Vivat Libertas

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...

...or, in other news, it's my birthday. I'm 15 today, if you didn't know, and this seems to be the only day where I've blogged on time. (I missed Christmas and New Year's, and now I feel selfish for remembering my birthday...never mind.) I didn't really expect much from today: my last two birthdays weren't any fun for various reasons, and I hate Tuesdays because of PE and Games. Bleh. But I was happily proven quite wrong, as people actually went out of their way to be nice to me today, which was a pretty good feeling, and some other good stuff happened too. Firstly, we finally got this year's issue of our school magazine, something I always look forward to: I know it sounds sad, but I like it because it gives me a chance to look back on the year before and what I've done. This time I contributed to it, so I was quite pleased with myself, and I got a good laugh out of seeing how much of a dork I looked in the photos. It reminded me of just how muc...