unstable atoms

Holographic string theory and Dance Speed

In issue 2691 of New Scientist magazine, 15 January 2009, Marcus Chown claimed that Stephen Hawking’s black hole information paradox shows that “black holes are in fact not entirely ‘black’ but instead slowly emit radiation, which causes them to evaporate and eventually disappear. This poses a puzzle, because Hawking radiation does not convey any information about the interior of a black hole. When the black hole has gone, all the information about the star that collapsed to form the black hole has vanished, which contradicts the widely affirmed principle that information cannot be destroyed.”
Interesting: information cannot be destroyed. Maybe “information” here has some special meaning. Newspapers here in Thailand have used interesting catch phrases (among them, “organic laws” and “form a national government” - as if laws can be alive, and there has been no national government), and educators use fancy language like “brain-based education”… Maybe this is little more than that. For, otherwise, why do we not know who built the Sphinx and when, how the stones of Machu Picchu were so nicely fit together, where the missing “Tribes of Israel” went, why Lee Harvey Oswald and two Kennedy brothers were shot, and where “labor leader” (and crime boss?) Jimmy Hoffa’s body ended up?
Seems, though, that modern physicists don’t have to make sense anymore. They can talk “authoritatively” about large numbers of dimensions, “orders of infinity” (my ton of lead weighs more than your ton of feathers, or something), and many, many “singularities”! Now, our universe is speculated to have an “event horizon” like black holes - a 2D (but circular, global) shell. Chown writes of “deep physical insight: the 3D information about a precursor star can be completely encoded in the 2D horizon of the subsequent black hole - not unlike the 3D image of an object being encoded in a 2D hologram.” On this surface, tiny pixels contain all the information of our universe (a bit of info per pixel) - and our world may be but a great big hologram. Now, it’s true that our world may be amazingly like a hologram, with everything penetrating everything, and the whole picture kept somehow within every little piece of it, but - and call me weird if you will - I somehow just can’t see us having sex in two dimensions.
String theory and gravity waves indeed.
Not only are we inherently, innately limited by birth and death, and by the vast and the infinitesimal, we’re limited in our capacity to perceive and understand our very selves. Digestion and appetite may well forever remain mysteries to us, as surely will the workings of mind. Artificial, electronic “intelligence” can never be the same as the internal systems which inform (or perhaps compose) us – with chemical as well as electronic messaging, and an elaborate series of connectivities extending, perhaps, even extra-dimensionally. As Kurt Gödel’s famous proof shows, systems have involvement beyond what we can explain! How is it that we have strong hunches, and often look around so rapidly, when someone is inspecting us from behind? We don’t even notice most of what our nose does, though scientists have shown that it functions much more than is readily apparent.
Our limitations don’t stop with failure to know ourselves or our universe - we adhere to protocols of etiquette and propriety that also enforce significant constraints. There is always taboo, bad form, the possibility of provoking anger and socially debilitating embarrassment; and these curtail ability to communicate and explore.
I certainly don’t mean to suggest anything like “too much learning is dangerous” or “there’s no real evidence or fact, merely only opinion” (though I do like Charles Sanders Pearce’s formulation, “Truth is that opinion to which all men who investigate sufficiently are fated to arrive” - except for the ‘fated’ part, that is…)… No, indeed. I’m just saying we need, as 2-year-olds do, to realize and accept limitations and constraints, so as to better proceed with doing what we can, and must.
It needn’t shame us to have inadequate explanations for sleep, beauty, arousal, hate or our many irrationalities. We need to understand ourselves, and our world, as best we can, but even more, we need to learn to live successfully with each other and our environment. In this is meaning, purpose, direction and perhaps, fulfillment. The answer, even, to the question of the meaning of life - it is a process of multiplicity organizing itself into shared, mutually beneficial patterns. I’m not really clear that we need more.

