I also enjoyed reading Stephen Hawking’s comments.

Sorry to go for so long without posting and then just post links to news. I’ve been super busy, but this required a post.

As the video I embedded in a previous post about visualizing higher dimensions said, sometimes it’s easier to imagine a higher dimension beyond the three we’re familiar with by thinking of the higher dimension as a dimension you “fold lower dimensions through” to get a desired result. For instance, as shown in the video, folding a 2-dimensional sheet through the third dimension allows the edges of the sheet to touch, so an ant can crawl from one edge to the other. If you lived on the 2-D sheet and could only see in two dimensions, it would appear to you that the ant disappeared from one edge and instantly reappeared on the other. We can’t visualize dimensions higher than three, but we can visualize how actions in these higher dimensions would would look in our 3-dimensional world, analogous to a creature who can only see in two dimensions watching an ant disappear from one place and reappear in another.

A popular 4-dimensional object to try to visualize is a tesseract, which is a 4-dimensional hypercube. We can’t picture it, but we can picture it’s projection, or shadow, in three dimensions. Here is a video of the projection of a 4-D cube rotating:

Here’s another video showing the construction of a hypercube:

It shows three dimensions of the tesseract being built on the left side, and one of those three dimensions along with a fourth dimension on the right side. We can’t picture the whole hypercube, but we can picture separate parts of the cube and piece together how they interact from those visualizations. I had to watch it a couple times to really piece together what’s going on, but I think it’s worthwhile.

This page has some really neat videos showing cubes folded up. The first one shows 2-D squares (in red) folded up to create a 3-D cube:

The pink squares are the cube’s 2-D shadow as it’s being folded and unfolded.

We can’t picture a 4-D cube, but an unfolded tesseract in 3-dimensions would look like this:

The second video shows what a 4-D cube’s 3-D shadow looks like as it’s being folded:

And now that you mind has been suitably bent, I’ll leave with with an image of Salvador Dali’s Christus Hypercubus:

It’s no secret that more people are interested in reading a story that involves potential “doomsday” then some benign tale about eggheads doing their incomprehensible nerd research in some distant location. And I suppose fear and mystery can help scientific projects get funded, what with keeping the public interested and all. Still, making people worry unnecessarily does a disservice to them and can hinder the progress of knowledge.

Even though this article presents the position of scientists at CERN, its structure and language seem to to give more weight to the worries than they really deserve. Physicists are very reluctant to state that anything is “impossible”, since the world of physics is filled with a great many improbabilities, and not so many definitive impossibilities, and this reluctance is easily misinterpreted. The title, “Some fear powerful atom-smasher”, should probably read more like “Three people in Hawaii, only one of whom cn be readily identified in the news as having a physics background, fear the powerful atom-smasher”.

I think this may be my favorite rendition of that Associated Press article though. The body of the text contains a prominent distraction, placed before any actual information, about the potential risk, asking readers “Is the giant particle smasher worth the risk?” check “yes”; check “no”, giving AOL News readers the opportunity to “vote” their opinion. Perhaps it’s been a slow week for the Lohans and readers would like their opportunity to get their irrelevant-poll-taking fix elsewhere.

I jest, but the presence of such a poll goes past marketing to a short-attention-span audience and into the realm of irresponsible journalism. It gives readers the impression that, based on the small bit of information contained in the article, or perhaps even just the few sentences before the poll, they will be able to make an informed decision on the matter. The fact is, there are very few people on the planet who posses enough knowledge about the situation to accurately assess the risks. Everyone else has to rely pretty much entirely on the opinions of the experts as reported in the press, rather than employing our own logic in addition, as you can do with most subjects in the news.

I think this article, which was the catalyst for a recent post of mine, was more informative about the nature of the concerns and where they come from, if you’re interested.

Reading the comments sections in many of the articles I perused made me feel uneasy in a mobs-with-torches kinda way. In fact, check this out. I’m not sending you here for the content of the piece, though, to assuage any fears, I assure you that it is full of false premises, bad logic and an apparent lack of physics knowledge. I do want to direct you to the comments, where the secret scientist terrorist plot to destroy Earth is unmasked. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Comment 69 is my favorite:

I suppose that LHC experiment will be completely silent. However, negative consequences inside the human noosphere will be distributed gradually and almost imperceptibly — new strange illnesses, fatigue, increased frequency of depressions and psychic deviations. The powerful LHC electromagnet may strongly interfere with the system of collective subconsciousnesses (noosphere).

