Marvelous Mubbles

In homeroom, during receipt of planners.

Mubbles: When your home alone and you don't feel good, who are you going to call?

Class: GHOSTBUSTERS

Class looks around and realizes that *everybody* said ghostbusters.

Mubbles: No, the school attendance line. Nice guess, though.

Potential Highlights

I thought to myself this morning: gosh, at least one nice thing about RSI is that people will stop going "oh, you're doing that summer thing. Isn't it hard to get into? I mean, really, really hard to get into?" and then look at me expectantly, like Mr. Mubble did this morning. I'm still not certain what he was expecting.

Oh, no. My sisters decided to play music while doing dishes. That Matt Nathanson song that is supposed to be all sexy and yay but just sounds depressing and awful to me. I will attempt to tune it out.

Anyways, Mr. Mubble. I am really truly going to miss him next year. I think I may have to just drop by randomly with questions when I finally get around to actually reading The Elegant Universe, which I really, really wish I had time to do.

To be honest, though, I think I would have time, if I didn't keep handing said time on a platter to Rube. I'll have hours in front of me, and just a bit of work, and I'll go to take a break, and then I look up and forever has past and I've gotten nothing done and that Gene Wolfe anthology is staring at me, desperately, pleading to be read.

I'm midway through the second or third story of said anthology. The tale centers on the son of a man engaged in human trafficking on a distant planet, and thematically it's centered upon the question of humanity.

I hate how much easier it is to find themes in science fiction than it is in everything else, although I do enjoy it so. I should read more of it, I think. At the very least, it'd be more invigorating to the psyche than the endless stream of bodice rippers is.

Speaking of bodice rippers, I really do need to get Nyx's sister's (Kiwi, is it?) back to her.

Somewhat unrelated but also worth noting: during physics jeopardy in ASR today, team Julie+Tea+Angela beat team everybody-else. It was extremely wonderful.

Hatred and the Physics SAT-II

It's almost enough to make me hate physics.

You know, the whole studying for the SAT-II thing. I'm so behind; I need to get through the whole book in the next five days, because I've forgotten far, far too much. I realize that this will mean a difference of about fifty points in my score, so it's a lot of work for a minimal payoff, but I want those points, so I'm making the effort.

Speaking of physics...*obsessively checks snapgrades.* Oh, look, it's been over a week and Mubbles still has not graded our tests. Oh, how woeful I am, how much I wish to know the truth. I know it will change nothing, but I've never really been a huge fan of suspense.

Some good kinds of suspense: looking forward to RSI, looking forward to being done with my SAT-IIs, looking forward to knowing physics, looking forward to the World Science Festival next weekend. You know, nice, fun things.

I washed three cars today. Granted, it was with Dad's help, and I ended up being the hose-offer, as I was a rather pathetically slow scrubber. At some point during this, I was reminded of a prom event, which, of course, I had never really gotten around to sharing.

I rode to prom in Cormac's car, along with Cammie and Nia. We were driving along, rocking out to the Beatles, when, much to our surprise, we saw a small tree in the middle of the road. The car in front of us swerved massively into the other side of the road and then continued.

"Gosh," we said to ourselves. "That sure does look mighty dangerous."

"We could go move it."

"We should go move it."

"Let's."

"One, two, three, GO!" said Cormac, of course, and the four of us, in rather impressive synchrony, leapt from the minivan. This is particularly impressive when one considers the facts that a) the minivan has rather sticky sliding doors and b) half of our party was wearing high heels. Regardless, leapt we did, and, in quick, effective motions, we cleared the tree to the side of the road and reloaded the car before driving off to the dance.

We spent the remainder of the ride discussing how awesome the aforementioned event was.

Another Round of Particle Physics

A certain someone (i.e. Tea) is rather confused, but doing her best to keep up. As a result, you get to listen to (watch? read?) me go through my notes this week.

My header, outlined to make it bold, is SHP notes, as I had my new notebook, which was supposed to be electrical engineering notes but has already become something of an everything. On the top is a note to self: ask Rube about imaginary particles, which he was kind enough to explain during the break. Apparently, particles can borrow energy from nowhere, so long as they give it back quickly, and this energy sometimes generates new particles, but, in doing so, imaginary particles end up briefly carrying mass. Or something like that.

There is then a large drawing of a flower. Following that is "Unification" with a squiggly line under it, with unpredictable variables underneath it (and I mean "unpredictable variables." I don't know what the variables were). Oh, wait, I remember. It's saying that the standard model can't predict all variables.