That sounds a bit overblown and preachy, but I can elucidate with a meaningful example: Not so long ago, the members of most communities participated in dancing, if not also singing and/or playing musical instruments of one sort or another. Waltz or square-dance, with call and response or story lyrics, or even just rhythmic line-dancing, this was (and sometimes still is) a backbone of cooperative spirit. It helps align and integrate, synchronizing personal rhythms, facilitating working together, group functionality and mutual aid. People who actively experience themselves as part of something, in this way, or other ways, usually have much less to prove - about their ego and sense of worth, integrity and self. Those lucky folk are aware of fitting in, being accepted.
It’s a great loss to have so thoroughly abandoned that. Jumping up and down to the electronic beat of a techno-DJ is hardly a sufficient replacement. Similarly, our enhanced ability to communicate – hand-phones, e-mail, radio – has led to content-vacuous, often semi-illiterate, text-messages, with limited variety of “smileys”… and some think, increasing hate-spewing. Words now refer to things, possessions - instead of the processes and patterns referred to in ancient sung languages (or so I like to suppose). Processes, cycles, and locations within them… relationship and place in pattern… another kind of valuing…
The search for technological, material comfort proves often counterproductive, with loss of sense of focus, direction and purpose. The great promise of cars, and of TV, have been belied by traffic jams, mindless programming and outrageous expense. For whatever has been gained, much has also been lost.
Surely society can be better organized and arranged, more stable and more conducive to intellectual and artistic creativity and contribution from almost every individual. Is it hard, or bad, to believe that more sharing, and more real satisfaction, is not only possible, but necessary, even essential? We must cease to be deceived by greed and material lust; and also, naturally, more able to do things in group. While also, I hope, maintaining at least some of the freedom inherent in individuality.
Communities of place, occupation, religion, academic interest, age, activity preference, sexual orientation, language, race, background, skill, handicap, involvement and/or obligation can forestall sense of alienation, and similarly of growth of desire for oblivion. And also forestall boredom, depression, anger, anguish, angst and especially despair, providing sense of place and belonging, involvement and acceptance, integrated fun as some moderns still have with ball games and other team activities. But dance, nicely, has no losers.

“Electromagnetic” radiations and the speed of light

Looking up “light” I find it’s considered a kind of radiation; James Clerk Maxwell published on this in 1873. The speed of light was first determined experimentally in 1675; in one of those imaginary vacuums nature so abhors, it travels at ‘exactly’ 299,792,458 meters per second (approximately 186,282 miles per second); and there’s no generally accepted support for the notion that this value has ever changed over time (although, if Big Bang theories are at all correct, very early on it must have). The speed of light, or, better said, perhaps, of electromagnetic radiation, in a vacuum, has somehow come to define the meter (a meter’s now defined in terms of the speed of light – anyone out there see a problem with that? Hint: think pragmatic, functional viability). Light travels slower in water, but somehow also at a constant speed, between the particles of any substance through which it is shining. Its photons excite adjoining particles which in turn transfer on energy, which may appear to slow the beam down, or something like that…; one web entry has it, “time lost between entry and exit results from displacement of energy through the substance between each particle that is excited.” Light doesn’t slow down, energy just gets displaced, like.
Light, an oscillating form of energy, moves from side to side between two limits (motion doubtless not taken into account in measuring light speed). It can convey information from one place to another; our eyes provide us with but a minute fraction of the information imprinted on light entering them. Light travels in waves which sometimes behave as particles (photons).
All recognized forms of EM radiation, in a spectrum ranging from very low frequencies (radio and television waves, microwaves, infrared) to visible light and on to ultraviolet light, X rays and gamma rays, have the same speed in vacuo, and show wavelike nature (with interference, diffraction, and polarization). Light, radio waves, X-rays and gamma rays are all the same type of thing: streams of photons. The only difference among them is the amount of energy in the photons. In the waves, electric and magnetic fields change their magnitude and direction each second, a rate of change (frequency) measured in hertz cycles. The electric and magnetic fields are always perpendicular to one another and at right angles to the direction of propagation. There’s as much energy carried by the electric component of the wave as by the magnetic component.
Matter can’t reach the speed of light - to do so would result in the matter acquiring an infinite amount of mass! Photons have no mass, but do have energy (again, anyone see a problem? e=mc²? If m=0, e=what? not much, but photons are very little? Well, there’s no nothing, except maybe far off perpendicular to our perceptible galaxies…).
Radiant-heat energy is emitted only in finite quanta (photons). Einstein asserted that the energy of a photon is proportional to its frequency; everything has both a particle nature and a wave nature, and various experiments can be done to bring out one or the other. The particle nature is more easily discerned if an object has significant mass.
Electromagnetic (EM) radiation is somehow said to have no mass and travel in waves. The photon, something like a tiny packet of energy, always in motion, is the base particle for all forms of EM radiation. The amount of energy a photon carries makes it sometimes behave like a wave and sometimes like a particle; low-energy photons (like radio) behave like waves, while high-energy photons (X-rays) behave more like particles. EM radiation can travel through otherwise empty space, which differentiates it from other types of waves, like sound waves, which need a medium to move through.

