You can watch at Vimeo.

Now there’s a Shockwave version of the same idea, by Cary and Michael Huang. A slide control allows you to explore at your own pace.

It takes a while to load, but it’s worth the wait. Nothing showy or (ahem) flashy, but neither was the Eames film.

Mouseover text: Colorado is working to develop coherent amber waves, which would allow them to finally destroy Kansas and Nebraska with a devastating but majestic grain laser.

It’s a physics joke. If you don’t get it, look up wave-particle duality and the Uncertainty Principle, which only exists as a Wikipedia entry when you are looking at it.

Quiz on Monday.

Somehow, yelling "Flame on!" just doesn't work

But it works for the Human Torch.

SANGZHI, HUNAN — OK, so I’m not really Johnny Storm, but it’s a cool photo, anyway. My friend snapped it as we were leaving Jiutian Cave here. After a long climb out of the cool, humid cave into the warm, drier surface air, I was sweating and my head was literally steaming.

The cave trip Thursday was my last excursion for the week-long National Holiday. Earlier in the week, I accompanied two friends (a young married couple) to a wedding in Huarong, a small city near Yueyang, Hunan. Then they drove me to Yueyang, where I met another friend and visited that city for two days. When I came back to Jishou on Wednesday, I literally turned right around and headed out again to Sangzhi with another friend, her cousin, aunt and uncle.

We also visited the reconstructed home of He Long, a revolutionary leader who was later purged during the Cultural Revolution. He was thrown into prison (where he died at age 74), his original home was razed, and his siblings were prevented from attending university. He didn’t get a formal state burial until 40 years after his death.

On our way back to Jishou, we stopped at a roadside marker for the Guzhang County “Golden Spike” — an international reference point for the sedimentary layer corresponding to stage 7* of the Cambrian Period beginning 503 million years ago. The rather elaborate marker includes relief images of Lejopyge laevigata trilobites, which made their first appearance at this time.

Interestingly enough, I live near another Golden Spike for the next stage of the Cambrian, about 499 million years ago, when Glyptagnostus reticulatus trilobotes first made their appearance. That Golden Spike is in Paibi, in Huayuan, the county just west of Jishou.

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* Stage 7 apparently has two names: Guzhangian and Dresbachian (for a town in Minnesota). During the Cambrian Period, of course, such names had no meaning, since there was only one big continent (Gondwanaland) and a few smaller landmasses.

But only as a first approximation …

MeiMei is fully bilingual in Chinese and Russian, thanks to several years living in Minsk as a student. Her English (and maybe her Chinese, though I cannot tell) has a Russian accent. In addition, she’s an excellent pianist.

Her job at JiDa was as translator/interpreter for the exchange students and music teachers from Ukraine, but midway through last school year, there was less call for her linguistic abilities. Meanwhile, still unmarried at the age of 30, MeiMei was facing the Chinese cultural pressure to find a husband before she got “too old.” So, she decided to quit her university job, and go back home to Hefei to find a mate, while living with her parents and supporting herself teaching piano and Russian.

About two weeks ago, she and I were chatting on QQ, and she asked about my plans for the future. MeiMei suggested I consider working in Hefei. Then I asked if I could visit her this month to see what Hefei is like. She enthusiastically said yes. So, in short order, I and her other friend and former neighbor, Ailsa, were planning a week’s trip to Hefei.

Hefei is the provincial capital of Anhui, which is northeast of Hunan province. China is building out a high speed rail system at a dizzying pace, starting with the provincial capitals, so Changsha, Hunan, and Hefei are already connected with HSR.

Ailsa had already bought a train ticket to Changsha, where she lives, so rather than taking the bus as I usually do, I agreed to keep her company on the eight-hour (slow) train ride. We booked our tickets to Hefei at the Jishou train station. We were on the D150 train to Wuchang station in Wuhan, and then the D3062 train from Hankou station in Wuhan to Hefei.

