Tuesday, June 10, 2008

The Laws of Physics

When I was about seven, my mum taught me to bake cakes. She said the way to measure a quarter cup of butter without making a mess is to fill a two-cup pyrex liquid measure with one cup of water. Then add enough butter to make the water go up to 1/4 cup + 1 cup. Pour off the water and you've got a quarter cup of butter.

She explained that this was physics and was called "displacement". It was the idea that two things could not both occupy the same space at the same time. I was delighted to learn this rule and happily set about measuring the volume of all sorts of things by pouring exactly measured amounts of water into and out of the bath.

The rule, "two things can't occupy the same space at the same time" reminds me of the L.P. of Non-C. I try to explain this to people as immutable, like math. From now on, I'm going to use the displacement analogy to teach it to people.

Churches in Belgium are to be turned into mosques as Christian congregations decline while Muslims demand more places to worship.

Philip Heylen, Antwerp's deputy mayor, has called on the city to "break the taboo" over the many empty and unused churches.

"It's a looming issue yet it seems impossible to have a debate about this," he said. "Churches were built as places of worship and they should not be used as shopping malls. We've had a positive response from members of the Muslim community, which is open to the idea of converting them."
I'll bet.

...cause you know, as long as it's worship, it's good. Whether it's Baal, or Moloch, or Allah or whatever. We ain't fussy.

2 comments:

Luminous DONG said...

This is not the kind of physical law that prof Feynman explains in his book 'the character of physical law', with which he attacks so many of the common sense axioms of natural philosophy that physicists today stand accused of turning common sense on its head,just so as to be the first with a new theory. We would worry a lot more if the premises being recommissioned as mosques were at CERN..........wouldn't we ?

Hilary Jane Margaret White said...

Dear sir,

Please take note of the commbox rules which I have just reposted to your left. If you are new, you are perhaps not aware that the use of real (or at least plausible) names is one of the very few things I treat with seriousness here.