Problems with speed of light are many - not the least of which is the problem of time itself, by which speed is measured. If, at close to the speed of light, matter becomes denser, and chronometers work slower, has time slowed? When your watch is slow, you don’t assume time’s changed speed!
Except when influenced by intense gravity, light travels in a straight line, it’s claimed. But what’s straight? Straight is a mathematical formulation, like number, or parallels. Fine in Euclid’s Geometry, but maybe not in the experiential world, where all curves, if only just slightly. For a while it was assumed gravity had no effect on the path of light, but then it was shown that it does. It bends around planets, and can’t escape “Black Holes”!

Light travels at the same speed regardless of the speed of its point of origin - well, at least as far as we can determine. So much depends on context; we don’t know what speed we’re “really” traveling at, because there’s no absolute point of reference! And what is speed, anyway? Is something going quickly in a small orbit going fast? Maybe so, but what about something spinning? If you spin in a tiny orbit, really, really quickly, will you age slower? I suspect not!
Sound travels in waves but not quantum bursts or particles (quantum theory has electromagnetic radiation flowing through space in photons, also called light quanta, and thought of as packets of energy). Better experiments have been done with sound than can be with light, and people have exceeded its speed. But any measurement of velocity requires a definition of the measure of length and of time, and though great advances in measurement are claimed, all remains relative.
Scientists now say clocks run slower in strong gravitational fields, as well as at great speeds (Earth goes around the sun at 20 miles per second, but the sun, and the galaxy move too… so total speed is more than that, relative to what, we don’t know, except that, maybe, we’re going at only about 1/9000th the speed of light…). Atomic clocks, used since 1972, are pretty good, but we simply haven’t adequate data on atomic (cesium) emissions (or better, oscillations) under (greatly) varying conditions… for instance, in a much stronger gravitational field. Theory holds that if a cesium atom is totally unperturbed - not affected by any magnetic fields, no light shining on it - then its resonant frequency is stable; in reality, the resonant frequency changes all the time, and we’ve no absolute clock (much as we’ve no absolute measure of anything). It’s not really whether cesium activity is regular, but that rates of change can vary, and that ‘scientific’ data, and with all statistics, can be, and often are, manipulated for political (as well as economic) ends. Too much science is underpinned by questionable assumptions, and will surely again be re-writ (given human survival).

