Category: Blague

Untriseptium is a hypothetical chemical element with the atomic number 137. It is nicknamed Feynmanium in honor of Richard Feynman who noted that, in elements beyond 137, electrons would have to move faster than the speed of light, thus creating, within the atoms, the electromagnetic equivalent of black holes. Because of this, it was speculated… Continue reading Feynmanium: It’s Element-ary

Light is an electromagnetic wave formed by the dance of two complementary pairs: an electric field and a magnetic field. Because the fields oscillate at right angles to each other, and back and forth across the direction of wave propagation, light is a transverse wave. Transverse derives from the Latin word transversare, meaning “to turn… Continue reading Light’s Chiasmic Complementarity

What is this invisible entity we call the human self, or soul? How does it endure over time? Is it always there, day and night, underlying all our activities? The process answer is No. As one of the emergent natural unities in the universe, the human self is no exception, but is quantum in nature.… Continue reading No Thinker Thinks Twice

It’s intriguing to learn that Buckminster Fuller, one of the most inventive minds ever, had two of his major intuitions while gazing at water. One example: “In 1917 . . . Buckminster Fuller was watching the bubbles boiled up in the wake of a Navy ship, and concluding from those millions of changing spheres that… Continue reading Water: Speaking from the Depths

Whereas one concept of intuition is drawn along religious or metaphysical lines, positing that “Intuition is God in man, revealing to him the Realities of Being,” I would make my case by discussing intuition in a more rigorously philosophical manner, revealing—with syllogistic clarity admitting only an occasional lapse (aliquando bonus dormitat Homerus)—its theoretical underpinnings, eschewing… Continue reading “Intuition” in One, Just for Fun

Did you ever “go ballistic,” or “blow your top” with such steam that someone had to “scrape you off the ceiling”? Have you ever “festered” with resentment, “nursed” a grudge, or “come unglued” in LA gridlock? Do some people so rub you the wrong way that they make you “fly off the handle”? Did you… Continue reading Countdown to Silence

In a pithy sentence that has been quoted many times since he first wrote it more than three hundred years ago, the English philosopher John Locke declared: Nothing is in the mind that was not first in the senses. Another great philosopher, Leibniz, came up with a clever, and insightful, reply to Locke: Nothing is… Continue reading What Do You Have in Mind?

Michael Gelb celebrates the power of play as our most effective way to learn. Most widely known, perhaps, for his best-selling book, How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, which has been translated into 24 languages, Gelb is the author of a number of other books and a pioneer in the fields of accelerated learning,… Continue reading Hold Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand

In the year 1514, the great German artist Albrecht Dürer completed a famous engraving that he named Melancholia. In the upper right-hand corner he placed a “magic square” that contained an arrangement of the numbers 1 through 16, as pictured below: Is there something really magic about this square? See for yourself: if you add… Continue reading The Magic Number 34

Raymond Kurzweil makes a fascinating observation: “Computers are about one hundred million times more powerful for the same unit cost than they were a half century ago. If the automobile industry had made as much progress in the past fifty years, a car today would cost a hundredth of a cent and go faster than… Continue reading Hello, Silicon; Goodbye, Carbon