Cartoons: the war continues but may turn a little foggy

Naturally, editorial cartoonists are having a field day with the election results. Some are looking at results not related to Republicans.

If Congressional action continues as it has recently, we have nothing to fear from a Republican one.

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Adam Zyglis, The Week

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New Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said as leader he hopes to work with President Obama and Democrats in the Senate, according to an interview with Time.

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Steve Sack, The Week

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Millennials Want Jobs, Not Vote Pandering. Unfortunately the Koch Brothers won.

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Chip Bok, The Week

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Now that marijuana is legal in more places, it's easier to tune it all out.

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Tom Toles, The Week

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While looking for an article that gives information on the topic of 'corporations as people', I found this: "Porn stars demand Google's help to combat piracy." Seems it's easy to forget that Google is a corporation, too.

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David Fitzsimmons, The Week

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-- Marge

How current science and cartoons view time

Meme with Wile E. Coyote found at Man vs Brain

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Are space and time (aka spacetime) a continuum?  Einstein thought so, Petr Hořava, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, does not.  Quoting from the article, Splitting Time from Space, in Scientific American:

Physicists have struggled to marry quantum mechanics with gravity for decades. In contrast, the other forces of nature have obediently fallen into line. For instance, the electromagnetic force can be described quantum-mechanically by the motion of photons. Try and work out the gravitational force between two objects in terms of a quantum graviton, however, and you quickly run into trouble—the answer to every calculation is infinity. But now Petr Hořava, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, thinks he understands the problem. It’s all, he says, a matter of time.

More specifically, the problem is the way that time is tied up with space in Einstein’s theory of gravity: general relativity. Einstein famously overturned the Newtonian notion that time is absolute—steadily ticking away in the background. Instead he argued that time is another dimension, woven together with space to form a malleable fabric that is distorted by matter. The snag is that in quantum mechanics, time retains its Newtonian aloofness, providing the stage against which matter dances but never being affected by its presence. These two conceptions of time don’t gel.

Evidence for Hořava's theory is offered in this followup.

So why are we including gravity in a discussion of spacetime?  This article at Einstein Online explains Einstein's geometric gravity.

NASA has confirmed Einstein's theory by means of its Gravity Probe B. You can download the results of NASA's report cites at Physical Review Letters; click on the Download Accepted Manuscript link.

What do you think: is time a continuum or discrete?

-- Marge

How we humans view time

This video posted on YouTube by the Science Channel caught my attention and started me thinking about how we view time.  This video is part of the series Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman.

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To say most of us view time as a linear progression appears to be true, and some people value time's linearity, as explained by Benjamin Sisko in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.  The video below was posted by Viral9.

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Many cultures and belief systems see time as cyclical, as noted by the Wikipedia article Time Cycles.  This ties in with the "study of the origin, evolution, and eventual fate of the universe" (Wikipedia) called Cosmology, which presents many interesting views from around the world.

Practices and viewpoints concerning time in a variety of cultures have been analyzed by anthropologist Edward T. Hall. You can find some of his views at Changing Minds.

And at Cracked.com you can find the attention-grabbing article, 7 Theories on Time That Would Make Doc Brown's Head Explode.

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Theory #7: We May Not Live in the Present. --Cracked

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-- Marge