I have a pretty crazy life. All sorts of crazy things happen to me. I don't know if it's my luck, or if I seek these things out. I'm going to share with you here some of the things that have been happening around me. I don't have fancy blogging software, so I'm hopping "vi" on my part and e-mail on your will do.
Mark has owned a defanged rattle snake as a pet for 3 years now. Apparently, these animals have trouble getting over their instincts and long after they are defanged, they keep trying to bite you. I've actually experienced this myself and it's kind of a rush getting attacked by one of these things, because even though your brain knows the bite is totally inoccuous, your body doesn't, and it is completely freaking out as the snake is approaching you. Once you tell your body to not jump away from the crawling snake on the floor, your body gets comfortably and TOTALLY freezes. Then the criter bites you on the ankle, which doesn't feel like a bite at all, but more like a pair of fingers trying to clamp your ankle.
Anyways, my friend has this habit of letting this snake run loose in parts of the his house, even though it has the habit of biting at ankles. Over the past 3 years, he estimates he's gotten bitten over a hundred times by this thing. He wakes up in the morning sometimes and this thing is chomping at his foot. Well it turns out that rattle snakes are QUITE adaptive and nature doesn't leave them totally helpless after a thorough defanging. They adapt their auxiliary slava glands to secrete a very mild poison that tends to be unpleasant enough to ward off some attackers, but never enough to kill them.
Except, apparently, a few hundred injections of this venom over several years causes deep tissue damage and destroys your receptive nervous system. My guess is the lesson from this story is to never leave your snakes run loose in the house.
Today, my officemate James, who works at the chronometry lab went totally apeshit. After 30 minutes of total silence from him, which is very unusual on his part, he started yelling at us non-sensical fragments like "and see, THAT's why it worked the first time and not the second time" or "man, the guys at ETH have beeng looking at the totally the wrong way". So it turns out he's find some crazy epirical evidence that supports the theory that heavy particles can also travel in time. I think this guy's in the running for a Nobel prize.
Here's a little bit more detail from what I can gather about this experiment. You take a beta particle, which is extremely heavy compared to the typical types of particle these time travel experiments tend to deal with, and bompard it with some arbitrary high frequency EM wave that gets it resonating. A few microseconds after you kill the wave, the resonance persists. There are a lot of explanations for this, but that's not where the magic is.
Another piece of apparently not-so-magic is that there are particles that are light enough to travel slightly faster than the speed of light. I learned in undergrad that you can't have stuff going faster than c, but apparently there are exceptions. Anyways, if you bombard these particles with muons, they pick up enough energy to travel back in time for a few microseconds.
The experiment James was conducting involved first bombarding beta particles with pions that are going faster than light so that the pions get embedded in the beta particle. And then turning on the EM resonnace field to get the beta particle to resonate.
These guys have been scratching their heads because it looks like the pions also seem to cause the beta particle to resonate, BEFORE you turn on the EM wave. No matter what frequency you set the EM wave generator to, the pions make the beta particle resonate at that frequency BEFORE you turn on the EM wave generator.
It looked obvious to them that there was a bug somewhere where the EM generator and the pion accelerator were somehow interfering with each other's circuitry, like some wires were getting crossed, and something was firing untowardly.
But today, they came up with definitive proof that this isn't a fluke or a bug. That what's really happening is that the presence of time travelling pions is actually causing the beta particles to hallucinate that the EM wave that is YET TO HIT THEM is hitting them right then. They beta particles are in fact experiencing the world a few microseconds ahead of what the experimenter is observing it. Now I'm thinking "shit, bombard me with pions right now so I can see the lottery numbers for tomorrow" right? Apparently the amount pions required for that wouldn't just sterilize me, it would also completely pulverize me. So maybe this work still has a ways to go, but man, that's exciting stuff!
Anyways. The bus toppled over on this ride! At the time, this wasn't so surprising because the helicopter hovering above us for the 20 minutes before the incident had been casting an ominous curtain on the whole trip, and I knew something was going to happen. But what's really weird is that not a single person was injured or killed! As I write this, I'm starting to wonder if that helicopter caused the accident or protected the passengers. And if so, how? Anyways, I can't wait to see the news in the papers tomorrow.