Posted on Monday, 22 April 2002 at 08:37 PM. About

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"Explicitly admitted uncertainty is one of the best recommendations a belief system can have." -- Eliezer Yudkowsky

What? I don't know. Something, I guess.
I found a page that lists what I love so much about physics: fundamental stuff that we just don't know. Anyone who claims to know any of this stuff (with some exceptions--some interesting discoveries have come out of astrophysics and experimental nuclear physics since that writing) is lying to you. Though a lot of these problems are less issues with our understanding of nature as they are consistency problems with the models scientists have constructed to explain it. Spontaneous symmetry breaking is a good example of this: it is ambiguous what makes mass mass, so the universe is said to be filled with a uniformly distributed field of somethings called "Higgs bosons" that give massive particles inertia. What really gets me is that I can explain this to you, but I can't do any better on my Physics 221 exams. Geez.
More positively: pictures are on the way! You can preview some of them now at the temporary server, but they aren't indexed, are pretty big, and won't be there for very long.

After classes today, I discovered that the adhesive that binds the sole of my left shoe to the outermost layer of its inner shell finally came off today. It disappoints me a bit, because it looks like I might actually have to break out the duct tape to fix it. The sad thing, though, is that I got a bit cocky with the duct tape and misplaced it not long after moving in. I don't have enough money to buy new shoes, though, and I'm not entirely sure if I can even use this duct tape on my shoes. It's a shame, because I've been using the same shoes for four years, and I've almost forgotten how to shop for new ones... but since they started falling apart soon after coming to college, it seems this may be a necessity.
The preceding paragraph is a true (irrelevant) story, but I'll leave its real meaning--and how I'm really doing--for you to snap together if you like.

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