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Comment Re:That kind of thing has been done actually (Score 2) 588

I think Feynman's real talent, the talent shared by many of the physicists I know who make real fundamental breakthroughs, is the ability to _understand_ physical problems in terms that even a 12 year old could understand. That is to say, to pare away the unnecessary complexities and reduce the problem to the simplest form that encapsulates the essence of the question. Once you can do that, you can explain what's happening in terms even a 12 year old can understand, because that's how you understood it in the first place.

Submission + - Science-y heroes for young children?

An anonymous reader writes: Unhappy that all his friends have heroes he knows nothing about (they've all chosen hockey players--actually a hockey player, Sidney Crosby), my eight-year-old son asked me if I would find him a "cool hero." When pressed to define "cool," he very earnestly gave me this list of acceptable professions: "Astronauts, explorers, divers, scientists, and pilots." A second and only slightly less worthy tier of occupations includes "inventors, meteorologists, and airplane designers." To be eligible for hero status, an individual must be (1) accomplished in one of these fields, (2) reasonably young (it pains me to report that Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger, NASA's youngest astronaut and now just 31, barely makes the cut), and, critically to my naive son's way of thinking, (3) respected by third graders nationwide. Ignoring that last criterion, or not, what heroes would you suggest from the sciences as people whose lives and accomplishments would be compelling to an eight-year-old mind?

Comment Re:I'm not qualified to read this article. (Score 3, Informative) 111

Black holes are regions of spacetime from which light cannot escape (nor can any other known form of matter or energy). The boundary of that region is called an event horizon. In classical General Relativity, there is a singularity inside the black hole. For a spinning black hole (described by the Kerr spacetime), this singularity is a ring around the axis of rotation, if that makes you feel any better. But in the end, talking about the motion of the singularity is meaningless - space and time do not exist in any normal sense at the singularity - it is called a singularity because the definitions of space and time break down there (the curvature of spacetime becomes infinite). If there is no space and no time, what does it mean to "rotate"? In fact, it is the spacetime at and outside the horizon that carry angular momentum (as compared to an observer at infinity). What that means is that objects near a rotating black hole which feel that they are locally "at rest" will still be rotating around the black hole from the perspective of an observer very far away from the black hole because the spacetime itself is being dragged around the black hole. Finally, for the record, singularities in spacetime are widely believed by physicists to indicate a failure of the General Theory of Relativity to describe extremely high curvature regions and not actual physical objects in our universe. We hope that if we can ever reconcile General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics that the resulting theory will be singularity free. Does that clarify things?

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