These arrogant pseudoscientists think they know everything about this world. But all they really know is a fake atheistic psychology.

LHC people are terrorists! Poor innocent Europeans even do not know that they are hostages. Europe is doomed. It is possible that massive psychic deviations and very strange illnesses may be observed during these 2008-2012 years.

STOP LHC TERRORISTS !!!

If someone could explain to me exactly what a “noosphere” is, it would probably only add to my amusement. Also, if physicists are “pseudoscientists”, I would like to know who is doing the hard science in this man’s world. In my experience, physicists are some of the most acutely aware people of how little they know about nature. I would also like to know what this guy’s profession is. I’m picturing a person who gets all his books from a shop that also sells rocks with various powers, healing pyramids and tarot cards. Twenty bucks says he believes his pet is psychic.

Before I dog-pile on those who mistrust the establishment too much — in that way, they are sort of my people, after all — I should mention that I’m also wary of some of the internet commentators who blindly scoff off all the concerns. As I said before, there aren’t too many people in the world who really understand enough about this to have truly informed opinions. I think it would be a saner world if we all recognized the limitations of our own knowledge when forming opinions.

If you’d like to learn more about the LHC itself, I enjoyed this Scientific American article posted today. There’s also tons of well written information about the LHC on CERN’s website.

Every bay I know of seems to have a corresponding volunteer organization whose mission is to save it. Over the weekend, a friend and I attempted to participate with one such organization. I was sort of just along for the ride on this one, but as I understand it, divers harvest this underwater grass, which is vital to the health of the bay ecosystem. Our job as volunteers was to sit on the beach organizing this grass into bundles, which would be transported to another part of the bay, that is short on grass, for transplantation. However, to our embarrassment, we showed up at the part of the bay volunteers were working at last week, and they had moved on.

Though we couldn’t do anything to save it by ourselves, the bay was desolate in the cloudy humid morning, which gave us an excellent opportunity to explore all the nature laying about. I have a tendency to turn into a question machine from time to time, soliciting those around me for all their knowledge and any theories they care to share on every matter that pops to mind, and nothing sets this off quite like nature. Stuffy scientist stereotypes in the general public seem foreign and incongruous to me, since my own behavior in the face of nature is more akin to that of a curious child. My companion and I taught each other some of the facts were knew, and came up with some new theories about the workings of all sort of natural elements. Casually observing aquatic life for a couple hours doesn’t exactly produce rigorous scientific theories, but these sort of curious observations of nature are the spark that propels people to do rigorous studies. It’s from the curiosity that we all have about the world around us and everything in it that all scientific knowledge is born.

First, we walked across rocks, shells, and a few crab and fish carcasses on land. I suppose the shells are carcasses too, in a sense, so the earth by the water was piled deep with the remains of dead creatures. Some of the shells had swaths of bright purple lining their insides. This reminded me of grade school, when I was taught that Native Americans used shells for money, and that the purple ones were worth more. I have no idea how true this is, or what the details surrounding it are, but it’s one of the many things I noted to look up later.

Most of the oyster remains consisted single shells and nothing else, but I found two shells that were still held together in the familiar clam shape, though the creature who inhabited them was long gone. It’s organic material that holds the shells together. Well, I guess the shells are organic too — creatures grow them like we grow finger nails — but we supposed that clams must be able to open and close the shells with some sort of muscle tissue connecting them. My friend pointed out a shell with a funny shaped hole in the middle, and told me the creature who resided inside of it was probably eaten by the creature who drilled that hole. What a terrifying experience that would be if it happened to us — like jumping into a coffin to hide from danger, only to find danger drilling through our claustrophobic encasement to suck us out and devour us.

I preferred not to think too hard about it, and moved on toward the water.

At first the water looked devoid of life, but then we saw a snail, and then another, and another, and a fish, and a crab, and before long we realized the cool shallow water was teeming with life. If you pick up a snail it will invariably hide in its shell. But if you hold the shell up to your face and hum near it, the snail thinks it’s hearing the sound of the sea and will slowly pull it’s globby face and jelly eye stalks out into the world. Some snails had fuzz growing on them which disguised them as bits of debris. We caught various creatures with our hands and shells, careful to grab the crabs from behind, where their pincers couldn’t reach, and all the while the scurrying blips of life were moving over the remains of their dead compatriots. Imagine spending your life walking around on the bones and teeth and finger nails of the dead; even if they were animal remains rather then human, that would be creepy as hell.

