Random Musings

One of the common ideas about Quantum Theory is that some things don’t happen until someone observes the experiment. Until the observation, events are said to be in superposition – a particle is in all possible states, until someone observes it; when the observation is made, the particle is found to be in only one state.

Marathons have an interesting history. The story is that Greece and Persia were at war. Greece finally won a decisive battle at a place called Marathon. The runner Pheidippides was sent to give the news to the people of Athens. Pheidippides ran the 25 or so miles, imparted the news, and promptly dropped dead of exhaustion.

Somehow someone thought, “Say, this running sounds like a great idea. We should do it regularly.” Not sure how they skipped the part about dropping dead, but there it is.

So now marathons are held all over the world. And every year, some people wind up dropping dead, and it’s a great mystery. “He was in good health, young, can’t imagine why he dropped dead.” I’ll tell you why: running is bad for you. WTF are these people thinking?

It is difficult to overstate the importance of using units in physics. Back in the day, my physics teacher would take off half the points in a question, if we forgot to include units. A question might be, convert 100°C to degrees F. If you said 212, you’d only get half points. Even if you said 212°, you’d be penalized. The correct answer would be 212°F.

You might think that this is just silly nit-picking. I mean, of course it’s 212°F; what else would it be? Why all the fuss?

I was recently looking up some facts about physics, as I often do to ensure that my statements are correct. Physics is filled with many non-intuitive facts, and I like to double-check what I understand. I came across a peculiar statement from a Google search. It said:

The only basic SI unit that is a vector is the meter. All others are scalars. Derived quantities can be vector or scalar, but every vector quantity must involve meters in its definition and unit.