Overstimulated!

[China Doll]

Bruce is back!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/amazon/index.shtml?survey =no&url=www.bbc.co.uk/amazon/index.shtml&site= amazon&js=yes

I'm really quite excited at the moment, what with all the
LHC stuff, the discovery of youtube links to a BBC4 (cheers Mibs) series on reality, atoms and matter and now the return of Bruce my little brain has gone in to science overload!

It must be very exciting to be a scientist right now. What things are interesting you in the science world at the moment?

Cheers
(A very hyper) China

[tiggerblue10]

Hi china,

This kind of thing interests me and scares me at the same time. have for a long time believed in this as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcBV-cXVWFw

[jake-the-peg]

For me it has to be the LHC - there's a definate feeling that we're getting close to really understanding how things work.

We need the Higgs and Gravity waves and there's a real chance of getting a Grand Unified theory together which is what Einstein spent his last years miserably failing at.

There are a few big elephants out there though that may resist us and prove to be beyond our capabilities.

Experimental proof of string theory is one - a bit 50:50 that the sizes are just so small and it seems to have been around forever without a decent experimental test.

The other is other dimentional universes (multiverse) - I'm not even sure how we'd begin to look for evidence of that.

Still you neveer know. Rutherford thought the power of the Atom would never be harnessed and the positron was predicted decades before it was actually found.

In applied science Fusion reactors are getting so close. We've seen ignition at Jet and the last true experiment is being built in France before we get to a real demonstration reactor.

Yes it's a pretty exciting time as long as Governments can be persuaded to still think that Science is important.

Certainly the election in the US of a vice president who is a creationist would be a real step in the wrong direction

[China Doll]

Is that the woman with the pregnant daughter that's the creationist? I've not really been following it to date.

I was watching something on youtube about reality as we see it and the cat in the box which is both alive and dead and how atoms have more in common with outer space than they do here. There's one on string theory which I need to watch as I haven't really got a hold on that all and I still get confused with ante-matter and dark matter, (one is matter created and one exists but we can't see it?) but it's all so fascinating. I also don't exactly understand quarks either but I just wonder how small we'll go and will it ever stop? From what I saw every time physicists think they've got something tied down 100%, another element pops up to upset them.

Then I watched something on channel 4 about tiny humans on an Island where mamals evolved to be smaller and reptiles evolved to be bigger and they were calling them hobbits but I think it turned out they'd evolved from homo erectus (sp??).

By the end of the day I was looking for box sets of all the walking with... series and the blue planet.

God, I'm such a geek! :c)

[tiggerblue10]

If you're a geek China then I'm a geek too. I love The Blue Planet and anything David Attenborough related. I also like anything with Dr Iain Stewart in it. He is currently doing a series on Climate Wars which was on last night. It says that varioustests have been carried out by scientists and that basically climate change is due to human activity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iain_Stewart

[jake-the-peg]

antimatter is like a negative version of the matter we see all around us. A positron is an anti-matter version of an electron.

PET scanners use radioisotopes that emit positrons.

Anti-matter is well understood (apart from why there is so little of it)

Dark matter is a puzzle - The gravity that we know is holding together the universe is way stronger than the matter that we can see. There is a lot "missing" Dark matter is just the name we give to whatever this is.

There are a few candidates with exotic acronyms like WIMPS and MACHOs but they're much less exotic than they sound.

[China Doll]

Thank you Jakey!

[tiggerblue10]

Can I choose Bear Grills?

[jake-the-peg]

Much as I love his programs Bruce is a little bit ..er..how can I put this?..Gushy

Still you have to admire him going in to film the cocaine trade in Peru.

Not only risking getting shot by the refiners but probably by the army too if they'd caught them at a bad time

[tiggerblue10]

Do you think that watching the way cocaine is made would put someone off using it? Seeing all the chemicals that were used in the process certainly made me feel rather sick.