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Uplifting Thoughts for the Isolated and Depressed in Times of Plague

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The lovely Patricia again, on a more serious note with a sublime piece from GF Handal often called just, "Largo from Xerxes"

The opera was a commercial failure with only five performances. But, the tune, resurrected a hundred years late is one of his most popular. Originally composed for a soprano castrato, I find Patricia far more enjoyable to watch.

Frondi tenere e belle
del mio platano amato
per voi risplenda il fato.
Tuoni, lampi, e procelle
non v'oltraggino mai la cara pace,
né giunga a profanarvi austro rapace.

Ombra mai fu
di vegetabile,
cara ed amabile,

soave più.
A love song to a tree sung by a castrato playing the part of a Persian emperor.
And we think we're weird here on Crux Forums! :p
 
A love song to a tree sung by a castrato playing the part of a Persian emperor.
And we think we're weird here on Crux Forums! :p
It can't be more uplighting than the Divine Mozart sung by the divine and delectable Patricia Janečková, German-born Slovak. (19 at the time of this recording)
 
This chant is written in French Trouver, (correct me if I'm wrong, Eul) by Guiot de Dijon. it speaks of an unmarried lady who mourns her friend who has left for the Holy Land. Fearing that he will not return, she implores divine protection for him and, in the meantime, refuses any idea of marriage with another. A little know fact is the Guiot also is known for originating a mustard recipe.
Written by a French (actually a Burgundian) trouver/ trouvère, in Old French/ Langue d'Oil. Dijon is famous for its mustard, though sadly it's not made there any more. I didn't know Guiot was credited with inventing it, according to Wiki it was first served at the table of Philippe VI, a century later than Guiot. But it was probably a woman who thought of it.
 
Lets get the juices stirring--isolated people have been sitting around too much.
Men of Harlech
"Freedom, God, and Right!" (rather uncompromising)
The performance in "Zulu" is unforgettable, though historically inaccurate. The movie calls the unit South Wales Borderers, but the unit was not in fact called that until two years after the battle, Of the 122 soldiers of the 24th Regiment present at the Battle of Rorke's Drift, 49 are known to have been of English nationality, 32 were Welsh, 16 were Irish, one was a Scot, and three were born overseas. The nationalities of the remaining 21 are unknown.
But the dramatic impact of the modified "Men of Harlech" is undeniable.

An even more dramatic side-note of true bravery:
Rick Rescorla, Chief of Security for Morgan Stanley's World Trade Center office, sang a Cornish adaptation of "Men of Harlech" with a bullhorn, along with other anthems, to keep employee spirits high while they evacuated during the September 11 attacks. After helping save more than 2,700 employees he returned to the towers to evacuate others until the towers collapsed on him.
 
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Actually a professor showed us that trick in first semester opening lecture, 1988 ... with only slightly different interpretation.
So I guess it's an ancient classic.
Variations on demonstration (not the life lessons) are common in first years physics classes to challenge the students Calculus skills and to understand issues of packing of degenerate matter under extraordinary pressure. "Degenerate" as an adjective in this context means that the electrons have been squeezed out of their orbits around the nucleus. You no longer have atoms as such, just nuclei and electrons floating, unconnected. It is the plasma state of matter.
 
to understand issues of packing of degenerate matter under extraordinary pressure.
That's what we CruxForums moderators do! :devil:

Lets get the juices stirring--isolated people have been sitting around too much.
Men of Harlech
"Freedom, God, and Right!" (rather uncompromising)
Time to bash the Saeson! :devil: Actually more than half the population of Wales is back in lockdown now - though I don't men of Harlech are (yet)
 
Variations on demonstration (not the life lessons) are common in first years physics classes to challenge the students Calculus skills and to understand issues of packing of degenerate matter under extraordinary pressure. "Degenerate" as an adjective in this context means that the electrons have been squeezed out of their orbits around the nucleus. You no longer have atoms as such, just nuclei and electrons floating, unconnected. It is the plasma state of matter.

... And now, let's lift us up to my preferred gods and goddesses of science!
I am predestined for the absolutely new slogan "Make Science Great Again!"


