Now, already a memory

Have you ever been gripped by nostalgia?
Have you ever felt that strong urge to travel back and revisit your old memories?

Youth is wasted on the young, as George Bernard Shaw said.

By janussyndicate 

I sometimes feel too caught up in building new memories and a better future to appreciate the very now, because frankly that "now" is all there is. Everything else is just a chemical pattern in your brain that is a formed memory that changes over time, or a longing for a later "now" on the horizon.
Still, as you live the "now" every second of every hour of every day of every year of your life, it is already a memory. I quantify my "nows" into such small parts that they have already passed before I've been able to savour them.

I think that is why memories from my childhood and teenage years seem so attractive now, because they are like a movie I can sit down and watch with a drink and some popcorn. I can pause, rewind and edit them into a perfect stream of a blissful life.
That is why I think Youth Is Wasted on The Young. They live through my favourite memories without even knowing it, as I did. They create what I miss.

Today is the happiest time of my life, I'm sure of that. The memories I create now will be played, paused and edited by me 20 years from now. Will I still feel that I didn't appreciate them while making them?
Is looking back on the nearest part of your life with nostalgia a sign that life is constantly getting worse, because the best part of your life was just before now? Isn't that a peculiar paradox that you know your life is getting better while your nostalgia is convinced it's getting worse!

Time is nothing you shall try to understand, like flying in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. If you stop and think about it you will crash.

More quotes from mr Shaw that I think fits the subject:

- “We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing"

- “I want to be all used up when I die.”

- “Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”

Silverstone 2010

This weekend the F1 circus will come to a slightly revamped Silverstone Circuit in Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire in England (not far from Oxford)
It hosted the very first F1 race in 1950 and is an old airfield which has been transformed several times during it's long history. From the sixties almost square, dangerously fast track almost only consisting of long straights and 90 degree bends. In the early nineties it changed more towards the shape we recognize (and love) today. Well, this year premiers another alteration and the current format is this:

Pay extra attention to the Arena complex which looks promising but did catch out a couple of drivers this morning (Schumi among others). The incorporation of this complex also made the track 759 metres longer to a total of 5901 m. It now has 18 turns that will take around 1:32:3 to navigate, and the GP will stretch over 51 laps.

The first practice saw Sebastian Vettel in the Red Bull take the fastest time followed by Lewis Hamilton and Robert Kubica. Jenson Button finished way down in eight with both him and Ham trying out the new exhaust-blown diffusers (leading the exhaust under the car to help out the diffusers, similar to Red Bull)

Results after first practice here:

ESPN F1 1st practice results

Other links

Races & Circuits 2010
Crash.net

photons are bosons

Two trapped charged bosons for different densities and temperatures;
PIMC simulation by Jens Böning

Physicists in the US have carried out an extremely precise test of the one of the cornerstones of modern physics – the idea that the two types of fundamental particle, bosons and fermions, follow two distinct kinds of statistical behaviour.

Physics tells us that fundamental particles come in two basic varieties: bosons, which have integer values of intrinsic angular momentum or "spin", and fermions, which have half-integer spin. Bosons include force-carrying particles such as the photon, W and Z and follow Bose–Einstein statistics. An important consequence of this is that many identical bosons are free to occupy the same quantum state, leading to phenomena such as Bose–Einstein condensates and lasing.

Fermions include the fundamental matter particles such as quarks and electrons and obey Fermi-Dirac Statistics. Identical fermions can never exist in the same quantum state, giving us the shell structure of atoms and, with it, chemistry.


Dmitry Budker and Damon English of the University of California at Berkeley decided they would test this principle, known as the spin-statistics theorem, as precisely as they could.

The researchers fired two green laser beams from opposite directions into a beam of barium atoms contained within an optical cavity, with the combined energy of a photon pair (made up of one photon from each of the beams) equal to the barium absorption energy. They found that when the frequencies of the two beams were very slightly different to one another this absorption took place, which they observed by measuring the photons given off by the barium's subsequent de-excitation. But they observed no such absorption when the frequencies were identical – demonstrating that photons really are bosons.

Read the whole story on:

Physicsworld