Footnote Physicist

 by Steven Gusman           My understanding is that the Planck units were discovered when Max Planck simply took the fundamental constants, c, G, and h, and algebraically manipulated them until they returned a unique length, mass, and duration (in other words, he reverse-engineered them through unit analysis). 1  Utilizing the fact that p = mv and E = mc 2 , one can further manipulate the Planck units to include a momentum and an energy.           l p = (hG/c 3 ) 1/2           m p = (hc/G) 1/2           t p = (hG/c 5 ) 1/2           p p = (hc 3 /G) 1/2           E p = (hc 5 /G) 1/2 The small values, length and time, are then naturally assumed by many physicists to be quanta of those variables (or at least of the right order-of-magnitude). That combining the relativistic constants...

 by Steven Gussman THE HYPOTHESIS 1           Why do warm things smell more-so than cold things? The obvious answer is that temperature is just the average kinetic energy of the molecules in a substance: colder things are stiller, and the constituents of hotter things are more-so in motion. This motion should then kick off molecules into the environment where they may be received by noses: smelled. Yet this explanation is purely physical, what if there is another cause, shaped by evolution by natural selection? Perhaps the effect is also by virtue of the fact that by being warm, the scent preferentially travels towards cool noses.           The passive smell hypothesis is that in animals for which smelling is an important sense (for sensing one's inert environment, and for communication via pheromones), the nose is elongated away from the warm body; made of cartilage; moist or runny (especially in colder weathe...

 by Steven Gussman THE CONCEPT 1           It is sometimes supposed that what is inside of black holes is another universe (and therefore that our universe may be inside of a black hole within a parent universe). Both our universe and black holes change sizes: the former during the inflationary epoch (sometimes blamed on a scalar “inflaton” field), and less rapidly during the current accelerated expansion epoch (labeled “dark energy” and associated with Albert Einstein's cosmological constant); the latter because it grows when it is impinged upon with the cosmic microwave background (or, less often but more dramatically, when other stellar objects collide with the black hole), 2 and because it shrinks when Hawking radiation dominates, sending energy outward. The Schwarzschild radius of a black hole is defined as: 3 r s = 2Gm / c 2 One can see that the radius and the mass are directly proportional. Yet the CMB impinges on the black hole always...