PHYSICS LECTURE

At least the sun is shining.  After an unusually long and cold winter, those are the words that cheer us.  It's only 15 degrees, but doggone it the sun is shining.  This morning I'm going to attend one of the Saturday Morning Physics lectures at UM with brother Dick.  This lecture is on new discoveries in particle physics.  These talks are billed as accessible to common folks,  like me,  in easy-to-understand, non-technical language.  I think, however, that the common folks to whom they refer are those who came into the world with the mathematics gene intact and part (Or, should I say particle?) of their DNA.  Anyway, it is always fun to watch the well bred and educated line up like commoners  to  get their free jelly donuts.  That part I understand, from then on it's all downhill.  I thought that a quark is a sound that a duck with a sore throat makes.

Now I'm home from the lecture.  A delightful young woman physicist gave the lecture.  She attended Reed College, so that gave me hope that some of what she would say might be intelligible to a commoner like me.  Then, she began her talk by saying, "I'm gonna talk some physics with you."  Now things were really looking up until she showed her first "cartoon",.  The thing that made it a cartoon  , I suppose was that it was in color and there were drawings and symbols and the like.  Then she talked about positrons and neutrons and quarks and ups and downs and b-flavored particles, etc.  She also works with the huge particle collider in Switzerland, I believe is where it is.  Apparently, what they do there is to make two really tiny things go in opposite directions until they meet and go boom.  Then the number and type of remnants from that collision are counted.  She didn't talk about what becomes of the information thus acquired.   Mostly, I enjoy observing who attends these lectures, like the guy next to me who brought this big, brown, paper grocery bad filled with two containers of yogurt.    And, it was fun to watch them all line up for the free jelly donuts. Best of all,  it's always good doing things with brother Dick.

One more thing to do today, I'm going to a meeting at Arbor Hospice on the topic of downsizing.  I'll give it a shot.  The rest of this weekend is set aside for taxes.  I know I've been resisting that because I don't want to have to report the death of my spouse.  I really do miss her so much.