Snails are not the only creatures inhabiting snail shells. The little guy my friend is holding in the picture doesn’t make a shell of his own, but rounds up discarded shells to inhabit. It reminded me of that episode of The Simpsons where they go to the beach and Lisa talks about the creatures getting bigger and trading up for a bigger shell, and at the end a creature takes up residence in an empty beer can.

The crowning glory of the outing was observing a crab fight. I saw one crab poised between two rocks while another crab came upon it and started a scrap. I thought maybe it was a territory fight, though I have no idea if crabs are territorial or not, until I saw a another small crab underneath the first large crab, between the rocks. I thought maybe it was a baby they were fighting over, but do crabs attack each other’s babies? What for? They don’t eat them, do they? My friend suggested that perhaps the small crab was a female and large ones were males fighting over her. This seemed to make more sense, and it’s the hypothesis we went with.

The fight was vicious, and both males were drawn away from the female. They split apart to size each other up and catch their breath from time to time, and at one point while they were doing this, the female scurried under one of the males again. The plot thickens though: she ran to the shelter of the male who had been the attacker, not the male she was with initially! She stayed underneath him as the bout continued. The claws flew fast and furiously though, and eventually the three were split apart again. After a few further skirmishes, the original protecting male reclaimed his prize, and the pursuer slowly moved on, under the wary eye of the defender.

Pictured here are the two male crabs in the heat of battle:

I wondered if perhaps the female had been kidnapped by the male who I originally had pegged as her mate before I started observing, and thus had a preference for the other male. More likely, however, she did not have any say in the matter, and her mate was chosen entirely by the results of the fight. Nature is full of brutal realities and limited choices for many individuals. Though I suppose there are, in fact, many human cultures in which a person’s gender, ethnicity, or what have you can designate them as a more property-like being than an independent decision-making entity.

After this wild battle concluded, we wandered to the other side of the small peninsula of land, listening to a mocking bird imitating a seagull. I picked up every rock that caught my eye along the way and examined it, noting the colors and the wear patterns. I looked at the rocks and the sand and the slow motion of the water and thought, and I frequently do in such settings, about how the patterns in these materials could’ve been created. The tide moves in and out, and waves beat down on sand and rocks, and it leaves distinct wear patterns; regular ridges or dunes in sand and rock. The water molecules are moving around pretty randomly at the smallest level, I think. I can’t picture the waves and wind moving such that these regular patterns appear. There’s all sorts of flow that’s not obvious though. There’s the undertow my mother always warned me about when I was a wee one at the beach, and wind changes directions and blows in all sorts of seemingly random ways. I suppose once a portion of sand is randomly pushed just a bit past the equilibrium point, and form the slightest lump, it is then easier for sand to get knocked down and join the lump when it’s blown about in the water or wind, and peaks and valleys form. I still wonder why these formations look the way they do though. For all I know it’s a simple matter to look it up on the internet, but I never have the internet available when I’m thinking about it on the beach. Knowing the deeper mechanisms at work can only add to enjoyment and appreciation of nature, but sometimes the fun of wondering is its own reward.

For good measure, I’ll leave you with this picture from the follow day at the beach, when seagulls tore into a five dollar container of beach french fries before anyone could stop them, and fought each other viciously for the the ketchupy goodness.

This theory is probably best applied to tiredness that occurs due to excessive academia.

I also took the opportunity to tap into the underused Hebrew alphabet, since the physics market on English and Greek characters is pretty saturated. Shin here, with the L subscript, is a “long-lasting thought”. It decays into two “short-lasting thoughts”, and the interaction is mediated by the “tired particle”, tau. My friend insisted that, as tiredness increases, her ability to sustain thoughts decreases, but she gets overwhelmed by many very short lasting though. I agree with the first part, but I think an abundance of short-lasting thoughts only comes to be via tiredness in particular circumstances, so this is not a general theory for the tired particle. The tired particle also leaves behind a “consciousness” particle, which carries with it consciousness of one’s own short-comings due to exhaustion.

