Mike Crittenden is Professor Emeritus at Genesee Community College in western New York, where he taught Physics, Astronomy and related courses for four decades. One of his favorite quotes is from Arthur C. Clarke, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” (For an example, put “levitating frog” in you tube’s search box and see if that doesn’t look like magic to you.) Science is not primarily about knowing the difference between a beaker and a flask. It is about important topics that touch our lives and how we fit into a very large, mysterious Universe.
“Just Because” and “Don’t Ask That” The world is not as rational and concrete as was once imagined. If you look closely, some basic things turn out to be uncertain, insubstantial or simply nonexistent. “Why is that true?” “Where is that located?” and “What time is it?” can sometimes be meaningless questions with no answers. Matter itself turns out to be almost nothingness. Topics include Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, chaos theory, time and space in the theory of relativity, the structure of matter and emergent behavior. All Welcome. Sirius Rising: 1:00-2:30 p.m. MON, July 21 East Shire
Math and Art. When people hear “math,” they often think of arithmetic, but saying math is just arithmetic is like saying pizza is just pepperoni. There is a lot more to it, and it doesn’t have to have pepperoni at all. To a large extent, math is about patterns or relationships. Art is often about patterns or relationships too. Not all math is art and not all art is math, but there is more than enough overlap to give us something to talk about. The discussion will include musical scales, the golden ratio, perspective, fractals, tessellation (tiling) and sacred geometry. All Welcome. Sirius Rising: 1:00-2:30 p.m. WED, July 23 East Shire
How Stars Form, Age and Die. The story begins with how a molecular cloud forms in space. Gravity makes clumps in the cloud contract until they become stars. A star spends many years as a stable “main sequence” star like our sun but then in old age, things start to go wrong. (Some of us can relate to that.) After some time as a red giant, a star ends up as either a white dwarf, a neutron star or a black hole. All Welcome. Sirius Rising: 1:00-2:30 p.m. FRI, July 25 East Shire