Spotted in Borders

Peter Hedges's new Book, The Heights.  Peter is best known for writing What's Eating Gilbert Grape?

Interesting Data

The center of the earth is heated to 12,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hotter than the surface of the sun. Where does all this energy come from? At least half and perhaps as much as 90 percent (no one knows for sure) comes from the breakdown of uranium and thorium atoms in the earth’s crust.  --from a site called The Infrastructuralist

Widowed Fourteen Years

        April

Eating alone,
  I notice the forest preserve
  across the way.
The taller trees barely show life:
  further for the sap to rise.
The underbrush is fringed
  in new-leaf green.
Soon it will be two years
  since we carried you to
  a garden you could not see.
The spot overlooked the water where
  swans had delighted our children.
They are not children now
  except in memory.
I weep for them.  I weep for me.

4-17-98  (revised 4-19-01)   --Harlow B. Staley

Swan Watch

        Swan Watch

For seven years swans have had young.
Coyote and fox for six have won.

Two pair but only one cygnet
that hasn't been a meal - not yet.

We watch and hope that all is well
Today, not sure, we cannot tell,

for we've yet to locate the spot
where mom and pop have led their tot.

Their turf an island yesterday.
Perhaps it wasn't safe to stay.

The ducks are here, the heron too
along the shores - a pleasant view.

Tomorrow I shall check again;
Perhaps this year the swans will win.

8-2-00 --Harlow B. Staley

Universes

In set theory space can transformed while preserving distance by translation, rotation, and mirror images. Could our universe have a mirror image?

Why is our universe composed of particles instead of anti-particles? If it were composed of anti-particles we wouldn't know it and would call them particles and call the particles anti-particles.

Maybe after the big bang (or other beginning) there were two separate regions one of which had more particles which destroyed the anti-particles and the other one of which had more anti-particles which destroyed the particles. Call these regions universes.

Imagine the collision of a particle universe with an anti-particle universe. Wouldn't that create a very big bang?

E = mc^2

Calculations have been made based on E = mc^2 of the amount of energy in a drop of water. The trouble is that there is no known way to release that energy. Even in atomic bombs only a small portion of the energy is converted to energy because the atomic number remains the same, doesn't it? The only way I know of to annihilate a proton is with an antiproton and those are hard to come by.

Btw, I've always had trouble identifying the units of that equation which contains no k.

Strings

I wonder whether comparing the strings in string theory to violin strings isn't carrying analogy too far. Violin strings are never loops.


I think it is misleading to speak of 10 (or 11)dimensions. Call them variables, three of space, one of time, and 6 (or 7) of something else (singular or plural?). Are the six (or 7) all equivalent to each other the way the three space ones are? Calling them coiled-up space doesn't seem very satisfactory.