It’s not for the faint of heart, but for those willing to brave some math, I’ve got more for you on Maxwell’s equations, and how they would be symmetrical if a magnetic charge existed. Look at the pretty equations and skip to the summary just above the second set of equations if your eyes start glazing over. These are Maxwell’s equations for charges and electric and magnetic fields in a vacuum:

I’ve written these slightly differently than the standard form to emphasize the fact that electric charges create electric and magnetic fields. So the information about the fields is on the left-hand side, and the information about the charges is on the right-hand side. What these fields tell us is the nature of the magnetic and electric fields produced by charges. At least in theory, the strength and direction of the fields at any given point in space can be determined from any arbitrary set of charges or charged objects. In practice, trying to model complex geometries of charge distributions can be exceedingly tedious.

Before you get overwhelmed, let’s just look at the first two of Maxwell’s equations. The E represents the electric field and the B represents the magnetic field. On the right-hand side of the first equation, the Greek letter rho represents the electric charge distribution, while the epsilon with the zero subscript is a constant number that always stays the same, like pi or the square root of two. In examining equations with the goal of conceptual understanding in mind, the constants can be safely ignored. The right-hand side of the first equation is written in a generalized way so that the equation applies to any distribution of charge. For our purposes, it’s easier to imagine what the equations are saying if we decide that the information on that side of the equation represents a single point charge, such as a proton or electron. The triangle, called “del”, followed by a dot represents the way the electric field is spreading out from a charge. In the second equation, we have del dot B — so the spreading out of the magnetic field — and this is equal to zero. There is no magnetic charge from which a magnetic field radiates.

In the third equation, del followed by an X and an E, (spoken out loud as “del cross E”), represents the way the electric field is curling around the charge distribution. The funny d and dt coupled with the B represent how the magnetic field changes in strength and direction as time progresses. On the other side of the equation, we have zero, so there is no charge involved. A changing magnetic field actually induces and electric field. If you had just a static point charge — or even moving charges that are constant in their motion and quantity, and we shall see momentarily from the fourth equation — the magnetic field would not be changing. In fact, with a stationary charge distribution, as we saw from the second equation, no magnetic field at all would be produced. It follows that the electric field of a stationary charge (or unchanging electric current) does not curve. The electric field of a point charge only points straight outward or straight inward; it does not curl around.

In the final equation, del dot B represents the way the magnetic field is curling around. Then there’s the scary term involving Greek letters (which we can ignore today since they are constants), and another set of funny d’s, this time involving an E. Ignore the constants and what you have left is a term just like the one directly above it except with an E instead of a B. So this term represents the way the electric field is changing over time. On the right-hand side of the equation, we have another ignorable Greek letter, and a J. The J represents a distribution of electric current. Electric current is just made up of a bunch of moving point charges. If the electric field is not changing, then the second term on the left-hand side is zero, and we’re left with the statement that the way the magnetic field of a charge distribution curls is dependent on the way those charges are flowing in a current. If you have a current running through a straight wire, the magnetic field will curl around it in a circle, as shown here.

I’ll spare you a discussion of changing electric and magnetic fields, since that portion of Maxwell’s equations would be unchanged with the addition of magnetic charges. So, the long and short of it is, a magnetic field does not spread outward from an electric charge (just so that we’re clear, all discussion of “charges” up until this point has been a reference to “electric charges”, such as electrons and protons), but it will curl around the direction of flow of moving charges. The electric field does the opposite; it does not curl around the electric charges, but spreads uniformly outward from them.

And now (drum roll please), this is what Maxwell’s equations would have to be updated to look like if magnetic monopoles are discovered:

Here I’ve added subscripts to the rho’s and J’s to distinguish electric charges and currents from magnetic charges and currents. A magnetic charge, or monopole, is an entirely different object from those science words you no doubt have at least a passing familiarity with, like protons and electrons. None of the dozens of subatomic particles you’ve read about physicists discovering and debating carry this magnetic charge, as far as we have been able to detect. A magnetic charge would do exactly what an electric charge does in Maxwell’s equations as we know them. A magnetic field would radiate straight out from a magnetic point charge, but no magnetic field would curl around it. An electric field would curl around a moving magnetic charge or current, but would not radiate outward from the magnetic charge.

If you ignore the constants and the plus and minus signs, which just represent direction, in the revised version of Maxwell’s equations, the first equation is exactly the same as the second equation, except with the E and B (and little e and b subscripts) interchanged. The same is true of the third and fourth equations: they are exactly the same as each other except the places of E and B, and e and b, are switched. This is the symmetry physics are looking for when they search for magnetic monopoles.

Until next time….

