So, when I was in high school my mom planted a pomegranate tree in our back yard. I remembered this yesterday and went to check on it. To my great excitement there were half a dozen ripe fruits ready for picking. So, now that I have learned about gardening and eating from the earth, I picked them. I was going to make ice cream, but that seemed a bit risky (I just started this whole eating from the earth thing, I'll work up to the ice cream :-] ). Instead, I made pomegranate juice. Here is my documentation.
The tree...
The seeds...
I put the seeds in a food processor (not for very long, just enough to break the juice pods) then strained it and squeezed a lot to get all the juice out. Four small to medium fruits gave me half a cup of juice. Mix with water and sugar and voila!
This makes me think. If food grows in Arizona and New Mexico, I bet it grows in New Hampshire too... Excellent!
"Be honest. And if you realize you are not being honest, be honest about not being honest... Be vulnerable. And if you're not being vulnerable, be vulnerable about not being vulnerable." -James Finely
I have a hard time being honest about what I am feeling. So I'm going to be honest about that. I don't tell people how I feel while I'm feeling it, which is just a way of avoiding the scary emotion. But I know I do that.
Today, I left Flagstaff. I thought that on my eight hour drive home I might get some things straight in my mind. Not quite...but I did see some pretty flowers.
Before I left, I went to say good-bye to the garden. Here are my last pictures of the (this) garden.
I'm not quite sure how it is that I came to be so attached to this pumpkin, but here it is!
The garden! Look at that pumpkin vine taking over everything!
My garden feast for the road. That, Village Baker bread, and a new mix CD makes a long car ride bearable.
Seven hours later and about 30 miles from home I realized why I love the southwest... And now I am home. It is good and comfortable.
There comes a time after every milestone (such as college graduation) when things start to change. I've managed to postpone this eventuality quite successfully, if I do say so myself. But even I, with my avoidance and denial, have to face the music.
I am very mixed up in my emotions, which makes this all the harder to sort out. I am excited about moving to New Hampshire to do Americorp for a year. I am looking forward to meeting new people, having new experiences, and putting my beliefs to the test to see how they stand up in the "real" world. But I am also sad. Deeply sad to leave this town and these people. That is hard for me to express, but somehow it is down there. I feel like I have grown so much here, like I have come to life. I would like to turn this sadness into celebration for all the wonderful things that have happened. I would like to be dancing when I leave town.
Today we had evening prayer like we have been doing for most of the summer. We practiced Lectio Divina or Holy Reading which is something that I have read about but never tried. We read Psalm 139, each of us read it out loud twice with periods of silence for meditation. The idea is to be present. To be present to the words, to be present to each other, to be present to ourselves, and to be present to God. Honestly, I found the last two the hardest. The best way I have to describe this "being present" is kything from Madeline L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time trilogy. If you haven't read these, stop reading this blog and find a copy. Kything with each other and kything with God are both beautiful images to me.
Psalm 139: 9-10
If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.
Another garden post. It just rocks my socks every time I walk past. I think what amazes me so much is not that I did anything (Nick and Aaron did all the hard work) or even that we did anything by planting it, but that the earth did it. That out of a bunch of bare dirt and a couple seeds the earth spit out edible food! Call me simple, but my socks are still rocked.
Here are some more pictures. I decided to change my blog title to reflect my obvious garden-mania. Plus I think it is a nice metaphor to my life, so it works.
Can you believe how tall the corn is!
We are going to make salsa with these chile peppers sometime soon.
The bean seeds Nick planted are all sprouting.
And, when I went to take pictures of the pumpkins, this guy was there waiting for me. He was beautiful in life and vibrant. He even sat there long enough for me to dig out my camera and didn't fly away even when I stuck the camera in his face. There are angels everywhere.
As most of you know, I am working on a quantum mechanics research project this summer. Since 1) I think it is really cool and 2) I'm not very good at explaining it on the fly, I thought I'd post what I'm doing here so if anyone is interested you can see what I'm doing. Plus there is a movie at the end...that was one of my major accomplishments (don't laugh, my adviser thought it was really cool too!).
