Everybody was Kung-fu fighting
I made my little sister wait 10 minutes for this picture
Yes great science can be done in an everyday kitchen. But of course my sister's kitchen isn't an everyday kitchen, more like a space ship headed to Mars for 2 years, everything you could possibly imagine you would ever need.
To the Lighthouse. Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?
This Christmas I went home to Ontario and flew out to the east coast (Halifax) to visit my sister and her (ever growing) family. We did the obligatory trip to Peggy's Cove and got some nice pictures. I also did an extremely succesful science experiment with my nephew Caleb. We looked at the effect that temperature has on the solubility of salt in water, and boy was I surprised by the outcome! It was a linear relationship!
Incidentally I found out that kids growing up is not a linear relationship. About as much happens in my life in a decade as happens in theirs in a week. I think this is because their experience of time is small. Therefore a week to a baby is like half their life! That's a lot of time! But for me a week doesn't even register anymore. I need a decade to feel like I've accomplished something. It's like Zeno's parardox in reverse. If I approach a wall by going half the distance and then half the distance again I will never get there. Well if my experience of time slows evermore as I get older then as I approach infinity in age, time will stop for me. Likewise for a newborn baby, a minute may "feel" like infinity to them. When explaining time relativity Einstein said something like: when you are with a pretty girl, an hour may seem like a minute, but when you are waiting for something like a train and you are late, then a minute may seem like an eternity!
