More Ricketts and other random tidbits

Gack, just when Beyond the Outer Shores starts to pick up steam with a tidbit about Steinbeck or Joseph Campbell, Tamm goes back to giving discourses on what Ricketts did day by day while he was in the Queen Charlotte Islands (the Galapagos of the North they say.) Starfish collecting on this day, eating crabs with the natives on this day. I do want to finish the book and not skim so as not to miss the entertaining morsels. And it has a The Monster at the End of This Book feel since I know Rickett's death in a freak accident is awaiting me.

Interesting rejoinder to thoughts about religion and how it's bad and how science is making it obsolete: Joseph Campbell in The Hero With a Thousand Faces observed the destruction of native cultures and how the death of their religion broke their spirit essentially. He said Western man was undergoing the same with the ascendancy of science. Specifically how the "rapidly rising incidences of neuroticism, mental disorders, suicides, dope addictions, shattered homes, impudent children, violence, murder and despair in modern society" could be consequences of the death of literal belief in the Bible. Interesting. I don't totally buy it as certainly all of those things exist in a religious society, but interesting.

Listened to AstronomyCast this morning on the subject of antimatter. When you convert energy into matter, you necessarily create matter and antimatter. Likewise, combining matter and antimatter begets energy. About 50% of the output will be lost as neutrinos but it is still a comparatively efficient reaction.

And, so why didn't all matter and antimatter react and destroy each other in the early days of the universe? This question used to confound astronomers as it seemed to violate the laws of physics. The answer is CP Invariance which basically in certain decay processes, the universe prefers to go one way or the other. Where C is charge symmetry and P is parity symmetry. The guys who discovered it eventually won the Nobel Prize (it sure is tough for theoretical physicists. They can't win until their conjecture is proven in a lab. When/if the Higgs-Boson is eventually discovered, Peter Higgs will have a Nobel waiting.)

There is no anti-energy as energy is zero point. There is no anti-time as time cannot run backwards. There is no anti-gravity. If there were an antimatter star, it's mass would cause objects to rotate around it in the same way as regular stars.

We have managed to create (briefly) anti-hydrogen and anti-helium.

This is one of the reasons why nuclear decay is bad. Beta decay emits positrons which if they hit a strand of your DNA, say, they damage it. But they use positrons in PET scans so I don't really understand too well why that is ok.

Speaking of history (or not), I also listened to a show about Tecumseh. The treaty he objected to was the Treaty of Greenville in 1795. He felt Indian lands were owned communally and couldn't be handed over by certain parties in a treaty. The Battle of Tippecanoe was in 1811. Tecumseh died two years later. William Henry Harrison was rather a shit and "Tippecanoe and Tyler too" was nothing to brag about.  The Battle of Tippecanoe was one of the catalysts for the War of 1812 since the Brits collaborated with the natives (although they also stabbed them in the back.) I'd like to visit this site in Indiana. It's near Lafayette. I dunno though if there is much there besides the memorial obelisk.