Why, I keep wondering, would energy and mass be functions of the speed of light? What kind of relation is that? And, since speed of light isn’t as precise as many like to pretend, or assume, squaring it could lead to a not very spot-on answer. Mass, too, is not as precise a quantity as we might like to imagine: for one thing, separate the parts of a molecule, and somehow you end up with more mass. Gold involves a lot of stored energy – but, I suspect, in a very different manner than radioactive uranium or plutonium.
An even bigger problem is that mass (inertia) and speed are incommensurates; multiplying them seems to me like multiplying height by an interest rate. Mass – according to what unit of measure (International Prototype Kilogram, avoirdupois pound, or the one used by engineers, nicely named the slug)? Speed – in miles or kilometers? And per second, at what rate of relative speed, someone else (but certainly not me) might even wonder.
If you multiply the horsepower of a car by its weight, you get a figure which could help compare its efficiency to other cars – although matters like accelerative capacity, oil use, exhaust production and expectancy for replacement part necessity aren’t included. A lump of granite can do “work” as a doorstop or weight, and copper (gold and silver too) as an electrical conductor, but I’m not sure that’s quite the same concept.
So, what is this “energy” quantity? Certainly not just the potential explosive power which could be produced. Energy is defined as the capacity for doing work. We burn wood or coal for energy (heat) produced, but certainly not gold, nor granite. Nor do we make nuclear energy from granite. Maybe it could be done from gold, but I won’t be expecting that. We use things already emitting energy, radioactive energy.
Is it all just baffling us with “science” or something like the neo-con republican think-tank verbal cons? I hardly know.
What I do know is that our conceptual framework isn’t all we like to believe it to be, and humanity seems to be losing capacity to interact cooperatively, working toward a shared goal. Hunters had to, and rice growers still do, but sense of common goal seems to be dissipating, diminishing or at least in decline.

Here’s a fascinating one: João Magueijo, a native of Portugal and professor at Imperial College, London, has put forth the idea that in the very early days of the universe light traveled faster. His varying speed of light (VSL) theory of cosmology - an alternative to the more mainstream theory of cosmic inflation - proposes that the speed of light in the early universe was of 60 orders of magnitude faster than its present value.
But if light were faster, distances were smaller (expanding universe and all)… time for some ‘duration’ immediately after a Big Bang had no meaning (no way to be measured - no clocks, cesium-133 or anything like that)… and for all we can expect, even gravity acted differently.
Conjecture on string theory, and about a Big Bang too, can not even be called wrong, but only meaningless. There is nothing referential about everything coming from nothing, the “first second” or, despite mystical experiences (which even I have had), some larger, meta-universe. All that is no better than talk of orders of infinity, the square root of negative numbers, or angels dancing on the head, or tip, of a pin. If anything at all can be said of those matters, anything at all can be said of them. An important idea here, usually lost sight of, is that there can be no 1:1 mapping, no complete description of anything, no explanation that takes into account everything. Like it or not, we are limited.
As for e=mc², why not mc³(cubed)? How can it be effectively claimed that the energy within an atom has really been fully quantified? What modern physics has presented us with has largely been but elaborate mathematics - little better than theology. It has not only presumed, but ignored, too much… and been used, perhaps, mostly, as propaganda to prop up political and economic power.
But scientists seem to ignore these matters, perhaps clarifying how some of them can believe in the ‘literal truth’ of the Bible. Can’t tolerate any pesky, enduring mysteries, at least outside of our canons of faith, can we?

