Science!

Dean Yeager:  Doctor.. Venkman. We believe that the purpose of science is to serve mankind. You, however, seem to regard science as some kind of dodge.. or hustle. Your theories are the worst kind of popular tripe, your methods are sloppy, and your conclusions are highly questionable. You are a poor scientist, Dr. Venkman!
Dr. Peter Venkman:  I see. 

That’s one of my favorite movie quotes, and pretty much sums up my educational career as a scientist.  But, I still try to think like a scientist, perhaps a mad one at times.  I am curious about the world around me, and have a particular fascination with light.  Not just the visible light that helps us see, but all forms of light, or electromagnetic radiation.  It’s such a strange form of energy that I still can’t wrap my head around and that we still know so little about.  Is it a wave?  Is it a particle?  Is it neither?  Who really knows.  The trouble with light is you have to use light to examine light, and that makes for a tricky proposition..

E=mc^2 everyone knows that famous Einstein equation.  But have you ever set it up in the other way, algebraically?  m=E/c^2 meaning that mass is equal to energy divided by the speed of light squared (a constant, unit conversion factor).  This makes mass and energy synonymous.  The suggestion that we are made of “stardust” doesn’t seem so far fetched, and is a belief of mine.  Things that look solid are actually made up of molecules, atoms, sub-atomic “particles”, and so on and basically we can be described as well-organized masses of energy.  That’s pretty cool to me..

Here are a couple of neat examples of how light interacts with matter:
Photoelectric Effect
Pair Production