THERE IS NOTHING WRONG HERE

Do you remember one of the physical constants you learned in school? Light travels at a constant speed and can not be changed -186,000 m/sec. Well now we have to teach students that is not true. Lene Hau of Harvard has been able to stop light, move an imprint of it, and start it again.

Listen to Dr. Hau on NPR here or go the web site for her lab to see a demonstration here.

There is no stone
There is no hill
There is no pusher

There is only a stone, a hill, and me

When I first head about blogging I wondered, like many did, why would anyone want to tell the world what they did everyday or were thinking about? Now that I am blogging and reading/responding to other bloggers, I am still asking that question. One answer may be because blogging is one place where people can tell their story and have some one listen. When was the last time you had a real conversation? A real conversation is when two or more people really listen to each other and not do the “Well listen to my story”. We are usually more interested in getting our story out there or judging their story, instead of listening to the other persons story.

Blogging seems to be a way for people to tell their story and have some one listen and respond in a thoughtful way. Real conversation involves the exchange and challenging of ideas. When someone ask me why I said something it causes me to think more deeply about beliefs. The few places I have found where people listen without judgment or pushing their story are Quaker meetings, meditation groups, and therapists. Now I can add blogging to the list.

An Ask The Experts question in the March 2007 issue of Scientific American has been intriguing me since I read it. The question was “Do the virtual particles in quantum mechanics really exist? The answer was - they are indeed real. This is strange enough, virtual particles are real? But the reason is even more mind bending. It seems that Quantum theory predicts that every particle spends some time as a combination of other particles in all possible ways.

In the Quantum world there is no conservation of energy law. Remember that law from high school science - energy can not be created or destroyed. Well it seems that one particle can become two heaver particles. Even as briefly as this occurs matter has been created.

The essential particles that make up everything are popping in and out of different states, so what is real and what is virtual?