Next we have "SYMMETRIES - explain everything." I must take the least informative notes ever. Ooh, now we move onto Field Thoery: must incorporate special relativity, quantum mechanics. At that point, my instructor hadn't yet explained what, precisely, field theory was, so I nodded along quite nicely. Fields are, as I later discovered, functions defined at all points in space time. They can be scaler, like temperature on the Earth, or a vector, like in magnetism. In quantum mechanics, this field oscillates sinusoidally, (like a mattress!), simulating particle interactions, as particles are the waves on a spring. It is at moments like these when I truly appreciate that Mr. Mubble taught us about waves on Thursday.

Then we went into Langrangians, which went completely over my head but had some relation to spring constants that was identified on the powerpoint by "(this is suggestive!)" at which I snorted at poked Allana to point out the ridiculousness of the exclamation point, at which point Rube tutted at my immaturity (this from the boy who attempted to argue with me last year that the penis game is not at all immature).

So, there are infinite waves, which work together like probability waves with particle motion. At places where the waves are added together due to constructive interference, particles propagate. Then there was some math stuff I didn't understand, and I learned that (cursive O) O(x^n) is "x of order n." Apparently whatever I just learned from that math can be applied to a crystal lattice, and the word phonon can be used to describe it.

Page 2! This has a series of notes on it between Allana and I. There was a short asian guy with bowl cut hair and glasses and an MIT shirt in front of us who, I swear to deities, looked exactly like Andy. Rube actually pointed to the guy and said "I be he's going to RSI with you." Anyways, I told Allana that if I guy who looked like that came up to her at Quiz Bowl nationals, he was my friend. She asked me his name, I said Andy, she said what?, so I spelled it on the corner of my page.

"I'll introduce myself as Shaniqwa," wrote Allana.

"I told him you were Allana."

"Names that Asians should not have: Andy and Shaniqwa!"

"Like Allana isn't Catholic" (this works better in reference to her actual name).

Beneath that, in Tea-code, is written "silly instrument," which, second to Wino, is our new favorite euphemism, and is from Canterbury Tales. My use of code to record it prompted both Rube and Allana to poke me repeatedly, trying to figure out what the hell I was writing.

Anyways, back to class....Langrangians, whatever they are, have symmetries called gauge symmetries, but pronounced gage symmetries, unless gauge is pronounced gage and I've been doing it wrong for all of these years. These symmetries apply to the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces, using an equation that includes circles with xs in them that make absolutely no sense. Anyways, the apparently predicts particle size, but this bit is rather boring so I shall skip it. There was something about minimums and partial derivatives (cyrillic d). Anyways, nothing forces a particular ground state, whatever a ground state is, hence it doesn't need to be an even function, so there can be SPONTANEOUS SYMMETRY BREAKING, which yes, is written in all caps in my notes and followed by wooooo!

I believe the wooooo is there because after Allana, Rube and I got back from stealing oreos from orgo and class resumed, the teacher said "and now, how that symmetry breaking occurs," Rube said "yay!" I said "whoooo" and the teacher laughed.

"So, mass comes from the Higgs field," but I still don't know what the 'so' is referencing. And a table! Look, logic. I shall copy this down into my notes so as to give myself the appearance of absorbing the information. Electromagnetism has one photon and is massless, neutral, has infinite range, and is calculated using QED. Weak nuclear has the plus and minus W and the Z, all three of which are imaginary, have gauge symmetry that has been hidden by the Higgs field, and are massive bosons with weak electric charges and zippy decay. Then there is the strong nuclear force, with its eight gluons, which are massless but self-interacting, colored, and calculable using QCD.

The next page starts with another fun euphemism, wino, as in a hypothetical symmetric pair to the plus or minus W. Now, a graph, with lines. "Theoretically, high energy scales will combine forces due to the effect on coupling constants as QED increases rapidly, strong decreases, and weak decreases slowly, finding a common value at ten to the sixteenth giga electron volts." Sure, yesterday's Tea, whatever you say.

Grand Unification Theory can be abbreviated as GUT, in case you were wondering.

Anyways, this one would be tested by searching for the decay of a proton, which would have a lifetime of 10^30 years, so if you watch enough, some should break down, creating observable Cherkov cones. But, after 1/5 a century of searching, we have nothing, so this particular GUT is likely useless, unless we have....

SUPERSYMMETRY (SUSY), which, yes, must be written like that. This would require an operator to switch between fermions and bosons, so there is an equal number of each. However, none of the knowns have pairs, so half our particles are missing. So, let's make up names for the particles that we haven't yet found.

Bosons become bosinos (photon becomes photino, etc.). Fermions become sfermions, including sparticles, squarks, and sleptons.

Allana then turned to me and said "You're such a slepton."

"Huh?"

"Whore."

"Well, you're a strange squark who can't get any."

She laughed. "So which is a better euphemism, wino or silly instrument?"

I said silly instrument at the exact moment that Rube said wino. Soon after that, I began playing tetris with myself on the side of the paper and shading in all the shapes, so there are no more notes, aside from Allan insisting that I am secretly called M.C. Tea, which is note true.

