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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

FISSION. “We propose an alternative method of creating energy by shooting electron-positron or proton-antiproton beams at each other and using the energy released as a means of producing commercial energy as in a fission reactor without the radioactive byproducts.” https://lnkd.in/gPGmqA_x 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

ON WAR AND PEACE. “Antimatter has been considered as a trigger mechanism for nuclear weapons, and as the possibility of creating thermonuclear energy.” https://lnkd.in/gPGmqA_x 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

TIME CANCELLATION. “Hence, we need cancellation of charge for charged particles and antiparticles, cancellation of spin for neutral particles and antiparticles, but cancellation of time in all cases which is the condition that must always be met for particle-antiparticle annihilation to take place.” https://lnkd.in/gPGmqA_x 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

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

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