Phun phacts of physics

Here are some quotable-quotes  relating to the natural world.   If intrigued, click for the essay in which they appear.  Or for you busy pre-marrieds,  they make elegant brainy pick-up lines (in the better sort of bars):

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/09/just-couple-of-observations.html

[Climate change] The point is not that, on some particular day, instead of being a sizzling eighty-one, the mercury hits a sizzling eighty-one-and-a-half, but that more heat is being dumped into a hydrodynamic system, which feeds local instabilities, and may nudge changes in overall pattern.

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/09/what-realism-is-not.html

Planetary orbits existed prior to Kepler and Galileo,  and the electron prior to Millikan, in much the same sense that the nightingale antedates Keats.

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/10/ontology-of-physics.html

Failure to be observable in isolation certainly doesn't make a thing "metaphysical" (in the colloquial bad sense intended here).  You cannot observe a "brother" in isolation…

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/10/consilience.html

There have also been some remarkable recent examples of consilience between math and physics:  cases in which mathematicians, burrowing from (as it were) the east coast, and physicists, burrowing from (so to speak) the west, suddenly met in the middle.

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/10/latest-dispatches-from-physics.html

every physicist’s privilege these days -- weighing in on the traditional Big Questions by sheer force of a Ph.D.   Apparently watching Large Hadrons collide  confers theological insights denied to the rest of us.

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/10/consilient-connections.html

Unlike the case of Gödelian incompleteness,  which is a restriction on what we can show, Heisenberg Uncertainty is no mere epistemological limitation:  it can actually create particles.