Dear Praefectus Praetorio:

As a presumed specialist for physics, could you explain to me - as easily to understand as possible - the "Feinstrukturkonstante" (sorry, don't know the words in English - double-sorry, just read it in my own link: "fine structure constant") of
α ≈ 1/137 ?
It is interesting for me because I will mention Wolfgang Pauli in a world-bestselling book about coincidences which I will write during the coming 30 or 40 years (I know the probably occuring-appearing problem with my limited lifetime, but if not in this life, I will surely write my book in the next one) and he was the typical re-incarnation of a "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde", always fascinated by this number and dying in a hospital in a room with the no. 137 !


 
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... And now, let's lift us up to my preferred gods and goddesses of science!
I am predestined for the absolutely new slogan "Make Science Great Again!"


Dear Praefectus Praetorio:

As a presumed specialist for physics, could you explain to me - as easily to understand as possible - the "Feinstrukturkonstante" (sorry, don't know the words in English - double-sorry, just read it in my own link: "fine structure constant") of
α ≈ 1/137 ?
It is interesting for me because I will mention Wolfgang Pauli in a world-bestselling book about coincidences which I will write during the coming 30 or 40 years (I know the probably occuring-appearing problem with my limited lifetime, but if not in this life, I will surely write my book in the next one) and he was the typical re-incarnation of a "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde", always fascinated by this number and dying in a hospital in a room with the no. 137 !


I'm not sure if deep-diving into Quantum Mechanics and the basic structure of matter would uplift many readers, (I myself learned just enough QM to hoodwink the proctors into allowing me to earn my B.S.
I also am very skeptical (as Pauli was also a skeptic) of "almost" in math and science. It is true that 10 followed by one hundred zeros and then a 1 is almost the same as 10 followed by one hundred and one zeros. But they aren't the SAME and their proximity is with higher meaning. The reciprocal of the fine structure constant is close to 137. As a dimensionless number (that is it doesn't matter what measurement system you use, it will have the same value in America, Germany, or The Andromeda Nebula - note @Eulalia ), it is one of those factors of nature that seem determined by the initial structure of the Big Bang or the mind of God (whichever way your faith in creation takes you). It is measurable and the best value to date is about 137.035999174. It is a ratio between other values in nature that are fundamental to physics. The man who first proposed it was Arnold Sommerfeld who defined it as the ratio between the speed of an electron in the first circular orbit of the relativistic Bohr atom to the speed of light in a vacuum. Thus you may think of it as a ratio between quantum motions and photon (light) motion.
Or as just a number (remember "Deep Thought" giving the answer to everything as "42")
 
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Thank you very much! I must say, I am always looking for a deeper meaning in almost everything and "just a number" does not really convince me - especially after I have read the fifth volume of the four-books-trilogy "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams.
There simply must be more than the "42!" on my towel, it simply has to!
:amen:
 
Thank you very much! I must say, I am always looking for a deeper meaning in almost everything and "just a number" does not really convince me - especially after I have read the fifth volume of the four-books-trilogy "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams.
There simply must be more than the "42!" on my towel, it simply has to!
:amen:
It might turn out to be one of those ratios, where if it was different, the universe (if such a thing had come about) would just shoot off in some completely different direction, such as dissipating or collapsing completely ...

the 'reason' for it having a certain value then becoming, frustratingly, "because we're here".

An interesting question of course with such constants is, were they unchanged over the entire history of the universe and if not, how can we find out.
 
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There simply must be more than the "42!" on my towel, it simply has to!
You will remember then that it only took "Deep Thought" the greatest computer ever built a mere seven and a half million years' work to come up with 42?
Can you imagine how many eons upon eons it would have needed to answer really tough questions like - What do women think? (That is, if they think at all - which many men doubt). Or -
Who put the bomp in the bomp bah bomp bah bomp
Who put the ram in the rama lama ding dong
Who put the bop in the bop shoo bop shoo bop
Who put the dip in the dip da dip da dip????????????????????