More on Einstein, baffling the public and light speed

The more I think about Einstein, and especially about the equation e=mc², the more absurd it all seems. OK, maybe, just maybe, gold involves a lot of stored energy – but, I suspect, in a very different manner than radioactive uranium or plutonium. But why, I wonder, are energy and mass functions of the speed of light? What kind of relation is that? And, since speed of light isn’t as precise as many like to pretend, or assume, squaring it could lead to a not very spot-on answer. Mass, too, is not as precise a quantity as we might like to imagine: for one thing, separate the parts of a molecule, and somehow you end up with more mass. An even bigger problem is that mass (inertia) and speed are incommensurates; multiplying them seems to me like multiplying height by an interest rate. Mass - according to what unit of measure (International Prototype Kilogram, avoirdupois pound, or the one used by engineers, nicely named the slug)? Speed - in miles or kilometers? And per second, at what rate of relative speed, someone else (but certainly not me) might even wonder.
If you multiply the horsepower of a car by its weight, you get a figure which could help compare its efficiency to other cars – although matters like accelerative capacity, oil use, exhaust production and expectancy for replacement part necessity aren’t included.
A lump of granite can do “work” as a doorstop or weight, and copper (gold and silver too) as an electrical conductor, but I’m not sure that’s quite the same concept.
So, what is this “energy” quantity? Certainly not just the potential explosive power which could be produced. Energy is defined as the capacity for doing work. We burn wood or coal for energy (heat) produced, but certainly not gold, nor granite. Nor do we make nuclear energy from granite. Maybe it could be done from gold, but I won’t be expecting that. We use things already emitting energy, radioactive energy.
Is it all just baffling us with “science” or something like the neo-con republican think-tank verbal cons? I hardly know.
What I do know is that our conceptual framework isn’t all we like to believe it to be, and humanity seems to be losing capacity to interact cooperatively, working toward a shared goal. Hunters had to, and rice growers still do, but sense of common goal seems to be dissipating, diminishing or at least in decline.

Some things pointed out many other places on the web:

Nikola Tesla, one of our greatest inventors, deserves credit for much modern technology. Critical of Einstein's relativity work, he said, “General Relativity is a magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates, dazzles and makes people blind to the underlying errors. The theory is like a beggar clothed in purple whom ignorant people take for a king..., its exponents are brilliant men but they are metaphysicists rather than scientists...” (New York Times, 11 July, 1935).
Tesla also said, “I hold that space cannot be curved, for the simple reason that it can have no properties. It might as well be said that God has properties. He has not, but only attributes and these are of our own making. Of properties we can only speak when dealing with matter filling the space. To say that in the presence of large bodies space becomes curved is equivalent to stating that something can act upon nothing. I, for one, refuse to subscribe to such a view.” (New York Herald Tribune, 11 Sept., 1932). He claimed that much of Einstein’s relativity theory had been proposed by Ruder Boskovic: “...the relativity theory, by the way, is much older than its present proponents. It was advanced over 200 years ago by my illustrious countryman Ruđer Bošković, the great philosopher, who, notwithstanding other and multifold obligations, wrote a thousand volumes of excellent literature on a vast variety of subjects. Bošković dealt with relativity, including the so-called time-space continuum ...” (from a 1936 unpublished interview, quoted in Anderson, L, ed. Nikola Tesla: Lecture Before the New York Academy of Sciences. 6 April 1897 : The Streams of Lenard and Roentgen and Novel Apparatus for Their Production, reconstructed 1994). Boscovich claimed that the observer can never observe the world as it is; he can only describe the interface (or “difference”) between himself and the world. A logical deduction from this is that a state of motion of the whole world relative to a stationary observer is equivalent to a state of external motion of the observer relative to the world.
Tesla, in 1936, said that he’d figured out how the universe and gravity worked, and wrote a book titled The Dynamic Theory of Gravity. But the book was never published and upon his death in 1943, the FBI raided his home and confiscated all of his research and notes. Tesla’s papers and other property were reportedly impounded by the United States’ Alien Property Custodian office.
A PBS special on Einstein’s wife stated that he did a lot of his early work with her; then, after their break up, his work wasn’t as good. Others credited with developing SR include, apart from Fitzgerald, Lorentz, Minkowski and Poincare. Although most historians of science don’t credit him with the discovery, some say Poincaré invented at least 90% of special relativity (light synchronization, the relativity principle, philosophical relativity of time, etc.) before Einstein.
Einstein tried to mechanistically explain the universe, and failed. Many of his ideas may have come from patents that he had access to through his Swiss Patent Office job… Tesla may have understood the universe better than Einstein, or perhaps not - his ideas just came to him, he claimed. Tesla’s good friend Mark Twain summed things up nicely: “Nothing exists except empty space and you - and you are but a thought.”

