Year: 2022

METAGALAXY. “Alfven proposed that a metagalaxy could consist of 10 billion galaxies and span billions of light years. In 2014, evidence has been provided for a metagalaxy in the ‘Laniakea’ supercluster of galaxies that encompasses the Milky Way galaxy.” https://lnkd.in/dhrW--56 View in LinkedIn

THE BIG PICTURE. “It is important to note that the clusters and groups of galaxies of Laniakea move gravitationally around the centre at the ‘Great Attractor’ showing the supercluster to be matter in composition, cognisant with the metagalaxy.” https://lnkd.in/dhrW--56 View in LinkedIn

PLATO’S CAVE. “Amazingly, the best understood fundamental theories in physics that correctly describe nature as we know it today in 3+1 dimensions, namely the standard model of particles and forces and general relativity, have been shown to be “shadows” of more symmetric field theories in 4+2 dimensions.” https://lnkd.in/dTA-PHpP View in LinkedIn

This late-flowering beauty, the pink trumpet vine, grows rampantly and tirelessly flowers at this time of year. Hugely rewarding. View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE for this and next weekend focuses on an article entitled Symmetry Principles in Physics, the Brookhaven Lectures of 1965, by Frank Yang. Symmetry has been an obsession in art, physics, chemistry and mathematics for a long time. It turns out at a subatomic level it is hugely important. It is one of the great stories in science. https://lnkd.in/dqXS2nnQ View in LinkedIn

LAUREATE. “Chen Ning Yang, or Frank Yang, showed that parity—the symmetry between physical phenomena occurring in right-handed and left-handed coordinate systems—is violated when certain elementary particles decay. Until this discovery it had been assumed by physicists that parity symmetry was as universal a law as the conservation of energy or electric charge. This and other studies in particle physics earned Yang and Lee the Nobel Prize for Physics for 1957.” https://lnkd.in/dYgJtnNW View in LinkedIn

PASTEUR’S PRIZE. “About 120 years ago, at the very beginning of his scientific career, Pasteur made a great discovery that enormously excited him and the chemists of his time. The discovery was to lead to the concept of the existence of a new kind of isomerism in chemistry.” https://lnkd.in/dqXS2nnQ View in LinkedIn

SURPRISE FINDING. “What Pasteur found was that a certain racemic salt, which was known to be optically inactive, when crystallized from a water solution at low temperatures, possessed two kinds of crystals which were nonsuperposable mirror images of each other.” https://lnkd.in/dqXS2nnQ View in LinkedIn

NOVEL CRYSTAL FORM. “Pasteur separated with infinite pains under the microscope the two different crystal forms and thereupon came to the discovery that one of them was precisely a known organic compound - of tartaric acid - which was optically active, and the other was a hitherto unknown compound with the opposite optical activity.” https://lnkd.in/dqXS2nnQ View in LinkedIn

UNFORESEEN CONSEQUENCES. “Some 70 years later, Jaegar, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, in his lecture on "The Principle of Symmetry" remarked, "seldom has a scientific discovery had such far-reaching consequences as this one had." (In reference to Pasteur’s findings on tartaric acid). https://lnkd.in/dqXS2nnQ View in LinkedIn