Speed Limit 670,000,000
And that, my friends, is the speed of light per hour.
Imagine seeing that on an interstellar highway sign! Truth be known, I've known the exact speed of light per second since third grade, when I read the figure 186,282 miles per second in The Big Book of Amazing Facts. But reading this among many other things last week in David Bodanis' : A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation (ISBN 0425181642) proved especially enlightening. And this was NOT synonymous with a biography of Albert Einstein who originally developed the equation (by the way, he hated the term "relativity" to describe it), although he does a get a decent role. No, this is a biography of the equation's components and intermittently the people involved in developing our modern concepts of energy, equals, mass, the speed of light (represented by c, the first letter of the Latin word for swiftness), and squared. And then, what does it mean?
That is a serious question.
From the preface: "I realized there could be a different approach. The overall surveys of relativity fail not because they're poorly written, but because they take on too much. Instead of writing yet another account of all of relativity, let alone another biography of Einstein -- those are interesting topics, but have been done to death -- I could simply write about . That's possible, for it's just one part of Einstein's wider work." I'm amazed Voltaire, the eighteenth century philosopher whose novella Candide I read every year to remind me how dumbfounded human beings can be, made it in here. He was the writer and his paramour Émilie du Châtelet the physicist (almost an intellectual soul mate, if you will) and partly their work led to nailing down the speed of light as other than infinite. Or to put it in Voltaire's words when she died:
I have lost the half of myself -- a soul for which mine was made.
I could say the same of Martha, should she go before I do. But enough morbidity; this morning before work I got some laps in walking through Town and Country Mall and stopped for a few minutes at Gideon's Trumpet, where they owner Kay was genuinely glad to see me and wondered how I had been doing. I think the last time we met I was sniveling and snot was draining from my head, so that's saying a lot! But we had some good conversation as I'd caught her in the midst of doing store inventory, a truly fun task. (Insert sarcastic font here.) Also, it's one of my frequent stops on Main Street for coffee before I get to work ... the sad thing is they accept donations but somebody stole the donation box last year so you have to pay it to whoever's working that day at the counter. I can accept that, it's just frustrating.
Now Baum? I'm a sucker for Baum.
L. Frank Baum, that is, whom you and I most likely know best as the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its thirteen sequels. And many other books as well, but they're under so many aliases that it's entirely possible all of them will never be found, like W.C. Fields' bank accounts. In 1905, the creator -- within the books, the Royal Historian -- of Oz produced and in 2010 with illustrations by Donald F. Montileaux the South Dakota State Historical Society Press released The Enchanted Buffalo. ISBN 9780982274934 Think The Lion King meets Faust among a herd of buffalo; in this fairy tale, Barrag comes to power with the help of dark magic, killing the king whose son Okun vows revenge when he's older. Barrag seeks to forestall this by using magic to enchant Okun, thus the title, into becoming a panther. And that proves to be his undoing, for "he forgot that a full-grown panther is the most terrible foe known to his race."
Seriously, I thought he'd turn him into a lizard.
But evil beings tend to be careless when all they're focused on is power. In the short story anthology I got to read last week, Sandra McDonald's Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories (ISBN 9781590210949) blends a high-sounding adventuress into a (to us) semi-fantastic world where fire stations have fantasy being mascots, talking statues lead abused children to new lands, and a Great War sweeps all in its wake. Charles Dickens meets Ray Bradbury and the writers for Once Upon A Time (come on, you KNEW I'd work in a reference before the mid-season premiere in March!) with handy and often red-herring author's notes. At least that's how I read some of them, and I admit I'm touched by a good telling.
So say we all,
David
Imagine seeing that on an interstellar highway sign! Truth be known, I've known the exact speed of light per second since third grade, when I read the figure 186,282 miles per second in The Big Book of Amazing Facts. But reading this among many other things last week in David Bodanis' : A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation (ISBN 0425181642) proved especially enlightening. And this was NOT synonymous with a biography of Albert Einstein who originally developed the equation (by the way, he hated the term "relativity" to describe it), although he does a get a decent role. No, this is a biography of the equation's components and intermittently the people involved in developing our modern concepts of energy, equals, mass, the speed of light (represented by c, the first letter of the Latin word for swiftness), and squared. And then, what does it mean?
: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation (ISBN 0425181642) proved especially enlightening. And this was NOT synonymous with a biography of Albert Einstein who originally developed the equation (by the way, he hated the term "relativity" to describe it), although he does a get a decent role. No, this is a biography of the equation's components and intermittently the people involved in developing our modern concepts of energy, equals, mass, the speed of light (represented by c, the first letter of the Latin word for swiftness), and squared. And then, what does it mean?That is a serious question.
From the preface: "I realized there could be a different approach. The overall surveys of relativity fail not because they're poorly written, but because they take on too much. Instead of writing yet another account of all of relativity, let alone another biography of Einstein -- those are interesting topics, but have been done to death -- I could simply write about . That's possible, for it's just one part of Einstein's wider work." I'm amazed Voltaire, the eighteenth century philosopher whose novella Candide I read every year to remind me how dumbfounded human beings can be, made it in here. He was the writer and his paramour Émilie du Châtelet the physicist (almost an intellectual soul mate, if you will) and partly their work led to nailing down the speed of light as other than infinite. Or to put it in Voltaire's words when she died:
I have lost the half of myself -- a soul for which mine was made.
I could say the same of Martha, should she go before I do. But enough morbidity; this morning before work I got some laps in walking through Town and Country Mall and stopped for a few minutes at Gideon's Trumpet, where they owner Kay was genuinely glad to see me and wondered how I had been doing. I think the last time we met I was sniveling and snot was draining from my head, so that's saying a lot! But we had some good conversation as I'd caught her in the midst of doing store inventory, a truly fun task. (Insert sarcastic font here.) Also, it's one of my frequent stops on Main Street for coffee before I get to work ... the sad thing is they accept donations but somebody stole the donation box last year so you have to pay it to whoever's working that day at the counter. I can accept that, it's just frustrating.
Now Baum? I'm a sucker for Baum.
L. Frank Baum, that is, whom you and I most likely know best as the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its thirteen sequels. And many other books as well, but they're under so many aliases that it's entirely possible all of them will never be found, like W.C. Fields' bank accounts. In 1905, the creator -- within the books, the Royal Historian -- of Oz produced and in 2010 with illustrations by Donald F. Montileaux the South Dakota State Historical Society Press released The Enchanted Buffalo. ISBN 9780982274934 Think The Lion King meets Faust among a herd of buffalo; in this fairy tale, Barrag comes to power with the help of dark magic, killing the king whose son Okun vows revenge when he's older. Barrag seeks to forestall this by using magic to enchant Okun, thus the title, into becoming a panther. And that proves to be his undoing, for "he forgot that a full-grown panther is the most terrible foe known to his race."
Seriously, I thought he'd turn him into a lizard.
But evil beings tend to be careless when all they're focused on is power. In the short story anthology I got to read last week, Sandra McDonald's Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories (ISBN 9781590210949) blends a high-sounding adventuress into a (to us) semi-fantastic world where fire stations have fantasy being mascots, talking statues lead abused children to new lands, and a Great War sweeps all in its wake. Charles Dickens meets Ray Bradbury and the writers for Once Upon A Time (come on, you KNEW I'd work in a reference before the mid-season premiere in March!) with handy and often red-herring author's notes. At least that's how I read some of them, and I admit I'm touched by a good telling.
So say we all,
David
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