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Showing posts from September, 2008

On not trying to fix you

Back in July, I posted a YouTube link to a beautiful song, Fix You , by Coldplay. It is easy in the emotion of the music to give assent to what is expressed in the chorus of the song: Lights will guide you home And ignite your bones And I will try To fix you But of course it's never as easy as that - there are no quick fixes for those in the kind of emotional distress that is portrayed in the song. So here is my creative response to those words ... Not trying to fix you I have no lights to guide you home, Instantly incandescent and full of hope. The little flame that burns in my heart Will perhaps suffice To see you, stumbling and hesitant, Around the next corner; Accompany you on the next twist In your path to light or darkness. For half an hour or maybe more I'll be alongside you An arbour of safety In which, if you are able, You'll begin to unpick The fettering threads of despair And release to me The gift of your story. And I, not guiding, But quietly receivi

Large Hadron Collider Rap

Just LOVED this, physics geek that I am. "Alpinekat" (Kate McAlpine) is a science writer at the CERN experiment in Europe, which will turn on the largest particle accelerator in the world, the Large Hadron Collider, on Sept 10th. There are some who say it will cause the end of the world, because of the potential to create "mini-black holes". Black holes are normally formed by the gravitational collapse of a massive star, but it is possible that the conditions at the time of the Big Bang could have created extremely small black holes. Steven Hawking postulated that such holes would evaporate by the emission of radiation, called "Hawking Radiation", a result of a virtual particle-anti particle pair being produced at the black hole's event horizon. Some physicists now believe that Hawking radiation may be a flawed concept and that a mini black hole created by the LHC would not evaporate, but could cause a cataclysmic disaster and swallow up the earth.