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He spent ten days in and around Phnom Penh and left feeling good about his new friends’ ability to work the gene machine. It was the flight home, on January 10, 2020, that he found unsettling. He changed planes again in Guangdong—the province from which the Chinese doctor, the superspreader of SARS, had come. The airport was transformed. There were now lots of security people wearing masks. Passengers were required to step, one by one, inside an acrylic stall and be scanned for fever. “They weren’t fooling around,” said Joe. “I thought, What the hell is going on?” He’d never seen a fever box and, as he stepped inside, he had a feeling in the pit of his stomach. “I thought, These people know something we don’t.”
The Premonition
Michael Lewis
4. Where do you repeatedly undermine yourself, create harmful replications, produce the same old, same old? Where do you flee from your best, riskest self? None of us begin the day thinking, “Well, today I shall do the same stupid things I have been doing for decades, but it will all turn out better.” Yet, everyday, the complexes, those historically charged energy cluster, operate in their autonomous way, and the same old, same old surfaces. The complexes take over the ego, flood it with their historic scripts, and the familiar, predetermined choices result, even as we believe ourselves free and conscious in any given moment. ~ Why Do Good People Do Bad Things, p. 220
The Best of James Hollis
Logan Jones
By carrying out such simple experiments, scientists can measure the strengths of the electric and magnetic fields, and Maxwell’s equations predict that the ratio of strengths gives the speed of the waves. What, then, is the answer? What did Faraday’s benchtop measurements, coupled with Maxwell’s mathematical genius, predict for the speed of the electromagnetic waves? This is one of many key moments in our story. It is a wonderful example of why physics is a beautiful, powerful, and profound subject: Maxwell’s waves travel at 299,792,458 meters per second. Astonishingly, this is the speed of light—Maxwell had stumbled across an explanation of light itself. You see the world around you because Maxwell’s electromagnetic field drives itself through the darkness and into your eyes, at a speed predictable using only a coil of wire and a magnet. Maxwell’s equations are the crack in the door through which light enters our story in a way that is every bit as important as the discoveries of Einstein that they triggered. The existence in nature of this special speed, a single, unchanging, 299,792,458 meters per second, will lead us in the next chapter, just as it led Einstein, to jettison the notion of absolute time.
Why Does E=mc2?
Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw
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