In the largest sense, I am applying an alternate interpretation of quantum mechanics to a basic concept in physics, namely, the harmonic oscillator. The harmonic oscillator is used as a model in almost all subdivisions of physics. Photons are modeled as harmonic oscillators in theories of light, pendulums in classical mechanics can be modeled as harmonic oscillators, etc. The quantum harmonic oscillator is one of the few systems that can by solved analytically in quantum mechanics (that is, the answer is exact equations instead of making approximations and using a computer to hack through). But even though an analytical solution is possible with standard quantum mechanics, the results are not necessarily conceptually fulfilling.
Standard quantum mechanics works on the assumption that a particle’s positions or velocity or any other feature is inherently probabilistic. Whereas on a human scale I can tell you the exact position I am sitting or exactly how fast I am moving, on the scale of an electron the best I can tell you is a range where the electron will be found and a position where it will most likely be.
This is a pretty unsatisfying view of the microscopic world. And since the macroscopic world is built from these probabilistic particles, quantum physics has profound implications for how we view the world. Einstein’s dissatisfaction with these ideas prompted the quotable line, “I am convinced that God does not play dice with the universe”.
As standard quantum mechanics was being developed (well before it was referred to as “standard”), other theories to explain experimental results were being developed. Why one theory becomes accepted and the others get relegated to footnotes, I am not enough of historian to explain. But so it happens. One of these “alternate” theories is now known as Bohmian mechanics, after its conceiver David Bohm.
Bohmian mechanics works on the principle that a probabilistic wave-function can be seen as a collection particles that can be treated just like particles in classical mechanics. We envision that each of these particles has a probability of existing until a measurement is made at which point only one particle actually exists. The true value of this interpretation comes from the fact that the behavior of wave-functions can be understood in terms of classical forces. All of those Physics I concepts like Force = Mass * Acceleration become useful tools in Bohmian mechanics. In standard quantum mechanics many problems can’t be understood conceptually, one just has to “shut up and calculate” as theoretical physicist Richard Feynman is quoted as saying. Bohmian mechanics gives us a way to picture the quantum world in terms of graspable classical concepts.
My specific project this summer is to apply Bohmian mechanics to the time-dependent harmonic oscillator. The simplest example of a harmonic oscillator is a weight on a spring sliding along a frictionless surface. The weight is pulled back from its equilibrium point and let go. It oscillates back and forth with a certain period and maximum distance from the equilibrium point depending on how far it is pulled back and the strength of the spring. This is a time-independent harmonic oscillator since the strength of the spring is constant in time. A time-dependent harmonic oscillator would be one where the strength of the spring changes over time. This isn’t a very meaningful model in the spring/mass example, but time-dependent harmonic oscillators are very useful models in quantum mechanics.
What we do is start with a specific wave-function whose shape is a Gaussian. A Gaussian is a distribution useful in statistics, you may know it as a normal distribution or a bell curve. A Gaussian is useful for our purposes because when the forces of a harmonic oscillator are applied to it, it stays a Gaussian. Its width and height changes, but it never loses the properties of a Gaussian. This makes it exceptionally nice to follow through time since we only have to worry about how one function changes in a harmonic oscillator.
Bohmian mechanics works by adding the force from the harmonic oscillator with the so called quantum force that is derived from the Schrödinger equation (the equation that governs standard quantum mechanics). By looking at how these forces cause the Gaussian’s width to grow or shrink we can predict how the probability distribution will change with time and where we are most likely to find the electron that this distribution models. Although there are still probabilities and uncertainties in this treatment, why they behave like they do is much more clear than in standard quantum mechanics. And since we come to the same conclusions as people who use standard quantum mechanics and as are achieved experimentally, our interpretation has validity.
My end results are best viewed as movies. The blue curve is the Gaussian probability distribution which represents where the particle is likely to exist. The green line is the quantum force that depends on the width of the probability distribution and the red line is the classical force which I can make change as any arbitrary time-dependent function. Sometimes physics is watching squiggly lines move on a screen!
i thank You God for most this amazing/
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees/
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything/
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
-ee cummings