Enough deep thought. Let's please get away from dead boring science and philosophy and back to Uplifting thoughts like:
Anita Ekberg -Sweden's gift to horny teenage boys in the early 69"s
1601517769450.png
I should know! :very_hot:
 
Thank you very much! I must say, I am always looking for a deeper meaning in almost everything and "just a number" does not really convince me - especially after I have read the fifth volume of the four-books-trilogy "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams.
There simply must be more than the "42!" on my towel, it simply has to!
:amen:
A little more should be said. The fine structure constant isn't just a figment of someone's imagination.
But first, listen to Feynman. "You can understand relativity, see after a guy proposed it why it must be so. But, nobody understands quantum mechanics."
Second, there is something called a "black body"--a perfect absorber and perfect emitter of radiation (the sun comes close). So, people worked up a theory that would calculate the energy in a black body using what are called "harmonic oscillators"--basically little springs with small masses attached--int the walls. When they did the calculation, the energy went to infinity. This was called the "ultraviolet catastrophe" (physics is dramatic). Max Planck (you certainly know of him in Deutschland) solved the problem. Instead of using an integral (a calculus concept) which allowed each oscillator to have any energy, he assumed that only certain energies were allowed for each "frequency" v (v, 2v, 3v, etc.) and did an infinite sum. That solved the problem. No one understood why it should be so, but the little packets of energy corresponding to integers were called "quanta". This was in 1905 or so.
Meanwhile, people had been shining light on hydrogen to see what would be "absorbed" and would would come out. It turned out that only certain "wavelengths" (colors) were absorbed or emitted--the energy was also "quantized".
Why? A long process followed, spearheaded by Heisenberg and Schoerdinger and an equation was developed (for a single H atom it can be solved, but to this day the meaning of the solution is disputed--the absolute square of the solution at each point in space around the proton is said to be the probability of finding the electron in that place (and it can be 0--no chance at all). This was around 1926. The solutions could also lead to the energy of the electron, and it was found that electrons around the hydrogen's proton (in "orbits") could only have certain energies. Again, they were "quantized". This explained the light spectra--an electron, depending on which orbit it was in, could only absorb a single color of light to move to a higher orbit, and when "tickled" to move to a lower energy orbit could only emit a specific color. (These spectra--the colors a given atom can emit--are so characteristic of the element that they can be used to determine the composition of stars based on the starlight, and were used to identify new elements before the Periodic Table was filled in. There are lots of complications because atoms and stars move and there are so many of them, but nonetheless it all works.)
So, where does the constant come in? Schroedinger's equation wasn't perfect. There were some faint lines close to the bright ones that weren't accounted for, the "fine structure". Your man Pauli proposed that electrons had "spin" (like a little round top). This helped, but it took an equation that was consistent with relativity (Schroedinger's is not--Dirac finally came up with one after others had failed) to explain them. Finally, the "fine structure" was explained, and the constant appeared in the results.
The math for all this is complicated (but there is math that is far more complicated) but the real problem is that one can't really see where the equations come from ("see why it must be so"). People just bumbled into them--it is not clear, at least to me, how they thought them up.
You recall the "Higgs boson"? ("Bosons" and Fermions" come from Pauli's spin--fermions like electrons in the same "state" cannot occupy exactly the same space at the same time because they have "spin"--the spins at least must be different, but "bosons" without spin bunch up: this is called the "Pauli exclusion principle".) The math is getting bad, and Higgs himself was asked about his discovery and the modern explanation of it. "I should have taken more maths in school--I can't really follow what they are doing anymore."
Oh, and there are other things nobody really understands (even though they can be calculated to a good approximation). For instance, Dirac's solution calls for a "quantum vacuum"--particle pairs periodically just pop out from nowhere in empty space and then "annihilate" each other. (This is the basis also of the postulated "Hawking radition" that Hawking proposed is emitted from black holes--which aren't supposed to let anything out. The idea is that if a particle pair "pop out" around a black hole, and the hole eats one of the pair, then it has to emit some energy to compensate so the energy of the universe doesn't change. There is something called the Casimir force based on these phantom pairs which has experimental support, so it's not just a fantastical theory.)
Also there is also what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance" which is analogous to two twins on opposite sides of the world. If one drops dead, then the other must also at the same instant. This was shown by the late John Bell (who like Hawking died before he could get a Nobel Prize because the experiments hadn't been done to confirm it yet).
"Nobody understands quantum mechanics". Feynman also asked whether the universe was like an onion. You peel off one mystery by explaining it, and a new mystery layer is exposed. Well, it gives people something to do.
 
