Mathematics
Whether infinity plus one is equal to infinity or whether it is greater than infinity is a matter of opinion. Whether infinity to the power of infinity is equal to or greater than infinity is also a matter of opinion, but Georg Cantor claims that infinity remains the same if you make a small change to it, but becomes larger if you make a large change to it. Am I the only person to see that this is nonsense?
D.N.A. and the Higgs boson
On 23rd November 1960, after studying science at college for nearly two years, I attended an evening lecture entitled ‘Nucleic Acids and Heredity’. It was held in the evening because it wasn’t part of the prepared course. I had never heard of nucleic acids, and I couldn’t see what they had to do with heredity. I didn’t think that a chromosome could be a molecule of D.N.A. because I knew that a chromosome was about eight times as log as it was wide, whereas a molecule of D.N.A was about a thousand million times as long as it was wide. As D.N.A. was an acid and acids are liquids, which are composed of vast numbers of molecules, I assumed that there must be a vast number of molecules of D.N.A. in each chromosome. It was at least thirty years later that I discovered that there was only one, which was folded up over and over again so as to appear the right shape.
Much more recently I learned that the Higgs boson had been discovered, and I wondered what this meant. Are there vast numbers of Higgs bosons in the universe, one of which has been detected? If so, are they evenly distributed like neutrinos or only found in particular places? Or is there only one Higgs boson, which existed for a short time in a laboratory? In that case wouldn’t it be better to say that it had been created rather than discovered?
Countries I have been to (in chronological order):
England
Wales
Yugoslavia
Austria
Scotland
France
Switzerland
Italy
Greece
Vatican City
West Germany
Belgium
Guernsey
Sark
Northern Ireland
The Irish Republic
The Isle of Man
The Netherlands
Spain
Andorra
Morocco
[I have also been to what were later to become Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia and probably Kosovo.]
The Internet
In Chapter 16 of Happy Memories I mentioned that I had been able to use the internet to find out what had happened to people with unusual names that I knew long ago. I have now read that some people have been able to do this with people with common names. Is there anyone out there who can tell me how this was achieved? I have tried Friends Reunited without success.