The distance between Changsha and Wuhan is about 362 km, and the D150 covers that in three hours, a third of the time the next fastest train (the T98A) takes. That works out to an average speed of 121 km/hr (75 mph). The distance from Wuhan to Hefei is 364 km, but the D3062 covers that in 2:23, also a third of the next fastest time, at an average speed of 156 km/hr (97 mph). The ticket price for each leg was 112 RMB, or about $17.

[Incidentally, you can take the D3062, or one of the other D-class trains, from Wuhan and be in Shanghai 820 km (512 miles) away in six hours. Amazing.]

Our “layover” in Wuhan was about six hours, giving us plenty of time to find our way from Wuchang station to Hankou station across town. We decided to do some sightseeing, since Ailsa had never been to Wuhan. But the heat was oppresive (42 C, or 107 F), so we just hit Yellow Crane Tower (Huanghelou 黄鹤楼), then grabbed an air conditioned cab to the air conditioned train station to recover.

Cities in the USA are lucky to have even one train station, which in a lot of places is now some kind of museum, office building or shopping mall. New York has two train stations, and as far as I know, no city in the States has more than two. By contrast, Wuhan has three railway stations now; the third one, in the northern suburbs, is part of the new G-class HSR trains connecting Wuhan to Changsha South station (also new) and Guangzhou North in Guangdong. The G-class trains zip between Wuhan and Guangzhou North — a distance of 1022 km (639 miles) — in just three and half hours. (That works out to be about 180 mph on average.) Tickets are $76, cheaper than airfares, so the domestic airlines have had to cut their prices to be competitive.

(We rode a G-class train from Wuhan to Changsha (90 minutes) on the way back, because it would allow both of us to grab afternoon buses home. The ticket was $25, only $8 more than the D150 fare.)

Anyway, on to our itinerary. We had dinner first with MeiMei and her husband, went to a KTV, then crashed at a hotel on Changjiang ZhongLu near Suzhou Lu downtown for the night. The next few days were packed with activities, as MeiMei and her parents wanted to show us a lot of sights.

Her dad is partner is a small metal stamping factory in Sanhe. The company supplies parts (brackets and chassis pieces) to JAC, one of China’s domestic auto and truck makers. As a boss, he gets a company car, similar in size and style to a Buick, and a driver, Mr Wang (no relation). So, we were able to tour Anhui in comfort.

We visited ancient cities at Sanhe, She (pronounced “shuh”) county and XiDi, a UNESCO World Heritage Site; the Bao family gardens; the ancestral home of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin; the boyhood home of physicist Yang Zhenning*; the home of Qing dynasty diplomat Li Hongzhang; Fantawild, an amusement park; and the Golden Peacock Spa Resort. We also did some shopping — I needed a new supply of contact lenses, for one thing.

We ate a lot of great food, and drank of lot of expensive and potent Chinese liquor. Ailsa, who weighs all of 90 pounds soaking wet, held her own liquor very well. (One of the popular sayings in China is that Hunan woman are not only the most beautiful in the country, but also the best drinkers. Then again, they say the same thing about the women of all of the other provinces, too.)

Ailsa has been fretting over my newfound bachelorhood, and MeiMei wants us both to move to Hefei, to each find jobs and significant others. MeiMei was trying to fix Ailsa up with at least two young men during our trip, but I don’t think anything clicked. On Wednesday night, the two of them persuaded me to sign up with a Chinese matchmaking site, jiayuan.com (literally, “family garden”). MeiMei and her husband, a busy journalist, confessed that they found each other on jiayuan.com last year, and were both happy with the results.

So, Ailsa helped me navigate the elaborate questionnaires on the site — it’s all in Chinese naturally — and we’ll see what happens.My little precis of myself is all in English, so it’s going to stand out like a sore thumb. I’m not expecting un coup de foudre, but it can’t hurt to try.

Having taken a whirlwind tour of Anhui, which has many other places worth seeing, my next trek is to Beijing to welcome the new American family coming to JiDa. I’ve been to Beijing now five times, so I am almost an old hand at it. This time, I am going with two students from my college, neither of whom has been to Beijing, so I get to be a tour guide to five people. Holy crap. Wish me luck!

