Richard P. Feynman
“I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is … I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.”

A Man Carrying a Child and Helium Filled Balloons on Mother’s Day 2012

The use of helium to fill inexpensive balloons, such as those shown above honoring Mother’s Day, could cease as the result of the elimination of cheap sources for this gas.

An interesting article on the availability of Helium can be found at:

A different kind of gas shortage

Dyson fans are intriguing to watch. The inventor Sir James Dyson gave an interesting interview where he talks about his fan’s design and also about his political agenda.

I created a short video that illustrates how the fans were being showcased at an art festival that I attended http://www.flickr.com/photos/bill_angel/5950898660/

I also used a bit of that video to create a depiction of the fan’s operation, shown in slow motion ( 1/4 normal speed ). I added a music track to enhance the video’s entertainment value. 🙂

I would like to inject a speculative idea. There is a form of matter that would only interact with visible matter gravitationally, i.e. only through the exchange of gravitons. This would be matter that existed IN ANOTHER UNIVERSE. The idea that matter in our universe could be interacting with matter in another universe is an idea taken seriously by string theorists. For example, the idea is discussed in the book “The Hidden Reality, Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos” by Brian Greene There is also a tie in between what I suggested and the so called Ekpyrotic Universe, which is based on the idea that our hot big bang universe was created from the collision of two three-dimensional worlds moving along a hidden, extra dimension. The tie in is that the Ekpyrotic model posits as I do the gravitational interaction between two “branes“ that are situated close to each other. See http://wwwphy.princeton.edu/~steinh/npr/

Here is an animation by Neil Turok showing the interaction between two “brane” universes, which illustrate his Ekpyrotic Universe model. His animation could also serve to illustrate the gravitational interaction between two “branes” corresponding to different universes. From the perspective of our universe, the matter in the other universe would be “dark matter” whose presence is felt only via gravitational attraction  i. e. the exchange of gravitons.