Chemistry + Physics

Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.

Carl Sagan, Cosmos  (via victoriousvocabulary)

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)

it’s easy to sit from your balcony of privilege & look down upon the masses, ignorant of why they’re angry.

it’s easy to sit under a shelter because you’re protected by privilege & wonder why the masses complain that they’re fed up with the rain.

it’s easy to sit in your warm house with state of the art equipment & wonder why people constantly complain that they’re left out in the cold

it’s easy to celebrate because your crops have yielded a high amount & question why other people complain, unaware that they weren’t given enough seeds. unaware that it barely ever rains here… the sun doesn’t even shine here…

it’s easy to be blinded by privilege. to remain neutral in situations of oppression simply because you are unaffected. but to remain neutral, is to strengthen the power of the oppressor.

— @beeyroyce

The Tale of Princess Kaguya (2013)

Check out these scientists reacting to the first images from the Hubble Space Telescope after they successfully fixed its wonky mirror.

Then watch our music video celebrating Hubble here.

Then read all about Hubble’s 25 years in space here.

Dia de Muertos, 2015

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calculus gothic

-The limits keep getting farther and farther away. Where are they going? Where did they start? Will they ever stop?

-The unit circle tells us to bow before it. All hail the unit circle. All hail.

-You have been scribbling the integral symbol and the summation symbol for so long. You can’t write 3′s or capital S’s normally anymore. It is a reflex, muscle memory.

-Piles of math homework surround you as you become a machine, cranking out more math problems as you hone your skills. You build your own castle out of math homework. It is never-ending.

-Trigonometry rids us of our sins. and cosines. and tangents.