Cemetery Of Dead Science On Our Floor This Week!

A man came across a beach covered in starfish that had washed ashore.  Further along he saw a boy throwing the starfish back into the ocean.  “What are you doing?” he asked the boy.  The boy responded “The tide is going out and if the starfish don’t get back into ocean they will die.”

“But there are thousands of starfish on this beach!” the man said.  “You can’t possibly save them all.  Even if you worked all day, it wouldn’t make a difference.”

The boy picked up another starfish and threw it into the ocean.  “It made a difference to that one.”

That starfish was Albert Einstein.

calculus gothic

-The limits keep getting farther and farther away. Where are they going? Where did they start? Will they ever stop?

-The unit circle tells us to bow before it. All hail the unit circle. All hail.

-You have been scribbling the integral symbol and the summation symbol for so long. You can’t write 3′s or capital S’s normally anymore. It is a reflex, muscle memory.

-Piles of math homework surround you as you become a machine, cranking out more math problems as you hone your skills. You build your own castle out of math homework. It is never-ending.

-Trigonometry rids us of our sins. and cosines. and tangents.

Today is the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s presentation of general relativity’s field equations to the Prussian Academy of Sciences. The equations demonstrated the relationship between the local curvature of spacetime and the energy and momentum within that area of spacetime. The first image shows the way that Einstein first presented the equations in his 25 November 1915 paper, where G_im is the Ricci tensor; g_im, the metric tensor; T_im, the energy–momentum tensor for matter; and κ is proportional to Newton’s gravitational constant. The second image shows a modern full version of the equation where R_μν, is the Ricci curvature tensor; R, is the scalar curvature; g_μν, is the metric tensor; Λ, is the cosmological constant; G, is Newton’s gravitational constant; c, is the speed of light in vacuum; and T_μν, is the stress–energy tensor. For more about Einstein’s development of the equations, we have a article available from our November issue: http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.2979

via: Physics Today

Slap it. Shoot it. Kaboot it.

Gandhi (via nezua)

There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world.

Nikolai Lobachevsky (via curiosamathematica)

Ways I Am Like the Standard Model

Clearly flawed, but with no obvious path to improvement

Can go from a top to a bottom under the right circumstances

I too have a problem with hierarchy

Influenced by Richard Feynman

Too weird to be widely understood

If you froze my body and shattered it down the middle that would arguably be symmetry breaking

Lots of self-coupling

Many of my interactions are weak

Incompatible with gravity (I fell out of bed the other day)

Will break down under extreme conditions

All of my friends describe me as a gauge quantum field theory containing the internal symmetries of the unitary product group SU(3) × SU(2) × U(1)

“In this presidential election season, one thing is certain: candidates will rarely — if ever — be asked what they would do to keep this nation at the forefront of science and innovation.

The truth is in the numbers. In the 1960s, the United States devoted nearly 17% of discretionary spending to research and development, reaping decades of economic growth from this sustained investment. By 2008, the figure had fallen into the single digits. This occurs at a time when the private sector has cut back on its research investment and other nations have made significant gains in their own research capabilities. China, for example, is projected to outspend the United States in research within the next decade. East Asia as a whole already does.”

— Janet Napolitano, Why more scientists are needed in the public square.