A Strange Case Of Uncanny Timing: May 14, 2010 - "The God Particle" s Got Gas? Uncle John's a laugh riot.

What does it mean?

You've been thinking about somone. Somone you haven't heard from in weeks, months or even years, and within a short period of time you receive some kind of communication from them. Twice I received letters from a woman I had worked with years before within a day of thinking about her for the first time in a long period of time. The second instance I even stopped in front of the mailbox and had the idea that there was going to be a letter from her because it had already happened once and sure enough, there was a letter in the box. My question is obvious. What is this phenomenon that boils down to a "Strange Case Of Uncanny Timing"?

Is it God? Is it the Universe? Entanglement? Are our brains Quantum computers? Is it the "Law of Attraction"?, or is it all nothing more than a coincidence? Carl Jung called it synchronicity and it happens all the time. Does it happen to you? It happens to me and I find myself wondering "What does it mean?". Decide for yourself as you follow my diary of another "Strange Case Of Uncanny Timing", also known as a S.C.O.U.T!

Monday, January 3, 2011

May 14, 2010 - "The God Particle" s Got Gas? Uncle John's a laugh riot.

Background - I was reading “The God Particle, If The Universe Is the Answer, What Is The Question” by Leon Lederman. I’m no quantum physicists so lets just say it was slow going! Today I worked my way through pages 108-110 which chronicles the life of French chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and his work with oxygen including the naming of the element and the role it played in combustion - just a few of this man’s amazing accomplishments.

I love this book, but it can make my brain hurt, so later that very same day I decided to take a break and pick up some lighter reading to soothe my aching gray matter. The “Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, Plunges Into The Universe” was just what the doctor ordered! It doesn’t get any lighter than that.

S.C.O.U.T. - I opened to the book mark that held my place from over three weeks ago and began reading. The very first section is titled “Got Gas? Part I” and subtitled “In which our hero discovers oxygen and other nifty stuff by accident” (pg. 104).

I started getting that tingly feeling. This was shaping up to be a S.C.O.U.T.. Oxygen studying scientists twice in one day?!! The body of this section deals with the oxygen exploits of one English chemist named Joseph Priestley, the man who initially discovered oxygen. This one was close, but no cigar. I would have to see Lavoisier‘s name to consider this really strange timing, which I hadn‘t … until I reached the final paragraph,

However, it wasn’t until 1789 that Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, the famous French chemist, actually gave it its name “oxygen”, from the Greek for “acid” (Those crazy French, eh?). In a series of brilliant experiments, Lavoisier showed that air contains 20 percent oxygen and that combustion - the process that produces heat and light - is due to the combination of a combustible substance with oxygen.

Now that’s a S.C.O.U.T.! Understand that #1 - the section before this was about beaches, and the section after this one was about invasive species to foreign ecosystems. Random, random, random. #2 - This is the only page/pages that Lavoisier’s name appears in both the 485 pages of the Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, and the 414 pages of “The God Particle”. #3 - I had never heard of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier before today. Just try and calculate the odds of coming across this guy randomly twice in one day. I bet even a quantum physicist couldn’t do that!!

It makes me wonder if Nobel Prize winning particle physicist Leon Lederman and his search for the infinitesimal is following a path that will eventually lead to a redefinition of the macro-world. Look out Newtonian mechanics, your days may be numbered! My goofy dog Scout is unimpressed with my intellect, annoyed with my insight and is pretty sure I don’t understand the first thing about this quantum physics book. All he wants to know is when he’s due for his next cookie. Typical.