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| date | 2001-03-16:19:30 |
| SelfConciousness |
I don't ususally use this journal as a place to bitch, although I'm making an exception today. I also don't make promises or commitments in it. I see a lot of this in online journals, and in my own paper journal--"Must do X" where X ranges from "write a poem about penguins" to "conquer the world." Sometimes such notes come back to haunt me, as I realize that if I'd done them when I said I was going to, I wouldn't be in the mess I'm in now. In my work notebook I've always tended to make lists of things that need to be done, crossing items off as they get done and carrying them forward to new lists if they don't. If something gets carried along too many times it gets either a high priority or the axe. The whole journalling thing is interesting. I've always (from the age of 14 or 15) kept a journal, but putting things online is different. As well as a place to develop my thoughts, an online journal is a place to share the process of creation, to show something of the genesis of my thinking. I used to do this on OWL and before that MDOP, although the feedback you get in such places is almost always negative, becuase the people you hear from are those who want to just tear everything to bits rather than pick up an interesting ball and run with it. Here, there's very little feedback, yet the sense of an audience is important. The sense of ideas floating like soap-bubbles, off into the summer sky, where they can be seen by all, shiny and ephemeral and beautiful. |
| Humans |
Wanted: two people to work in a bookstore, any bookstore. Qualifications: REALLY LOUD VOICES and the ability to carry on conversations in a REALLY LOUD VOICE so that everyone in the store knows exactly where you are and what you are doing at all times. Pay: Comensurate with the carrying distance of your voice. Salary may be higher for a successful candidate who demonstrates an ability to carry on not just business conversations but intimate personal conversations in a REALLY LOUD VOICE. Is it just me, or are these the sorts of job ads bookstores must be posting these days? Am I becoming a cranky old guy? The amazing thing is that I'm pretty deaf (as my audiologist said upon seeing my sonogram, "Err, your hearing is not what we would like it to be in a person of your age.") So if I'm bothered by idiots--particularly employees--in bookstores who seem unable to carry on any kind of communication without what would be called in any other context shouting, what must people who can actually hear think? I look around me and don't see anyone wincing, so maybe it's just me. |
| Anomalies |
High energy cosmic ray physics is a collection of anomalies baled together loosely with theory, speculation and wishful thinking. It's a bit unfair for me to say that, because I've never worked in the field, but I've studied enough of it to be able to defend that impression. There are two types of anomalies--spectral anomalies and individual events. The individual events are the most interesting, because we know the least about them. Spectral anomalies--in particular the refusal of the cosmic ray spectrum to drop off as expected at very high energies--are probably more fruitful in the sense that we can pin them down and study them in more detail, and design experiments to be sensitive to various ideas about what might be going on. High energy cosmic ray detectors are big--typically covering square miles of territory with sparse arrays of detectors. When energetic particles smack into the top of the Earth's atmosphere they release a cascade of radiation, and some detectors are sensitive this radiation shower directly. Others look for the brief flash of Cherenkov light (or radio waves) that is generated. The detectors that are sensitive to the radiation shower itself actually detect particles that travel all the way to the surface of the Earth. By looking carefully at the arrival times of these particles in detectors spread over a few square miles, it's possible to figure out the direction the original, primary particle was coming from when it hit the top of the atmosphere. A couple of very strange events, from an experiment that will remain nameless, were mentioned to me in conversation once. A physicist who had worked on the experiment said that they had seen a couple of heavily hadronic showers, which means that the primary particle must have been a nucleon rather than an electron or a gamma-ray. The showers pointed back to a pulsar, which is a rotating neutron star, and were simultaneous with slight "glitches" in the pulsar's rotation. For some reason I can't recall they'd ruled out protons as the primary particle, and the only logical candidate was therefore neutrons. The problem is, no one has a clue how to accelerate a neutron to such a huge energy--the lifetime of a free neutron is about 900 seconds, so to get one half-way across the galaxy it requires enough energy so relativistic time-dialation will let it live ten thousand years or so. There were only two such events, and they were always afraid to publish them, because the story is just not quite plausible. The most likely explanation is that there was a glitch in the detector, but it's still a deeply curious coincidence that these showers would point back to a pulsar that shifted phase at the same time. |