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* Yang won the Nobel Prize in 1957 with T.D. Lee, for discovering a key law of the Standard Model of particle physics. Yang and experimental physicist C.S. Wu once gave a symposium at Palmer Labs at Princeton. My freshman year physics classes were in the same building almost four decades later. So maybe there are only a few degrees of separation between Yang and me. Another noteworthy fact about Yang is that, at the age of 82, was engaged to a woman only 28 years old. They married in 2005. Lucky fellow. I suspect they did not use jiayuan.com, though.

The Milky Way galaxy: The microwave version

This lovely image is of our home, the Milky Way galaxy, but in a way our mortal eyes cannot perceive it. It doesn’t show stars, but the stuff that makes (or will make) up stars and planets and whatnot — clouds of gas and dust.

Our eyes can see only a tiny fraction of light — the visible spectrum, ROYGBIV (rainbow colors) — but the universe also glows in other kinds of light: gamma ray, X-ray, ultraviolet, infra-red, microwave and radio. And each frequency tells us something different.

The atmosphere blocks some of those frequencies (fortunately for life in Earth), so to view the universe in this exotic light astronomers have to depend on telescopes out in space. The European Space Agency, for example, launched the Planck Surveyor telescope to capture images in the microwave range, like this one here.

Microwave imaging gives us two important sets of information about the Milky Way and the universe we are in.

First, the huge clouds of gas and dust in the galaxy (which are mostly invisible to our eyes) are what eventually turn into stars and planets (and all the stuff that ends up on planets). In the photo, those clouds are all those wispy bluish-white and pinkish-white tendrils stretching out from the center (the galactic equator).

Putting it another way, that’s what we looked like about 5 to 6 billion years ago, before the Sun, the Earth (and the rest of the solar system) condensed out of a cloud of dust and gas. Needless to say, everything on the Earth was once in that same cloud, including the atoms that make up you and me.

So studying present-day dust clouds can help us understand the clouds that became us a long time ago.

Secondly, astronomers are also keenly interested in the background “behind” the Milky Way, because that’s the radiation left over from the Big Bang — the beginning of the universe. In the image, it’s colored magenta and orange. (Those are “false colors,” since microwave light doesn’t really have color.)

Our best estimates now put the Big Bang around 13 to 14 billion years ago. At the time, the universe was much smaller, denser and hotter than it is now. It was so dense, in fact, that light could not travel very far at all. It wasn’t until matter spread out far enough to become transparent that light from the Big Bang could get through. That happened about 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

So those microwaves are really, really frakkin’ old. And the pattern of magentas and oranges can help astronomers learn more about the early universe, before there were even stars and planets around.

The Cosmic Background Radiation is one of the main sources of evidence for the Big Bang. In 1948 physicists George Gamow, Ralph Alpher, and Robert Herman calculated that the expansion of the universe after the Big Bang would have shifted the original radiation from gamma rays to microwaves of a specific frequency (corresponding to a temperature). Other theoretical physicists at Princeton revisited the prediction in the mid-1960s and started to build a detector to test their predictions. (One of those guys was my freshman year physics lecturer, David T. Wilkinson, one of the best teachers I ever had.)

Meanwhile, down the road at Bell Labs, two researchers looking for something entirely different had already built such a detector. No matter how they fiddled with the contraption, there was a constant “noise” corresponding to a temperature of 3.5 K that they couldn’t get rid of. So, they phoned the physics guys at Princeton and asked their advice. Entirely by accident, the Bell researchers, Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson, had detected exactly the kind of temperature that the theoretical guys had anticipated!

Penzias and Wilson later got a Nobel Prize in Physics for their accidental discovery. The Princeton physicists only got the simple satisfaction of knowing they were right.

The image above is a high resolution version of what Penzias and Wilson found with their ground-based “telescope.” In a way, it’s a portrait of what the Big Bang looks like 13 to 14 billion years after the fact. Studying the “afterglow” can tell us more about how the early universe behaved, so we can better understand how it is now.

Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words.

The Southern Lights from orbit

Ionized gases emit light of particular frequencies — colors. Neon, for example, glows a bright red color. Oxygen in the atmosphere typically emits green light, as we can see in the photo.