Tag: physics

bosons

may i please borrow some bosons?

because without particulate matter i am dead
in fact i will cease to be
my mind will be clear and my spirit quite free
but the world will be minus a fred

i don’t need that many, but i do need a few
just a handful perhaps, how ’bout three?
one to laugh, another to sing,
and third so i can ask all the questions i ask all the time to everyone i see wherever i am

that will complete what is me.

Waves, Coherence, & the Origins of Inspiration

So I’ve taken a few months off from writing – not because I’ve been out of thoughts and ideas but because I’ve just wanted to take some time to reflect on my thoughts and ideas to date. I’ve wanted to somehow soak it all in and envision a larger realm of thoughts and ideas emerging in my life. I’ve wanted to ride a different psyche wave for a bit – one of absorption and reflection rather than construction and emission.

Waves, phases, and cycles are a major part of our lives. Some are natural, some controlled, and some just plain impossible to understand. Some can be calculated and predicted while others come completely unexpected. What drives these waves and cycles, and how does the combination (or interference) of multiple waves in our lives affect our overall well-being and happiness?

In the physical world, the relation (or correlation) between multiple waves can be described or denoted by something called coherence – how much their phases differ and, when combined, what the resulting wave might look like. Let’s think of coherence for our psyche wave as our level of well-being and happiness that results from the combination of all the waves in our life.

To look at this idea in more detail, we can identify several waves and cycles in our lives: seasons, weeks, days, running and working out, our diet, relationships, playing sports, volunteering and giving, sleep cycles, dreaming big, acting small, being social, feeling courageous, extreme happiness, comfort and security, professional experience, travel, spending and saving, learning and teaching, new thought, and well, on to infinity with this list.

Well, this is where it gets tough. Given the complexity and often complete unpredictability of these waves and cycles, how can we ever determine what our resulting psyche wave will look like, or at least what it should look like? How can we identify the properties of these waves – that is, how frequently they come around, how high they take us, how low they take us, how they change in time, what interactions they make with other waves, and what really drives them from the get go?

These may be questions for many millennia, but I want to look at the most general driver that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently: inspiration. The source of true inspiration is seemingly quite unpredictable yet it is the major driver of a peaking (or cresting) psyche wave of well-being and happiness.

From where does one find inspiration? Is it something to be harnessed and propagated, or is its movement about society entirely beyond our control? From where do we find the courage to venture and the fuel for adventure, the motivation to take on the world and the drive to motivate the world around us? Is inspiration in itself a natural cycle of crests and troughs or can we deconstruct it into its own understandable DNA? What drives the waves of inspiration?

In my search for the end of the internet, I found an interesting post on inspiration by “Duff McDuffee” on Precision Change, a personal development blog. Thank all Gods, earthlings, and minerals for the internet! Duff spends most of the time summarizing several unique realms of thought surrounding the origins of inspiration but most notably concludes with some very compelling ideas:

“Inspiration is the natural and automatic drawing in of spirited experience, just as inhalation is the natural drawing in of breath. You cannot force inspiration any more than you can force an inhale. Just as inhalation happens naturally as long as you don’t try to control it, inspiration also happens naturally and is just as near and easily available.

Inspiration comes from the same place that dreams come from. It is a place beyond understanding, knowing, and controlling. Inspiration is born of naturalness, of being, of attunement to spirit. When you stop controlling and start listening, inspiration naturally arises.

Inspiration is also wild, mysterious, and unknowable. Inspiration is the stuff of pure creativity. It cannot be measured, predicted, or controlled.”

So inspiration is natural like breathing, mysterious like dreams, and immeasurable like pure creativity? But what about sunsets, hymns, good naps, lasagna, beaches, speeches, births, deaths, memories, wins, losses, and the moments that take our breath away? What about the performances, trips, meetings, phone calls, churches, hikes, and wonders of the world?

To me, inspiration just comes in many forms, expected and unexpected, natural and brought forth by our own acts. Sometimes we can find it easily, and sometimes we can’t. But the key is that we can learn about it, and learn about it we do. As we grow older, see the world, and interact as a society, we can learn about the origins of inspiration. As we learn about it, we can harness it, maintain some coherence between multiple waves, maximize our collective peaks, and maintain the highest level of well-being and happiness. To me, that’s pretty inspiring.

