Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

On a chatty photography mailing list I read, someone said something or asked something about gravity last week, and this led to the expected "the Earth sucks" jokes (yeah, I chimed in with one), and then jokes about science, and now discussions of physics that are less joking. And less narrowly constrained to gravity. Today someone made a comment about "phonons" (bits of sound that act like particles), reminding me of how I first reacted when I found out that all matter has a "wave nature" as well as a "particle nature":

For the past couple of decades I've had this image in my head of a huge wall with two Volkswagen-sized slits in it, an even bigger wall (probably made of Niven's Ringworld material) about a light-week away on one side, and a Beetle canon a light-week away on the other side firing cars at the slits at relativistic velocities one at a time so that physicists can look at the interference patterns in the Bug splatters on the far wall and measure the effective frequency of a VW. (Or Rabbits, or Golfs, or any other Volkswagen as long as you're consistent. But not Things. Things are too rare and nifty to do that to.)

Yeah, I know a car isn't a particle, but that's the image that got stuck. You try getting rid of it!