Wheat-dogg’s world
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Science fact is crossing over into science fiction today.

First, astronomers have located an earth-like planet orbiting close to a star some 20 light-years away. This planet is a little larger than Earth, so we’d feel heavier than normal if we could walk on its surface. Sounds mighty like the conditions on Kal-El’s homeworld, if you ask me, though of course it supposedly blew up.
Second, geologists have discovered a mineral with nearly the same chemical composition as the fictional kryptonite in Superman Returns. It’s not radioactive and it’s not green, but it’s the next best thing.
Now, if we can determine that the mineral came from the distant planet, that’ll clinch it. Somewhere on some farm on Earth is a boy learning that he can leap tall buildings in a single bound and run faster than a locomotive.

One of my Honors students gave me this link to a YouTube video. It’s pretty funny.

The math jocks doing the rap wear their TI calculators on a cord around their necks. In my day, we wore our calculators on a belt clip. I must have missed that geek fashion tip …

Flugelhornist and composer Chuck Mangione and I are separated by about three degrees. He and my high school band director, jazz drummer and band leader Clem deRosa, played together back when. I was in chorus, not band, but I had friends who were. So that’s about three degrees, unless you count the time Mr D and pianist Marian McPartland played at our elementary school — 2.5 degrees?

Anyway, Mangione is a fellow New York native, though he hails from upstate. I started to listen to him while still in high school, and I still like his music. A master of catchy melodies, Mangione does not get a lot of respect from some jazz aficionados, who believe jazz has to be unmelodic to be true to the genre. Yeah, sure. Some of Mangione’s best pieces end up on “smooth jazz” radio, and he has written some good stuff for the movies, the Olympics, and orchestras. And as he approaches age 70, he still has a huge fan base.

This album includes some of Mangione’s orchestral and choral works, as well as some more personal compositions. The musicians include his quartet (Gerry Niewood, Al Johnson and Joe LaBarbera), the elusive singer Esther Satterfield, cellist Cathie Lehr, the Horseheads Chamber Singers, and the Hamilton (Ontario) Philharmonic Orchestra, all recorded at Massey Hall in Toronto. It was a top seller in 1973, as it seemed to be harbinger of a union between jazz and “serious” music. Unfortunately, Mangione was not able to repeat the magic.

He takes pictures in your kitchen of solar spectra.

My sister-in-law has this crystal ornament in her kitchen window. On Easter, the sun was hitting it just right, so I snapped this photo of the dispersion, catching the blue end of the spectrum.

And this one of the dispersion pattern on her fridge:

Pretty, huh?

And don’t we all …

It’s close to the end of the year (Classes end 5/16 at my shop.) and as usual I find myself looking at the Procrustean bed of my syllabus. How do I fit in five weeks of material into three weeks’ equivalent of classtime?

Chop chop chop.

At this time of the year, I am trying to wrap up the year with light and the atom. We have covered electricity and magnetism already, made the connections between the two, and are now studying how electromagnetic waves are the logical result of EM induction.

Except there’s that pesky wave-particle duality and quantum physics, two of the most important (and difficult to comprehend) aspects of modern physics. Rather than plodding through the wave descriptions of the behaviour of light, I now have to condense a century’s worth of research into roughly 20 days of classtime and make it understandable.

When you think about it, the progress of science and technology since 1850 or so has been phenomenal. Most of the devices we take for granted now have roots back in the 19th century. Cellphones, after all, are just the descendents of Marconi’s radio sets. But cellphones, and their cousins, computers, depend on the quantum understanding of electronic behaviour. So, to provide students with some passing idea of the how things work requires me to cover wave-particle duality and QM.

In three weeks.

Hang on to your hats, kids. It’s going to be a rough ride.