One of the fears in the article seems to be that the exotic and frighteningly named “magnetic monopoles”, if created, will be malignant and alter all matter they touch in upsetting ways, Ice-Nine style. Having just reinserted the topic of magnetic monopoles into my brain a couple months ago in my class on electricity and magnetism, I’m feeling the spirit to type about them on the internet.

The article sums up a magnetic monopole as a particle with “only one magnetic pole — only north, or only south, but not the north-south magnetism that dominates nature.” This is true, but a deceptively simple thought nugget for a reader to carry around and apply to future contexts. When I’m musing about some aspect of physics to my biologist coworker, I summarize some pieces of mathematics when going through it point by point would detract from the discussion at hand. She usually gives me permission to proceed by saying “I’m sure its more complicated than that.” This is her way of indicating she’s understood conceptually what I’ve said and is willing to take on faith that my simplistic model can be trusted in the realms I apply it to. This is a common understanding of physics: whatever portion is conceptually comprehensible must be a simplified version of how a physicist would explain what’s going on to another physicist. This, too, is true, but with a catch: the complication of physics frequently lies in the elaborate mathematical and conceptual apparatus required to solve specific physics problems. Physicists are trained be begat physics, not just to understand what has come before. The concepts themselves are frequently not super complicated for non-physicists to understand, when explained using English and pictures rather than math.

So what is a magnetic monopole, in plain English? It’ll be a meandering adventure through electromagnetism to get there, so if you’re in the mood for a leisurely Sunday discovery jaunt, let’s go. First off, what’s a magnet? If a three-year-old asked you what a magnet is, every adult of sound mind would (correctly) give the answer with confidence. But if a physicist asked you what a magnet is, you might be hesitant and second guess yourself before answering, assuming the answer should contain more complexity. On some level I suppose it does, but your intuitive response, the one you gave to the three-year-old, is still entirely correct; we just need to emphasize specific properties of a magnet and hold them in our heads to have a thorough understanding of what a magnetic monopole is, and how it fits into the larger picture of nature. (The point, after all, is to have this enriched understanding, not just to accumulate the intellectual equivalent of cute party tricks.) So what’s a monopole? Well, if it occurred to you that “mono” means “one” or “single”, then you’re on the right track. You might be reminded of the North and South pole of the Earth when you read the word “pole”, or even recall that bar magnets, like the ones you stick on your refrigerator, the ones you told the three-year-old about, have “North” and “South poles”, and again, you’re on the right track.

So what does a magnet do? You know this: it attracts or repels some objects, such as a refrigerator or another magnet. In other words, from physics 101, it exerts a force on some objects and not on others. A magnet doesn’t have to touch the refrigerator to be pulled toward it either. It seems to exert its force from a distance. This seems a little odd compared to the way other familiar applications of force work. For example, you couldn’t knock your roommate onto the floor or pull him tight to you by throwing punches or grabby hands from your side of the couch when your hands only connect with the air between you. Likewise, it seems a little weird that a magnet would leap through the air to the fridge when you let go of it close by, but not touching. It turns out there’s another actor that mediates this force: the magnetic field. A magnetic field exerts a magnetic force on some materials, particularly metal ones. Iron filings on paper illustrate the location and direction of the magnetic field of a bar magnet. Physicists have figured out tons of details about these interactions, and have created mathematical models such that the behavior of all sorts of objects under the influence of magnetic fields generated by a variety of means can be predicted. Not knowing these details does not imply a lesser understanding of the underlying principle though; a magnetic field carries the magnetic force, some objects feel a push or pull from this force, and a bar magnet can create a magnetic field, which is the carrier of this force.

Before we get too carried away parsing words and examining our Chipclips, let’s think about why some materials, such as iron, react to a magnetic field, and others, such as wood, do not. This will lead us to a bigger picture. It turns out that only objects that have charge are affected by magnetic fields. If this seems weird, let’s go back to a more intuitive situation involving force. In the roommate shoving analogy, you apply a force to shove an object (your roommate), who has mass, off the couch. He falls to the floor because he has mass and the Earth has mass, and the gravitational force of the Earth — the force exerted by the Earth’s gravity that we’re all familiar with — exerts a force on your roommate that pulls him toward the Earth. The gravitational force only acts on objects that have mass, and the magnetic force only acts on charge.

