Physics

I'm doing this powerpoint presentation on dark matter for physics, and I just finally understood where the mass discrepancy occurs. It's not a discrepancy between Newtonian gravitational estimates for galactic mass and luminosity estimates. Rather is comes from the fact that one needs a dust based distribution of matter going out much further than the luminous boundary of the galaxy to account for the orbital velocity of Magellenic Clusters that orbit the Milky Way. Oh god, it's so cool! (ha, ha, pun not intended). Assuming that I can put in some pictures, Mrs. Feller is going to die with love when she sees this presentation. She really likes having lots of stupid graphically appealing stuff, eye candy, that is. That's what I struggle a bit with: making it pretty, making the text and images have the right size and location, etc. Nevertheless, she has a secret infatuation with making so-called "connections." She loved it when someone made the distant connection of antimatter as a possible energy source, and she loves all of the analogies. So I have a whole list of analogies, including the holy grail of all analogies: the man at the cattle auction trying to figure out the weight of the cow before the auctioneer has arrived (an analogy for the various ways in which one can measure the mass of the universe--it has both accuracy and humor). But it gets better. I use equations for luminosity, doppler redshift, newtonian gravitation, and the hubble velocity-distance proportionality, as well as a comparison the dynamics of a dust filled system as opposed to a system filled with a small number of massive bodies, all in order to describe the necessity for dark matter. If I don't drive her insane with the low level math, then she'll go nuts over my application of these various principles to the given problem.

Only about half of school is about being smart. The other half is about figuring out exactly what a teacher wants and likes. And most of the part about being smart is about being smart enough to give the teacher exactly what they want. In other words, it's like working the social services system in order to live well without doing anything. If you at least know how to do it, your life will never be too bad no matter what your economic situation may seem. Okay, that is a bad analogy, but you get the point. So let me finish this off with a quote by my dear friend (a teacher, nonetheless) Bill Wilson:

"The more you know, the more you know how little you know."