This theory inspired the celebrated Scottish physicist Peter Tait to undertake an extensive study and tabulation of knots in an attempt to understand when two knots were ``different''. (The later stages of this study were in collaboration with C. N. Little.) Tait's intuitive understanding of ``different'' and ``same'' is still a useful notion. Two knots are isotopic if one can be continuously manipulated in 3-space (no self-intersections allowed) until it looks like the other. The accompanying diagram shows a portion of Tait's study---an enumeration of knots and links in terms of the crossing number of a plane projection. If Kelvin's theory had been the correct foundation for the classification of the chemical elements, then Tait's knot table would have been the basis for a periodic table of elements. But Kelvin's theory was fundamentally mistaken and physicists lost interest in the Tait's work.
I choose Auntie M. Cause she does. Matter.
As a being of pure apathy I can't be bothered to decide.
Rt
Photons.
Go here http://www.particlezoo.net/
Jordin just had a birthday and I bought him by request the Higgs Boson. I myself prefer the Strange Quark. (I also got him the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, but that's not a particle.)
MKK
Sorry, MKK. Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation IS particles. They are photons that have red shifted to be in the microwave band. There remains dissent over primordial neutrinos, WIMPs, and Gravitons.