Physics: Notes.
Albert Einstein.
I realize he didn’t exactly invent the Universe. But SUCH a scientist! They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.
Just walking around in his own mind (“thought experiments”) he could see the way things MUST work. What others thought were the rules, were only a special case. He took a few inches off of the height of Isaac Newton, his only real rival for the Great-God-Of-Science prize, showing that Newton’s achievements, amazing as they were, were only a door to the true mysteries of the universe.
Einstein guided us through that door.
I have to recyle my “Newton Spinning In His Grave” drawing here (below).
Still Spinning
Einstein came to realize that light has special properties. For some crazy reason, when you measure its speed, it is always the same. No matter how fast or slow you are going.
So he thought about it.
And the ramifications.
When he worked it all out, he saw that the sizes and masses of things follow unexpected rules, depending on how fast you’re going (Special Relativity). He looked at time differently too. And he found an explanation for how gravity works (General Relativity). And he described atoms. And photons (the photoelectric effect) and helped kick off Quantum Mechanics, a bastard child which he had some second thoughts about later in life.
I’ll stop. You can read the Wikipedia article. But what’s funny about this funny guy is that he liked things or he didn’t like them based on some inner aesthetic. If it was beautiful it had to be right.
Beautiful.
So that’s interesting, isn’t it? Our greatest modern scientist was an aesthete. He played the violin. And the piano.
He loved Mozart; he loved Bach.
Indifferent to Brahms.
He began playing the violin as a little child. Real serious.
Once, he was supposed to give a physics lecture to his students (Geneva University). Instead he decided to play his violin for them. He figured they would like it better than a physics lecture.
And understand it a LOT better.
No doubt.
So would he have become a musician if he hadn’t become the greatest physicist of modern times?
No.
He already had a job in the patent office. Maybe he LOOKED like a dreamer with his long flowing hair, but Einstein wasn’t THAT dumb!
After all. He was Einstein.
BehavioralEcology: Tool Use By Octopuses
What has eight legs and.. eight hammers?
Used to be that we had a franchise on intelligence. We were the smart guys. Apes and monkeys chattered mindlessly in trees. Elephants munched at the bottom of them. And octopuses were too dumb to grow a proper set of arms and legs.
Used to be.
We used tools. We had language. We wore clothes. We did karaoke.
The creatures we ate didn’t do any of those things.
But observation by observation, study by study, our distinctions over other species have shrunk.
We still out gun our nearest biological competitors when it comes to dumping carbon into the atmosphere, but we now know that chimpanzees can sign and understand extensive human language as can various apes, dolphins, and parrots. Even walruses.
And the use of tools is definitely out there. We’ve seen it in chimps and other primates as well as birds and even elephants (which have very large brains, as you might expect, with very large “thinking surfaces” as you might not expect).
Now a paper in Current Biology describes the use of tools by Octopuses.
Octopuses are Cephalopods which means non hat wearing ink squirters. If you follow their comings and goings, you know already that their dopey looks are deceptive. They have good memories and are good learners. They routinely solve their way out of mazes and Dr. Maury Schlaffer (University of Teheran) claims he has observed them scavenging old electronic components on the ocean floor and reassembling them into devices such as OPhones and OPods for their own uses.
We would LIKE to believe Schlaffer’s work but, unfortunately, the evidence is kinda weak and we have to give it a ScienceAintSoBadRating of less than 2. The Current Biology paper, however is good. It’s got the “pusses” dragging around shells which they use for protection (“tents”).
That’s thinking ahead.
If I ever DO become a vegetarian, it’ll be because of a scientific study – one like this.
