Mind Memes for March 14: Einstein, Pi Day and More
Higgs is Confirmed
After a Higgs-like particle was detected last summer by CERN scientists, that particle has now been confirmed to be the real deal. Read more here.
Sex in Space
Is it ethical tio conceive a child in space? So asks Laura Woodmansee at Space.com. We don’t know, for instance, how changes in gravity would affect a human embryo. Read more here.
Happy Pi Day!
Why do we love Pi, or 3.14159, or 3.14 for short, so much? Because it is an “irrational and transcendental number” whose decimals “continue infinitely without repetition or pattern.” That’s why.
Pi Day, March 14, was given official recognition by the U.S. House of Representatives in 2009.
So how do you celebrate Pi Day? There are many ways. For one thing, plan to do something fun and quirky (and math related) at 3:14pm. Are you a mathlete? Take a 3.14 mile run. Or, do what a student named Theresa Miller did in 2010: recite 450 places of Pi while hula hooping and solving a Rubik’s Cube. No big deal.
Here’s a musical interpretation of Pi:
Happy Birthday Einstein!
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” That is one of our favorite sayings by Albert Einstein. So in that spirit, we asked Dr. Michio Kaku to explain the significance of Einstein in 90 seconds.
Watch the video here:
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
