Science
Physics
"The universe is made mostly of dark matter and dark energy," says Saul Perlmutter, leader of the Supernova Cosmology Project headquartered at Berkeley Lab, "and we don't know what either of them is."
A group of 50 international physicists, led by UC Riverside's Ann Heinson, has detected for the first time a subatomic particle, the top quark, produced without the simultaneous production of its antimatter partner -- an extremely rare event.
I have been trying to understand quantum physics. Every time I think I grasp a bit of it, I try to apply that to the world I see around me and the knowledge I thought I had slips away into the realm of the incomprehensible. Richard Feynman warned about that. "It can't be like that." No, it can't, but it is.
And for anybody who thinks she understands how the universe around us operates, look up Bell's Theorem. An action occurring here cannot possibly affect something over there without a field, a force, a particle, a photon, something crossing the intervening space. But it does.
I don't know about this stuff. I just don't know. Is an electron actually a point particle, meaning zero dimensions? I don't know.
Astronomy
If we run our picture of the expanding universe backward (in theory, of course) we arrive at a point as the original location of the Big Bang. Assuming the expansion after that was approximately uniform in density and velocity after that (with localized anomalies) then there is still a center of the universe. If the sky looks the same at great distances no matter which direction we look, we must be close to the center. Maybe the earth is the center, after all. Actually, I think the Big Bang occurred at the corner of 6th and Congress in Austin, Texas, but I might be a couple of blocks off.
Medicine