Unstable atomic nuclei

While I’m hardly a chemist, I can think, which lots of chemists can’t, at least not very well or much. Physicists are even worse: see the Schrödinger’s cat babble (either the cat is breathing or not, it’s not about the human observer). Our social structure is arranged so that we tend to believe that we have betters who can do things we ourselves cannot, which is hardly the case, but useful for social control. We’re given fables to live by, to insure some degree of social stability (instead of the egalitarianism of anarchy), and most of us simply accept them. Which causes lots of problems.
Matter, in a manner of speaking, is not discreet. It emits stuff – radiations, and particles that can be smelled, some from decomposition, some not. It doesn’t cling tightly together in discreet units, but is interactive, its boundaries really rather vague.
As is also the matter/energy relationship. Matter reacts; and energy is the advent of reactions of attraction &/or repulsion. Sometimes more is exhibited, sometimes less, but it is NOT an inherent quantity, any more than matter is truly solid. All is interactive, all a temporary state, leading, as it were, to its opposite. Matter and energy come and go.

Radiation is energy in motion, either at light-speed or less (but appreciably greater than thermal velocities, the velocities of molecules forming air). It results from unstable atoms, with an excess of energy or mass (or both).
One type, electromagnetic radiation, includes radio waves, microwaves, infrared rays, visible light, ultraviolet rays, X rays, gamma rays, and the neutrino. These have zero mass when at rest (theoretically). Another includes electrons, protons, and neutrons, particles which have mass in a (theoretical) state of rest. They’re constituents of atoms. When such forms of particulate matter travel at high velocities, they are regarded as radiation. Radiation includes heat, sound, ultraviolet frequencies, the visible color spectrum and EM radiation. Radioactive materials naturally degrade into lighter “daughter” elements, which in turn degrade, culminating in stable elements (a process called fission). When bombarded by neutrons, atoms of a rare type of uranium (uranium-235) release neutrons that split other uranium atoms in a chain reaction.
Unstable atomic nuclei spontaneously decompose to form nuclei with a higher stability. This decomposition is called radioactivity, and energy and particles released during the decomposition process, radiation. Radiation comes from unstable atomic nuclei, travels through space and can penetrate matter. Atoms with unstable nuclei are said to be radioactive.
Put alternately, radiation is a process where energy emitted by one body travels (in a ‘straight’ line through a medium or through space), and sometimes becomes absorbed into another body. In order to stabilize, unstable atoms give off, or emit, excess energy or mass, called radiation. Kinds of radiation are electromagnetic (like light) and particulate (i.e., mass given off with the energy of motion). EM gamma radiation originates in the atomic nucleus while EM x-rays come from electrons, the electronic part of the atom.
A brief digression: my parents were respected and successful educators: my father a scientist (behavioral psychology) and my mother a musician (harp). When I was having trouble with high-school chemistry, my mother suggested thinking of it as like cooking (not recognizing that I was still unclear about how to heat a hot dog). But my father said, no, that’s not right, it’s not the same. I suppose they were both partly right, and that the analogy I’ll use now is similarly only half-way appropriate. Radiation is like smoke, something given off from heat, internal activity, an undergoing of change.
Radiation is classified as either ionizing or non-ionizing. Non-ionizing radiation (visible light, infrared, microwaves, radio waves and long-wave, low-frequency radiation) is lower energy radiation that comes from the lower part of the EM spectrum; it doesn’t have enough energy to completely remove an electron. Energy released from radioactive atoms, ‘ionising radiation’, involves a non-radioactive atom hit by radiation, giving up an electron, and thus ‘ionised’. Ionising radiation is released by nuclear fission. It involves enough energy to detach electrons from atoms or molecules (the process of ionization), and comes from both subatomic particles and the shorter wavelength portion of the EM spectrum (ultraviolet, X-rays, gamma rays and subatomic particles including alpha particles, beta particles and neutrons). Subatomic particles are usually emitted as an atom decays and loses protons, neutrons, electrons or their anti-particles. Ionizing radiation, from unstable atoms, produces charged particles (ions). The three types of ionising radiation are alpha, beta and gamma; ionizing particles include alpha particles, beta particles, neutrons and cosmic rays.
About 1900, it was determined that some radiation is 100 times more penetrating than the rest; the less penetrating emanations became known as alpha rays, while the more powerful ones beta rays, after the first two letters of the Greek alphabet. Beta and alpha radiation are particulate radiation; alpha radiation consists of a stream of positively charged alpha particles, equivalent to a helium nucleus. Beta radiation is a stream of electrons, called beta particles. When a beta particle is ejected, a neutron in the nucleus is converted to a proton, so the mass number of the nucleus is unchanged (here I get lost, as the atomic number increases by one unit). Gamma Radiation, or Gamma rays, are high-energy photons of very short wavelength (on the short-wavelength end of the EM spectrum). The emission of gamma radiation results from an energy change within the atomic nucleus. Gamma emission changes neither atomic number nor atomic mass, but the high frequencies of gamma rays are even more penetrating than X rays. Alpha and beta emissions are often accompanied by gamma emissions, as an excited nucleus drops to a lower and more stable energy state.
Encyclopedia Britannica says, “Until the 20th century, physicists had studied such subjects as mechanics, heat, and electromagnetism that they could understand by applying common sense or by extrapolating from everyday experiences. The discovery of the electron and radioactivity, however, showed that classical Newtonian mechanics could not explain phenomena at atomic and subatomic levels. As the primacy of classical mechanics crumbled during the early 20th century, quantum mechanics was developed to replace it. Since then, experiments and theories have led physicists into a world that is often extremely abstract and seemingly contradictory.” Theories of wave/particle duality and indeterminacy arose, and the public became conveniently baffled. This hasn’t kept North Koreans (among others) from making quite dangerous bombs, though, although it has kept the Swiss from noting the full extent of the real dangers of particle colliders (which may or may not be even more dangerous, but do emit radiation).

