• Midway Upon This Journey //
  • Victoria. 25. TX.
    Things that I love: Books, Art, Fashion, Politics, New People, Anatomy, Philosophy, Washington DC, Physics, & Psychology. //
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ikenbot: Black Hole Powered Jets Plow Into Galaxy This composite image of a galaxy illustrates how the intense gravity of a supermassive black hole can be tapped to generate immense power. The image contains X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue), optical light obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope (gold) and radio waves from the NSF’s Very Large Array (pink). This multi-wavelength view shows 4C+29.30, a galaxy located some 850 million light years from Earth. The radio emission comes from two jets of particles that are speeding at millions of miles per hour away from a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. The estimated mass of the black hole is about 100 million times the mass of our Sun. The ends of the jets show larger areas of radio emission located outside the galaxy. The X-ray data show a different aspect of this galaxy, tracing the location of hot gas. The bright X-rays in the center of the image mark a pool of million-degree gas around the black hole. Some of this material may eventually be consumed by the black hole, and the magnetized, whirlpool of gas near the black hole could in turn, trigger more output to the radio jet. Most of the low-energy X-rays from the vicinity of the black hole are absorbed by dust and gas, probably in the shape of a giant doughnut around the black hole. This doughnut, or torus blocks all the optical light produced near the black hole, so astronomers refer to this type of source as a hidden or buried black hole. The optical light seen in the image is from the stars in the galaxy.
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NGC 602: Taken Under the “Wing” of the Small Magellanic Cloud
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But who can say what’s best? That’s why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.

— Haruki Murakami (via electric-wish)
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I want to force myself again and again to leave the warmth and security of static situations and move into the world of growth and suffering where the real books are people’s minds and souls.

— Sylvia Plath (via creatingaquietmind)
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zeitvox: Corsin Pfister & Stephanie Wehner “It has been suggested that nature could be discrete in the sense that the underlying state space of a physical system has only a finite number of pure states. Here we present a strong physical argument for the quantum theoretical property that every state space has infinitely many pure states. We propose a simple physical postulate that dictates that the only possible discrete theory is classical theory. More specifically, we postulate that no information gain implies no disturbance or, read in the contrapositive, that disturbance leads to some form of information gain…” PhysOrg » Consider the famous Schrodinger’s cat paradox, a thought experiment in which a cat in a box simultaneously exists in two states (this is known as a ‘quantum superposition’). According to quantum theory it is possible that the cat is both dead and alive – until, that is, the cat’s state of health is ‘measured’ by opening the box. When the box is opened, allowing the health of the cat to be measured, the superposition collapses and the cat ends up definitively dead or alive. The measurement has disturbed the cat.This is a property of quantum systems in general. Perform a measurement for which you can’t know the outcome in advance, and the system changes to match the outcome you get. What happens if you look a second time? The researchers assume the system is not evolving in time or affected by any outside influence, which means the quantum state stays collapsed. You would then expect the second measurement to yield the same result as the first. After all, “If you look into the box and find a dead cat, you don’t expect to look again later and find the cat has been resurrected,” says Stephanie. “You could say we’ve formalised the principle of accepting the facts”, says Stephanie.Corsin and Stephanie show that this principle rules out various theories of nature. They note particularly that a class of theories they call ‘discrete’ are incompatible with the principle. These theories hold that quantum particles can take up only a finite number of states, rather than choose from an infinite, continuous range of possibilities. The possibility of such a discrete ‘state space’ has been linked to quantum gravitational theories proposing similar discreteness in spacetime, where the fabric of the universe is made up of tiny brick-like elements rather than being a smooth, continuous sheet.As is often the case in research, Corsin and Stephanie reached this point having set out to solve an entirely different problem altogether… >continue< Paper
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Indeed, the solitary reading experience is presented as an emotional investment, drawing out powerful and often unexpected depths of feeling that lead them to question who they are and how they perceive the world around them.

— Adam Reed (University of Surrey UK) - Henry and I: An Ethnographic Account of Men’s Fiction Reading.  (via anthmusings)
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aseaofquotes: Virginia Woolf, Night and Day
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i hope one day you find someone who makes flowers grow in even the saddest parts of you

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