Electrocution

is really, really fun. I know I've told all of you about it already, but, really, I want to record this for posterity, seeing as it was, you know, completely f**king awesome.

Yes, the two asterisks are necessary. Just as necessary as they were last week when somebody modified my science research paper to say some very rude things about my mother. Then again, they said f***e. I'm still not sure what the "e" is for.

So, today in physics, Mr. Mubble comes in with a giant metal ball on a big plexiglass stick ("Oh," said Kathrya, when I told her this. "Was it...big?"). "This," said Mubbs, "is a Van de Graaff generator."

Mr. Mubble poked at the generator and asked, "has anybody ever been electrocuted?"

"On a lamp," I said. "It hurt."

"Me too!" said Umber. "Well, it was basically a lamp, but it, like, wasn't making light, and I was going to change the bulb, so I put my thumb in the socket, but there wasn't a bulb."

"Did you get shocked?" probed Mubbs.

"Well it hurt a lot, so, like, yeah."

Nobody bothered to ask why she bothered to put her thumb in it anyways.

Then Dino went into his bit about sticking a paperclip into a socket in eighth grade (I always knew he was daft), but Caroline started telling me her electrocution story, about a live wire she had to plug into a high voltage lamp for Les Mis, at the same time.

Mr. Mubble wanted a demonstration of what happens when people get charged up. I was selected as the participant because my hair is relatively thin and of a good length. Sergio tried to get a chant going of "Tea, Tea, Tea," but he was, per usual, unsuccessful, and it didn't take much persuasion anyways.

Becca brought over a bunch of textbooks for me to stand on so that I couldn't discharge into the ground. Apparently, that's really uncomfortable, although it seems doubtful that something could be more uncomfortable than getting charged up. I stood on the stack of books, making Mr. Mubbles, who is already shorter than me, look diminutive.

"Put your hands on it," he said.

I slowly extended my hands and touched my fingertips to the metal surface.

"It'll go faster if you add your palms."

I flattened my hands. I stood still for a few seconds, the entire class watching. "Oh my god, my arms are tingling," I said.

Mubbs laughed. "Do you want to stop?"

"No, I'm good, it's just kind of....weird."

Mr. Mubble said some stuff about the science behind it, with me interrupting every few seconds with relevant statements such as "I think my shirt is sticking to me."

"That's supposed to happen." He looked over the progress of the charge. "A few more seconds and your hair should start to stand up. I wonder if we'll get it all the way over your head."

"Wonderful," I responded with a grimace. Predictable, I could see my hair starting to curl up at the edge of my vision a few moments later.

The class started laughing. I stayed there for a while longer, my hair on end, until Mr. Mubble declared me fully charged.

"Anyone want to discharge her?"

Dino, who'd been inching further away from the generator with every minute, scooted backwards another half a foot.

"I'll do it," said Tybalt.

I reached towards him a bit, but I was afraid to touch anything, so he ended up standing and reaching out. I touched his knuckle with the tip of my pointer finger and yelped.

The class laughed.

"Ow!"

"Do it again," said Mr. Mubbles. "She might not be fully discharged."

It hurt more the second time. I squeaked and moved backwards, falling off the books. "That hurt!"

"You might want to touch something metal to get rid of the rest," said Mubbles.

I reached cautiously towards the board and squealed again when I heard the zapping noise and lost some more electrons. I still hurt. I was afraid to do it again, so I went back to my desk. When I sat down, I got shocked again, eliciting another yelp followed by another laugh.

Time Travel

"Mr. Mubble?"

"Yes, Umber?"

"Does the Hubble telescope see back in time?"

"What?"

"Is it like a time machine? Cause you said it can see all the way back to the big bang."

"No, it's not a time machine."

"But, like, if you turned it on Earth, wouldn't you see stuff that already happened."

"No. Well, yes, but not very long ago."

"So, could you use it to look at historical events and see what actually happened?"

"No. The delay is whatever the speed of light is, so you'd only see back a few milliseconds. For instance, right now you're, what, ten feet away from me. Now, let's say you pass out riiiiigggghhht NOW."

"Huh?"

"Now, you're passed out, but I don't see it right away."

"Yes, you do."

"No, I don't."

"You're not going to just stand there while I'm on the floor."

"Well, not for very long. It takes something like three nanoseconds for the image of you falling to reach me, so there's a delay. If you pass out on the moon, the delay is longer. If you pass out on the sun, it's 7 minutes."

"Because if she's on the sun, all she's going to do is pass out," I muttered, forgetting momentarily that the sun is gaseous and you can't truly be 'on' it.

"Wait, so if I took Hubble to, like, Pluto, then would I see stuff that already happened?"

"Yes, but you won't see anything from before your telescope took off."

"Oh. Okay."