Thing One: Putting up my paintings.
Tuesday will mark the second anniversary of my moving into this flat. They're going to look great when they're up though.Thing Two: The 2000AD Zarjaz 100-Page Xmas Mega-Special, 2019.
Thing Three: Finally understanding relativity.
Special theory or General, I don't mind which. Back in December I hit a wall roundabout page 54 of Frank Close's Nothing: A Very Short Introduction when he started talking about electric charges without, as far as I could spot, explaining what an electric charge actually is. I mean, I know its effects. But what physically is a charge? Are "positive" and "negative" just names we gave them, and if so what's the point of saying "opposites attract" if they're only opposites becasue we named them after opposites? Without understanding any of this, everything following has to be taken on trust, which given that it's all thought experiments means I'm lost and Do Not Get It. Similarly, I hit a wall in George Gamow's Mr. Tompkins In Wonderland roundabout this illustration (no pun intended):
But since these are the books I'd chosen to read, this means I've also hit a wall in reading generally because I really want to finish these first. Take a sentence like Close's "he made a series of 'thought experiments', more usually referred to by their German analogue 'gedankenexperiment'" though. Are they? Really?
I should move on. I know.
I can't.
Thing Four: The sky above Prague.
Viewers of my Journal of the Plague Year readings may remember me receiving this puzzle back in April. But it's just sky. Also though, sorry, but "an electric charge at rest relative to you, in an inertial
frame, gives rise to an electric field, so in this situation you
perceive there to be an electric field where previously you felt
magnetism"? So, Frank, are you saying that magnets stop working if you
move them, because I'm perfectly happy to believe that and I get that
this is meant to be weird, but I just want to be sure that's what you're
saying. Also I don't know what a field is.
Given this is a stock-taking, it's only fair on myself to end by noting that, firstly: I did get something done today - someone online was looking for plays so I ran a spellcheck on, and tweaked yet another ending for, Jonah Non Grata...
My worst (best?) act of procrastination is as follows. A couple I knew moved to Australia and got married in around 2002/3. A friend and I bought them an art print as a present and I took it into my office, intending to go to the nearby post office and post it the next day or so.
ReplyDeleteIt's still there, in my office, under a pile of books.
The couple in question got divorced two years ago.
Win!
ReplyDeleteHalf-arsed explanations for the physics bits (to be taken with a pinch of salt - well, more of an entire salt mine, really) are as follow:
ReplyDelete1. Everything is made of protons (each proton = +1 elementary charge unit) and electrons (each electron = -1 elementary charge unit) [well, and neutrons too, but they have no electric charge/their charge equals zero]. See Wikipedia: If there are more electrons than protons in a piece of matter, it will have a negative charge, if there are fewer it will have a positive charge, and if there are equal numbers it will be neutral.
2. I'm guessing Frank Close is referring to the fact that a moving electric charge generates a magnetic field - but if the charge isn't moving, you will only be able to observe its electric field. (Unless I'm missing some other bits prior to that nicely convoluted quote.)
3. Think of a field as a mathematical function mapping a certain force/other physical quantity across every point in space and time. Meaning you can predict how an object/physical entity will interact with said force at any given point in spacetime. (I think? But it's well past one in the morning and I can't vouch for the accuracy of anything I've just written - and even if I could, it still wouldn't explain anything whatsoever, most likely.)