Science Wednesday

 I think it was about sixth grade when a handful of us guys who thought we were the smartest guys in the class got together and were discussing school subjects.  Stuff like history and English got our scorn because there was something soft about them.  There were a lot of things in them where there was no single correct answer. unlike science and math where you were always right or wrong and there was no fuzzy inbetween.

I got a telescope and took it out into the backyard at night, and bought weird stuff at American Science and Surplus way out at the northwest edge of the city (still there). and I started reading Isaac Asimov, the smartest man in the universe.

So that's what I was doing when other guys were doing things like dating girls, but right at the end of high school I began drinking beer.  Which I continued to do at college where I discovered that most of the chemistry I had learned at Gage Park High was like thirty years out of date, and compared to those hotshot suburban kids with all their well-learned study habits, I was not as smart as I thought I was.

But then I got into this crowd of baby beats and that morphed into hippiedom, and this was pretty good, not the least because all of a sudden there were girls.  

But hippies were not big on science at all. It was square, it was dull.  They did not like that thing where everything had to be right or wrong, they wanted to let a thousand flowers bloom, astrology, crystalogy, drug addled gurus, this was their cosmic outlook rather than that stodgy, basically fascist, science which they scorned, and I kind of turned away from it myself.

Well hippiedom, we like to think that it ended the unpopular war, but probably those body bags coming back to America had more to do with that.  I will give us credit for one thing though, almost nobody has to wear a tie anymore, unless you're a lawyer and those guys probably want to wear a tie.

But by the mid seventies it had gone mainstream and there was nothing much to it.  I spent my Sunday afternoons riding my bike around campus scouting for yard sales where I could buy books on interesting subjects practically for free, and one day I came across a surprisingly thin book that explained relativity, special and general.  How could that be?  I had heard somewhere that only like a handful of people in the world understood relativity.

Not true apparently, and it was not all that hard.  I couldn't understand all the equations, but I think I got the general gist.  And from there on I read a lot of books on relativity, quantum mechanics, and cosmology.

Cosmology is a little fuzzy for my tastes, but it's like many things, interesting to discuss over a pot of coffee or a pitcher of  beer.  Anyway this buddy of mine, who was more into music and philosophy has now discovered science and the universe of youtube.  He sent me this video this morning and I thought I would pass it on to the silent dawgs to see if I can get a yelp out of you guys.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzkD5SeuwzM