Goals:

Today is the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s presentation of general relativity’s field equations to the Prussian Academy of Sciences. The equations demonstrated the relationship between the local curvature of spacetime and the energy and momentum within that area of spacetime. The first image shows the way that Einstein first presented the equations in his 25 November 1915 paper, where G_im is the Ricci tensor; g_im, the metric tensor; T_im, the energy–momentum tensor for matter; and κ is proportional to Newton’s gravitational constant. The second image shows a modern full version of the equation where R_μν, is the Ricci curvature tensor; R, is the scalar curvature; g_μν, is the metric tensor; Λ, is the cosmological constant; G, is Newton’s gravitational constant; c, is the speed of light in vacuum; and T_μν, is the stress–energy tensor. For more about Einstein’s development of the equations, we have a article available from our November issue: http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.2979

via: Physics Today

Ways I Am Like the Standard Model

Clearly flawed, but with no obvious path to improvement

Can go from a top to a bottom under the right circumstances

I too have a problem with hierarchy

Influenced by Richard Feynman

Too weird to be widely understood

If you froze my body and shattered it down the middle that would arguably be symmetry breaking

Lots of self-coupling

Many of my interactions are weak

Incompatible with gravity (I fell out of bed the other day)

Will break down under extreme conditions

All of my friends describe me as a gauge quantum field theory containing the internal symmetries of the unitary product group SU(3) × SU(2) × U(1)

my possible career choices: cloud flower

Great physicists and their blackboards. 

We can say that life itself is the axiom of the empty set. It begins in zero and ends in zero. We know that both states exist, but we will not be conscious of either experience: they are states that are necessary parts of life, even as they cannot be experienced as life. We assume the concept of nothingness, but we cannot prove it. But it must exist.

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life (via shrinemaidens)

As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty, Jonas Mekas (2000)

God’s Own Junkyard exhibition at Lights of Soho 

I wrote my way out of hell… I picked up a pen, I wrote my own deliverance.

“Hurricane,” Lin-Manuel Miranda (via freethepoets)