The other day I heard a book mentioned. The title was At Home in the Universe. There are two books by that title and I have no way of knowing which one had been mentioned but it struck me as an interesting title. Home can mean many things, where you grew up, where you live
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Have you ever noticed how differently we perceive time? Every circumstance implies its own meanings for “a long time ago” and “recently.” Every human activity has different ways of measuring time. A cosmologist might consider a billion years to be a brief period. For a particle physicist a nanosecond (one billionth of a second) can be
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New Year’s Eve is the proper moment to contemplate time. There is nothing logical in this. There is no great discontinuity in anything but our calendar as the clock strikes twelve but the feeling is right. All the better if eyes are bathed, as mine are now, in the ancient light of far away stars.
Ludwig Boltzmann died on September 5, 1906 and was buried in his hometown of Vienna. His monument is dominated by an imposing bushy-bearded bust that stares down glowering. Above that bust is a single line, a mathematical equation first formulated by Boltzmann- S = k log W. Besides the fact that this appears at a