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Cake day: June 29th, 2025

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  • Some of the christians in my family like to take the “let there be light” thing and claim that it’s talking about the big bang, anecdotally.

    But that’s probably not even right. In my understanding, the Big Bang wasn’t actually bright, because the first phase of the universe was a superhot but opaque quantum soup. Even the weak nuclear force took time to become distinct from the electromagnetic force. I don’t know if energy packets of a combined electroweak field count as photons exactly.

    Regardless, the first light as we know it (in the sense that it could traverse the universe) wasn’t until a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, when the whole mess had cooled enough to become transparent. We now call that initial light the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation.








  • There are different levels of understanding.

    I’m trained in physical sciences. I studied at university and then worked ~8 years for a research department and at one point learned 2D NMR and how to run molecular simulations on a supercomputer. I’m well aware of the challenges of winning grants against colleagues and getting papers published and surviving peer review and then hoping your work gets noticed outside your weird little niche.

    My buddy is a schoolteacher. He can run circles around me with arithmetic and explain the scientific method in rap format. Kids eat it up! But he’s probably never done a gradient integral (not that I remember how either) or contributed to a collegiate press release.

    We’re both ostensibly working with the same core principles but the reality ends up quite different. Context matters.