What is a charge? Well, physicists like to break things down as simply as possible, and the most simple charge model is that of a static point charge, which is a charge that has a particular location, but no volume, and is not moving. The closest you get to one of these in real life is an electron, the particle that orbits the nucleus of an atom. You may recall that an atom has a nucleus that contains protons, which are “positively charged”. Orbiting around the nucleus are electrons, which are “negatively charged”. In a metal, the outer electrons in each atom have more freedom to move than in a material that magnet don’t stick to. The electrons are free to align themselves with the magnetic field that radiates from a magnet, causing the object to feel a push or pull from the magnet.

Modeling an electron as a static point charge is a total lie, by the way. An electron doesn’t stand still, and it occupies a volume, but cannot be precisely located in space, so it pretty much fails as a static point charge on all counts. The trick with physics models, and the source of much confusion for all the regular folks trying to learn a bit about science, is this: it doesn’t actually matter that the electron utterly fails as a static point charge or that point charges, a prominent and indispensable tool in the study of electricity and magnetism, do not exist in reality, because perpetuating this falsehood allows us to create accurate models of nature under certain conditions. The model of an electron as a point charge fits some applications quite well, so we tend to use that fact to our advantage in realms where it works, and abandon the lie in realms where its falsehood becomes apparent. Additionally, point charges are tools for thinking about electric and magnetic effects in the simplest terms possible, and from these simple terms, physicists build up larger models of nature that are tested again and again by experiment and pass every time. Hopefully you’ve bought this argument, but I encourage you to be skeptical and think it through.

So a mass exerts a gravitational force on another mass. Does a charge exert a magnetic force on another charge? If the charges were moving, it would. A still charge exerts an electric force on another charge, but not a magnetic force. Magnetic and electric fields have parallel properties, and are interrelated, but there are some key differences. A point charge can also be thought of as an electric monopole. It’s a single charge with a uniform electric field radiating out from it in all directions, and this field carries the electric force. An electric dipole, “di” meaning “two”, can be most simply modeled as one positive charge some short distance from one negative charge. The electric fields are drawn toward each other and orient themselves in a pattern much like the iron filings in the magnetic field of a bar magnet, going from one charge to the other.

A magnetic field springs forth from moving charges, with the field itself curling around a wire on which charge flows, and the magnetic force pointing radially outward from that wire. If you have a circular loop of wire with charges moving along it, aka, a wire with an electric current flowing through it, the magnetic field will still curl around the wire, such that the magnetic field is all pointing upward from the center of the loop, and downward around the outside (diagram). Now, this is getting somewhat taxing to visualize, but if it were possible to have an electric dipole where the distance between the two charges was zero, its electric field would look exactly the same as the magnetic field of the current loop if the radius of the loop was zero! See what interesting “coincidences” we find when we use oversimplified theories full of lies? The current loop is actually a magnetic dipole. As far as we can tell though, there is no magnetic monopole.

The electrons in a material spin, and this spinning, like current going around a loop, creates a magnetic field. These spins are usually oriented randomly through the material, so there’s not net magnetic field outside because all the tiny magnetic fields points in all directions and cancel each other out. In bar magnet, however, these spins are all oriented in the same direction, creating a magnetic field outside the material. Similarly, the path of the electrons around the nucleus creates a current loop, and these loops can also become aligned to create a net magnetic field.

One large reason physicist search for magnetic monopoles is that Maxwell’s Equations, the equations which, coupled with Lorentz’s Force Law, describe all of classical electrodynamics, would be more symmetrical if they existed. I am serious. Physicists want nature to be simple and beautiful and symmetrical–probably because it is, in many cases–and search for new ways in which it is so. There are other reasons too, but do not underestimate the sort of aesthetically pleasing equation OCD physics get into their heads.

I suppose I should actually state a mission. It will be amusing and possibly informative to look back while from now and see what I thought this blog‘s mission might be at its conception. Well, here is goes:

I have decided to share with an internet audience my thoughts on science, of which I have a wide variety. I intend to place particular emphasis on explaining elements of the hard sciences — concepts, experimental techniques, why you should care if you don’t already, etc — in a way that is comprehensible to any adult of sound mind who desires to learn, regardless of educational background in science (or lack thereof).

Why might you be interested in anything I have to say? That is a very good question, and I hope you asked yourself it. In a nutshell: because I am a scientist who talks pretty. I am good at explaining things to people from many backgrounds, and I do actually know a thing or two about science, a broad subject full of topics that are mystifying and vague to many an otherwise well-informed reader.

Cheers,

Dyslexic Mathematician