Eureka

You really haven't lived until you drive around on your motorcycle with your IPod blasting away in your ears. This is seriously fun stuff. A little dangerous perhaps? Yeah...motorcycles combined with auditory sensory deprivation probably isn't the safest thing in the world. I can just hear the stories in my head:

- she crashed her bike? oh god...how?
- she sort of ran into a car while changing lanes...she had her IPod on ya know.
- mmm-hmm...

I knock on wood as I type this...lots of wood.

I was pondering the whole opposites attract thing the other day. It's funny how cherry-picked analogies have a way of propgating throughout a culture. There are 4 fundamental forces in the Universe as we understand it. They are the strong nuclear force, the electrmagnetic force, the weak nuclear force and gravity. Gravity is by far the weakest of the four, which is a bit of a puzzle to Physicists. Hell...gravity in general is a bit of a puzzle to physicists. We can describe it's effects but not its mechanisms or explain why it's so much weaker compared to the other forces.

Sorry...digressing...

Opposites attract as applied to people is taken from the electromagnectic force...which is the second strongest of the 4. It's the thing that holds atoms together. Electrons are attracted to protrons and vise-versa. But it's often not very difficult to strip an electron from an atom. I think about my son sliding down slides and his hair standing straight up and out and every which way when he reaches the end. As he slides down, the friction between his bottom and the slide results in his stripping and gaining electrons from atoms on the slide...he becomes electrically charged...and poof with the hair. It's not always easy to strip electrons from atoms, but we do it all the time as we move around in the omnipresent friction on this planet. Analogies abound here, but I'll just leave it.

The strong nuclear force is the attraction/binding of protons and nuetrons in the nucleus of an atom. Protons repel other protons and nuetrons actually don't much like each other either. So how do we get elements besides Hydrogen (which has a single proton and neutron). Turns out that the quarks and gluons that make up a proton attract each other if the protons become sufficiently close to one another (I mean really, really close). And it takes a LOT of energy to get them close enought. But, once protons bind, it takes a great deal of energy to separate them. It's doable, but you have to induce nuclear fission (splitting the nucleus of an atom) in order to accomplish it. So a proton binding is actually the strongest force in the Universe. Likes attract...very strongly.

To digress once more, nuclear fusion is the process of binding atoms at the nucleus. When atoms are fused an extraorinday amount of energy is released. Nuclear fusion is the engine that drives stars and prevents the stars from collapsing under the force of their own gravity. I can't say why, but I find the idea of fusion and the equilibrium of a star irresistably beautiful. Romantic.

And more analogies emerge. The bigger the star, the faster it goes through its supply of nuclear fuel. All elements up to iron can be fused to make the next element on the periodic table...but iron is too heavy to fuse...takes too much energy. Once a star has exhausted its fuel up to iron, gravity wins....gravity always wins. The bigger the star, the shorter its life. The bigger the star, the more violent its life and death (the more gas and other elements that collapse under the weight of the star's gravity, the more violent the implosion...and resulting explosion (nova) if the star is big enough). If the star is big enough, it's death will result in a black hole...from which, nothing can escape.

I had a super giant star relationship once.