Scientific American
Just because a mathematical formula works does not mean it reflects reality
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I take inspiration where I can get it. My girlfriend recently alerted me to a viral video in which a teenage girl complains about mathematics. “I was just doing my makeup for work,” Gracie Cunningham says while dabbing makeup on her face, “and I just wanted to tell you guys how I don’t think math is real.”
Some of the math she’s learning in school, Cunningham suggests, has little to do with the world in which she lives. “I get addition, like, if I take two apples and add three it’s five. But how would you come up with the concept of algebra?” While some geeks mocked Cunningham, others came to her defense, pointing out that she is raising questions that have troubled scientific heavyweights.
Is the Schrödinger Equation True?
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Skooz OK, so it s like this. This used to be a really nice profile page; pics galore, nice wallpapers, and if I say so my self, pretty cool. Then, Comcast deactivated the web pages of their subscribers, including me, and all the painstaking HTML was orphaned overnight. One of these days I ll get around to rebuilding this page. One of these days .
ungh!! Will you raise or lower my taxes? Until that question is answered, I do not hear a word they have to say.
All Hail the Mighty Kansas City Chiefs
............................................................................... 80MM+ in China
8MM in Cambodia
so thick that you don t understand the man s own words.
Bohr s model of the atom. Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)
You can search for a picture of an atom on the internet and you ll find one, even though nobody s actually seen an atom before. But we ve got an estimation of what a single atom looks like because of the work of a bunch of different scientists like Danish physicist Niels Bohr.
Atoms are the building blocks of matter a single atom of any individual element is the most basic entity in nature that still abides by the rules of physics we can observe in everyday life (the subatomic particles that make up atoms have their own special rules). Scientists suspected atoms existed for a long time before they could conceptualize their structure even the ancient Greeks figured the matter of the universe was made up of components so small they couldn t be broken down into anything smaller, and they called these fundamental units
Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner, 1912 (Public Domain via WikimediaCommons)
At a conference in 1937, Meitner shares the front row with (left to right) Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Otto Stern and Rudolf Ladenburg; Hilde Levi is the only other woman in the room. (Friedrich Hund via WikimediaCommons)
Chemist Lise Meitner with students (Sue Jones Swisher, Rosalie Hoyt and Danna Pearson McDonough) on the steps of the chemistry building at Bryn Mawr College. Courtesy of Bryn Mawr College. April 1959. (Public Domain via WikimediaCommons)
However, Hahn wasn’t alone in making the discovery. The credit should have also gone to his longtime research colleague, physicist Dr. Lise Meitner. It was yet another example of the Matilda Effect, a bias against acknowledging the achievements of women scientists whose work is attributed to male colleagues.
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