Archimedes: The Father of Mathematics

Summary

  • Birth: c. 287 BC in Syracuse, Sicily (colony of Magna Graecia)
  • Death: c. 212 BC in Syracuse, Sicily (during the Second Punic War)
  • Alias(es): Archimedes of Syracuse
  • Ethnicity: Greek
  • Residence(s): Syracuse, Sicily; Alexandria, Egypt (during school)
  • Language(s): Works were written in Doric Greek (Sicilian)
  • Religion(s): Judaic Christian
  • Father: Phidias/Pheidias (astronomer and mathematician)
  • Mother: Unknown
  • Spouse(s): Unknown
  • Children: Unknown
  • Relatives: King Herion II (unconfirmed), Gelon (unconfirmed)
  • Acquaintances: Conon, Dositheus, Eratosthenes, Heracleides
  • Class/Wealth Notes: Upper
  • Institutions/Degrees: The School of Alexandria
  • Profession(s): Mathematician, engineer, astronomer, physicist, inventor
  • Field(s) of Study: Hydrostatics, Mechanics, Geometry, Calculus, Defense
  • Famous Works: The Sand Reckoner, On the Equilibrium of Planes, On Floating Bodies, On the Measurement of a Circle, On Spirals, On the Sphere and the Cylinder, On Conoids and Spheroids, The Quadrature of the Parabola, Ostomachion, The Method of Mechanical Theorems, Book of Lemmas (Liber Assumptorum), Cattle Problem
  • Legacy: “Eureka!”; known as “The Father of Mathematics”; with Newton and Gauss he is commonly referred to as one of the three greatest mathematicians who ever lived; last words were “Do not disturb my circles”;
  • Cause of Death: Killed in Syracuse, Sicily during the Second Punic War despite orders from the Roman general Marcellus to leave him unharmed. The Greek historian Plutarch reported that Roman soldiers killed Archimedes to steal his scientific instruments. Another version states he was stabbed for ignoring a Roman soldier’s orders because he was too entranced in a geometrical diagram he drew in the sand.
  • Notable Historian(s): Isidore of Miletus, Eutocius, Plutarch, Polybius, Thābit ibn Qurra (Arabic translator), Gerard of Cremona (Latin translator)


Archimedes’ Principle & The First Law of Hydrostatics

Story: Archimedes was tasked to determine if the new crown made for King Herion II was made of solid gold. While taking a bath, he observed the level of water in the tub rise as he got in… leading to his “Eureka!” moment regarding density and displacement.

Science: A body immersed in a fluid experiences a buoyant force equal to the weight of the fluid it displaces. Therefore Archimedes could immerse the crown in water, measure the amount of water displaced, divide it by the weight of the crown, and arrive at the density of the crown.

Impact: Hydrostatics, or the study of the mechanical properties of liquids at rest, was born. Archimedes’ Principle regarding buyancy and density is used throughout science today. It’s used in the building of ships, other industrial manufacturing, and really any type of engineering. Without it, well, we might be “screwed” (see Archimedes’ other works below).


Other Works

  • Archimedes’ Screw – This consists of a long screw enclosed in a cylinder. With tilted so that its bottom tip is placed in the water, turning the screw pushes water up the screw and out the top. This was used to bilge water out of large ship he designed, the Syracusia.
  • Law of the Lever – Achimedes supplied the first real scientific explanation of how levers work in his work titled On The Equilibrium of Planes (although he certainly did not invent levers).
  • Method of Exhaustion and Pi – Archimedes used the “method of exhaustion” to determine approximate areas and volumes of circles. It involves drawing one polygon outside of a circle, and inscribing a similar polygon on the inside of the circle. Since the area of a polygon (at that time) could be worked out more easily than a circle, Archimedes would determine the areas of the polygons, continuously adding more sides to the polygons, computing the new areas, and estimate the area of the circle which falls between those of the inner and outer polygons. This helped him determine an approximation of pi which he set at somewhere between 3.1429 and 3.1408.
  • Spheres and Cylinders – Archimedes, through the use of several means, proved that a sphere had two-thirds the volume and surface area of a cylinder that circumscribes the sphere.
  • Engineering Feats – Archimedes engineered and built several machines, based on the physical properties and relationships he had proven, to help defend Syracuse from the Roman assault. These included giant pulleys and catapults that would lift ships out of the water and shake them up, destroying them (check out the “claw of Archimedes”). He also built a giant mirror that focused the sunlight onto a ship to burn it.


Adsideological Discussion

Archimedes’ life highlights when a needs translates to accomplishments. This is a characteristic of most inventions, because they need money to flourish and inventors need money to succeed and continue inventing. But Archimedes’ accomplishments were much more than this. It seems to me that he was driven by pure curiosity and intellect, a desire to test his mind against science and nature.

At some level, perhaps he spent too little time outside of his passion of mathematics and discovery. A passion is supposed to be a majority consumer of time and energy. However, no legacy really exists, outside of his scientific accomplishments, that tells us about Archimedes the man and Archimedes the neighbor. Perhaps this has something to do with the time frame in which he lived, but a story told is a story told. Regardless, Archimedes was a life changer and contributed an incredible balance of both an immediate impact and a long term impact on society.