Giant Sumpweed???
In 1900, to solve a dilemma in physics Max Planck derived a bold solution through mathematics. The problem was in the relationship between a particle's energy and its frequency. Planck's calculation determined what he called the Quantum of Action. By Action he referred to energy moving along a path. Lend your mind to the image of waves on the screen of an oscilloscope, or the heart monitors in a coronary intensive care unit. The classic view of Action was that energy moving along a path could change in a smooth and continuous manner. Trouble was energy didn't seem to be moving along a path in a smooth and continuous manner, which suggested that energy might not be an infinitely divisible stream of whatever it was flowing into endless and mysterious wonder. Instead, Planck suggested, and this was radical, that energy and all other physical things comprised of tiny indivisible packets, that could be measured. Planck's Constant is his calculation of the size of the smallest possible unit or packet of energy or action in the Universe. Pretty, bloody bold, but lo, since 1900 Planck's Constant has been "measured with increasing precision." The question I'm hearing: "Does this have something to do with Ivan of the Left Artery or Baxter of the Abdominal Aorta?" Certainly not Ivan, he's a savage, he's a proponent of a flat-earth and he's in deep denial, so he has to grow up a bit, but Poor Baxter, encouraged by our Spleen and his cult members, is laboring under the illusion that despite claims by the laws of entropy which suggests that as energy dissipates and everything cools down time comes to an end producing the blessed release we all yearn for, Baxter, however, has been persuaded that when we die, he personally will be tried by God's Department of Justice and sentenced to what's laughingly referred to as "The Eternal Flames." The point about Max Planck, a blue-eyed German Idealist, the founder of quantum theory and a Lutheran, he's one of those fiendish physicists who has a number of very neat, and often incomprehensible suggestions about consciousness. At the end of his life, perhaps contemplating his legacy, he suggested in what to my mind was an off hand manner that Consciousness was the underlying matrix from which all matter came. He went on a bit, then some more and in so doing he sounded guilty of something, but we'll look at where that came from tomorrow when a rather special Clematis Paniculata achieves a slightly fuller bloom and after we've all been forced into a better understanding of what makes a young Mormon tick.
