Over the Edge: June 2013

Physicists Amir Safavi-Naeini and Oskar Painter describe how they were able to measure quantum motions of 1 femtometer (0.000000000000001 meters) in a micro-scale object.

More About Me...

I grew up loving the stars.

We lived on a farm far from the city where stars provided light when the moon did not shine. In the distance, Cannon Air Force Base was home to fighter jets that flew over our land, sometimes breaking the sound barrier, a thrilling sound I still love--the sound of freedom!

I devoured science fiction, Heinlein, Bradbury, Asimov, Herbert, Le Guin and Le Engle until I grew weary of the newer writing, plot driven, technical, dry, lifeless. Now I write science fiction-- character driven science fiction--and try to fill it with love, mystery and wonder.

Light, Time and Distance

The star nearest to Earth, besides our sun, is something like 24,000,000,000,000 miles away. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second. A light year is how far light travels in a year, 5,865,696,000,000 miles. Thus, the nearest star is quite a long way off. Our sun is about 8 light minutes away.

Whatever we see in the night sky, it's old news. That light has been traveling a long time to reach our retinas. We don't really know what's still out there. We assume everything's pretty much unchanged, but we really don't know. Even in our solar system, if our sun were to explode, it would take about 8 minutes for us to realize we were doomed. Eight or ten blissful minutes and then blam.

Make good use of your time. Don't waste it. Now is really all we have, it's all we've ever had.

Over the Edge

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Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Quantum Mechanics: a Primer