Mathematical vegetables and physicist jokes
First, I direct you to a beautiful
cabbage. Wow!
Here's a bit more
plant science.
And... in a further attempt to connect math and food, I bring you
A Technical Approach to Pancakes and Kansas (complete with IHOP reference!) This topic was mentioned in a physics
seminar I heard this week. The speaker,
James Bjorken, was comparing the flatness of the universe* with the flatness of Kansas, and therefore, the flatness of pancakes.
Early in the talk, he was describing the universe, as we see it: we can't see any kind of edge. When people speculate about what lies beyond the part of the universe that we can see, they wonder, of course, how far out it goes. Dr. Bjorken said that many theorists predict that the obervable universe (even if we don't have telescopes that can see it all) is, in fact, infinite. (So, we'll never see it all!) "That's pretty far, though," Bjorken countered. "
especially toward the end." That got a good laugh.
He went on to talk about a model of his own, where we are in just one square of the universe, and outside of the square that we can observe, there are many other similar squares. He compared our square to Kansas. "Now, if you're a theorist," he laughed, "and you're in Kansas, you can't see outside of Kansas... you would probably say that Kansas is infinite." :)
*When physicists & cosmologists talk about the universe being "
flat," they mean flat in 3D, not 2D. Usually people show
images that are in 2D, though, since the 3D ones are hard to picture.
