It’s still the sniffle season and there’s still no cure for the common cold. So says the Mayo Clinic; so say many others. They are wrong. Here is the long-sought cure. No kidding. It turns out to be spectacularly unspectacular. It is simple physics. (That’s too bad; if it were complex chemistry it would be […]
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Just Don’t Bug Me: Infection Control in a Distant Realm
Just Don’t Bug Me: Infection Control in a Far Country Back to Priština, new capital of a new country, Kosovo. Our hadrons lost an argument about occupying space on a crosswalk. We’re taxi-struck and dazed. Ambulance doors open. Sign says Emergency. Another sign, University Clinical Center of Kosova, is the only other English sight or sound amid […]
Exotic Not-Erotic Hadrons vs Gravitational Ripples
I’m taking time out from Pristina. Exotic hadrons are the rage this week. Suddenly a cipher, Z(4430), seems to be sexy. What’s exotic? Well, not-exotic, plain-vanilla hadrons are particles of matter. They include baryons―the protons and neutrons that are stable in nuclei of atoms that we see, and unstable particles called mesons that fly unseen […]
Hitting the Streets of Priština
We are in Priština, the new capital of a new country, war-torn Kosovo. Main street is Bill Klinton―not a typo―Boulevard. His statue’s in the square. He’s their hero; he gave the Kosovans Kosovo. Cars crowd sidewalks, people throng the streets, mingling in a complex dance. The dance is guided by blue signs and fading pavement-paint […]
Day Bus in Kruševa
After some sunny days in Beograd we take a bus to Priština, a 5½-hour ride, or so we think. There are overnight buses but we decide to take the day bus. It leaves at noon. It is a clean but hand-me-down Mercedes with two drivers and is almost full. All locals, except for us. I […]
Night Train in Novi Sad
It’s a break for me from writing, or so I’m thinking. We are on the 09:48 from Wien to Beograd. Change of trains in Budapest; a 16-minute connection ― safe enough because the first leg is an Austrian train. The second leg is 7 hours. Or should be. It seems that we are stopping overlong […]
What Do Neanderthals Say About Race?
Okay, this is not about Sochi. It’s about racial distinctions, and what physics can contribute to out understanding of them. ‘Race’ once referred to a group with a common line of descent. But over time it became less clear. Nineteenth-century racial distinctions were built on emerging sciences of linguistics and physical anthropology. Many scientists were […]
Harry Potter Magic and Levitation Physics
Some weeks back Harry Potter’s magic, having helped him walk through a brick wall, got me onto bosons. A boson’s any kind of particle that has integral spin (like 0 or 1). What’s spin? Well, that’s another story. Suffice to say it is a quantum number used by physicists to tag a quantum state. Fermions […]
Lemaitre, Penrose and the Original Order of the Universe
Life is all about order. Life forms use energy to organize themselves. Their often-exquisite order is created at the expense of disorder which they dump somewhere else. The net effect is always a decrease in total order of the universe. It’s basic physics (the Second Law of Thermodynamics, if you care). The Second Law says […]