by simon baird

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Science. It Works, Bitches

It's a t-shirt from the xkcd store. I just finished reading The Fabric of the Cosmos so I understand that graph. Well okay I don't understand the graph exactly, but I understand what it means, enough that felt a little personal geek pride knowing that I knew what it means. :) If you're not up on inflationary cosmology, then allow me to enlighten you... Small fluctations in the universe's background radiation are predicted by quantum mechanics equations describing the universe when it was only a few billion sqillionths of a second old. Predicted. Exactly. Hence... cool shirt.

The book is pretty good. I read some Stephen Hawking a while ago but I think Brian Green was more interesting. I learned new stuff like the Higgs ocean, stuff about string theory, curled up dimensions, branes and so on. I give it a 4 p-branes out of 5.

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