Atomic Musings

I'm currently reading A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson which does chapter length surveys on all aspects of science. One of the initial chapters goes into all things atomic and quantum...of which I know next to nothing. I ran across two things that needed further exploration: 1) E=mc2, and 2) The notion that Newtonian physics doesn't apply at the nuclear level.

Well, I'm still completely buffaloed by #2, but I'm smarter about Einstein thanks to a recent Nova called Einstein's Big Idea. I'm still not ready to be empaneled on a blue-ribbon committee of leading theoretical physicists, but the most simple and salient thing I learned was that "time" is not the universal constant I thought it was. Einstein turned things around by theorizing that the speed of light (c) is the real universal constant and time is a function of the speed of light.

Another key revelation was, obviously, the relationship between Energy and mass. When you multiply just about any amount of mass by a gigantic number like the speed of light squared, you realize that there's a tremendous amount of energy at the atomic level, a la nuclear (or nucular in Bushese) weapons. A small amount of something incredibly dense like uranium (lots of mass despite limited size) can provide a ton of energy...in the form of a mushroom cloud.

Hopefully it will be replayed or available with other PBS documentaries on Netflix.

By the way, Bryson's on of my favorite non-fiction authors whose oeuvre includes everything from the aforementioned scientific survey, to British travelogues, to an insightful study of language, to a hiking trip up the Appalachian trail.