Happy Birthday, Niels Bohr!
Because equations are awesome. So, as most people might not know were it not for the Google Doodle, today's the 127th anniversary of Niels Bohr's birthday. I'm not going to talk about his life (mostly because I'm lazy, partly because the internet's got a wealth of information about him already), but I am going to talk about the influence him and the other greats of physics have had on me. You might wonder how a bunch of dead white males from the first half of the twentieth century could possibly influence a sixteen-year-old girl - a sixteen-year-old girl, mind you, who hasn't even gone to university yet and whose knowledge of theoretical physics, and the maths behind it, is thus very limited. Moreover, that physics is relatively old - even the positron, the first evidence of antimatter, was discovered in 1932; the modern theory of antimatter itself originates in a 1928 paper by Paul Dirac . Even something as exotic as antimatter is ancient (not that it...