Uranium, a silvery-white metallic chemical prevalent in the environment, slightly softer than steel, is unstable and weakly radioactive, and reacts with almost all nonmetallic elements. Normal functioning of the brain, kidneys, liver, heart and numerous other systems can be affected by uranium exposure.
Radiation varies in strength; while casual exposure to gamma rays emitted by some radionuclides can cause severe harm, alpha rays emitted by uranium outside the body poses little threat to human health. But when inhaled or ingested, uranium’s emissions alter the cellular reproductive process, creating great risk of lung and bone cancer. Radioactive substances harm living organisms by emitting alpha particles, beta particles, and gamma radiation, all of which ionize molecules they strike by knocking off a negatively charged electron. Even small amounts of radiation have potential to harm humans – especially ionizing radiation (light is hardly as dangerous). An antidote to uranium exposure is bicarbonate, used because uranium forms complexes with carbonate, becoming much less dangerous. We’re always exposed to radiations, and instabilities, but we can make choices, and it is part of our programming (a part fairly well circumvented in many ways) to try to protect ourselves. I’m afraid we could do a much better job of that, but have abdicated responsibility, allowing ourselves to become dependent on “our betters”. But “our betters” aren’t always thinking things through. Often they’re paid to think this or that, and not something else. Some of them even pay others to do their thinking for them (equally, in a certain way, and not in certain other ways). I was taught that Einstein’s work made atom bombs possible; by now I’m not at all sure there was much of a real connection at all.

And it was pretty weird to see a Yahoo!News headline saying a star had been observed coming out of a Black Hole… maybe that star is carrying info about the Sphinx, Machu Picchu, and some infamous dead folk?