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A little more should be said. The fine structure constant isn't just a figment of someone's imagination.
But first, listen to Feynman. "You can understand relativity, see after a guy proposed it why it must be so. But, nobody understands quantum mechanics."
Second, there is something called a "black body"--a perfect absorber and perfect emitter of radiation (the sun comes close). So, people worked up a theory that would calculate the energy in a black body using what are called "harmonic oscillators"--basically little springs with small masses attached--int the walls. When they did the calculation, the energy went to infinity. This was called the "ultraviolet catastrophe" (physics is dramatic). Max Planck (you certainly know of him in Deutschland) solved the problem. Instead of using an integral (a calculus concept) which allowed each oscillator to have any energy, he assumed that only certain energies were allowed for each "frequency" v (v, 2v, 3v, etc.) and did an infinite sum. That solved the problem. No one understood why it should be so, but the little packets of energy corresponding to integers were called "quanta". This was in 1905 or so.
Meanwhile, people had been shining light on hydrogen to see what would be "absorbed" and would would come out. It turned out that only certain "wavelengths" (colors) were absorbed or emitted--the energy was also "quantized".
Why? A long process followed, spearheaded by Heisenberg and Schoerdinger and an equation was developed (for a single H atom it can be solved, but to this day the meaning of the solution is disputed--the absolute square of the solution at each point in space around the proton is said to be the probability of finding the electron in that place (and it can be 0--no chance at all). This was around 1926. The solutions could also lead to the energy of the electron, and it was found that electrons around the hydrogen's proton (in "orbits") could only have certain energies. Again, they were "quantized". This explained the light spectra--an electron, depending on which orbit it was in, could only absorb a single color of light to move to a higher orbit, and when "tickled" to move to a lower energy orbit could only emit a specific color. (These spectra--the colors a given atom can emit--are so characteristic of the element that they can be used to determine the composition of stars based on the starlight, and were used to identify new elements before the Periodic Table was filled in. There are lots of complications because atoms and stars move and there are so many of them, but nonetheless it all works.)
So, where does the constant come in? Schroedinger's equation wasn't perfect. There were some faint lines close to the bright ones that weren't accounted for, the "fine structure". Your man Pauli proposed that electrons had "spin" (like a little round top). This helped, but it took an equation that was consistent with relativity (Schroedinger's is not--Dirac finally came up with one after others had failed) to explain them. Finally, the "fine structure" was explained, and the constant appeared in the results.
The math for all this is complicated (but there is math that is far more complicated) but the real problem is that one can't really see where the equations come from ("see why it must be so"). People just bumbled into them--it is not clear, at least to me, how they thought them up.
You recall the "Higgs boson"? ("Bosons" and Fermions" come from Pauli's spin--fermions like electrons in the same "state" cannot occupy exactly the same space at the same time because they have "spin"--the spins at least must be different, but "bosons" without spin bunch up: this is called the "Pauli exclusion principle".) The math is getting bad, and Higgs himself was asked about his discovery and the modern explanation of it. "I should have taken more maths in school--I can't really follow what they are doing anymore."
Oh, and there are other things nobody really understands (even though they can be calculated to a good approximation). For instance, Dirac's solution calls for a "quantum vacuum"--particle pairs periodically just pop out from nowhere in empty space and then "annihilate" each other. (This is the basis also of the postulated "Hawking radition" that Hawking proposed is emitted from black holes--which aren't supposed to let anything out. The idea is that if a particle pair "pop out" around a black hole, and the hole eats one of the pair, then it has to emit some energy to compensate so the energy of the universe doesn't change. There is something called the Casimir force based on these phantom pairs which has experimental support, so it's not just a fantastical theory.)
Also there is also what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance" which is analogous to two twins on opposite sides of the world. If one drops dead, then the other must also at the same instant. This was shown by the late John Bell (who like Hawking died before he could get a Nobel Prize because the experiments hadn't been done to confirm it yet).
"Nobody understands quantum mechanics". Feynman also asked whether the universe was like an onion. You peel off one mystery by explaining it, and a new mystery layer is exposed. Well, it gives people something to do.
Thanks, a good explanation ... I do remember learning about the 'ultraviolet catastrophe' but long since it dropped from active memory.

For me, explanations that approach things by way of going through the history of ideas and scientific challenges tend to be the easiest to follow.

In comparison for instance the wikipedia page on the fine structure constant isn't massively helpful for a person like me who doesn't have any physics background.
 
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