Did
you know there are over 30,000 particle accelerators in the world? The design
of particle accelerators is a creative process. Often it starts with just one
person and their concept, but they all tend to have 5 key ingredients.
1 - Particles - where do you get them, how do you make them? Accelerators might use atoms with electrons split off, called ions, or the particles inside atoms themselves: electrons or protons.
2 - Energy - you need an acceleration mechanism, some way of giving the particles a push. Typically this uses electric fields.
3 - Control - once your particles are moving, you need to control them, to move them and focus them where they’re needed. This is generally done with magnetic fields.
4 - Collision - not all particle accelerators are ‘colliders’ in the traditional sense. They don’t all collide beams together like at the LHC. But in almost every case you do need to collide your beam of accelerated particles into something - this might be a fixed target to investigate a sample, or even directly into a person’s body, such as during medical treatments.
5 - Detection - there’s normally not much point doing all of this work unless you can then detect the outcome and learn from it. You need to measure what happens to the beam of particles when they collide with their target.
“Sixteen-year-old Scotch struggles to fit in—at home she’s the perfect daughter, at school she’s provocatively sassy, and thanks to her mixed heritage, she doesn’t feel she belongs with the Caribbeans, whites, or blacks. And even more troubling, lately her skin is becoming covered in a sticky black substance that can’t be removed. While trying to cope with this creepiness, she goes out with her brother—and he disappears.
A mysterious bubble of light just swallows him up, and Scotch has no idea how to find him. Soon, the Chaos that has claimed her brother affects the city at large, until it seems like everyone is turning into crazy creatures. Scotch needs to get to the bottom of this supernatural situation ASAP before the Chaos consumes everything she’s ever known—and she knows that the black shadowy entity that’s begun trailing her every move is probably not going to help.
A blend of fantasy and Caribbean folklore, at its heart this tale is about identity and self acceptance—because only by acknowledging her imperfections can Scotch hope to save her brother.
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Nalo Hopkinson, born in Jamaica, has lived in Jamaica, Trinidad and Guyana and for the past 35 years in Canada. She is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, USA. She is the author of six novels, a short story collection, and a chapbook.
The observable universe has TEN TIMES more galaxies than we thought 😮 Scientists converted Hubble images into 3D renderings. Previously, we thought there were about 100 billion galaxies in our observable universe. This new research suggests there are 10 times more. (📷 :ESA)
The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics (2015)
“The Sound of Culture explores the histories of race and technology in a world made by slavery, colonialism, and industrialization. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and moving through to the twenty-first, the book argues for the dependent nature of those histories. Looking at American, British, and Caribbean literature, it distills a diverse range of subject matter: minstrelsy, Victorian science fiction, cybertheory, and artificial intelligence.
All of these facets, according to Louis Chude-Sokei, are part of a history in which music has been central to the equation that links blacks and machines. As Chude-Sokei shows, science fiction itself has roots in racial anxieties and he traces those anxieties across two centuries and a range of writers and thinkers—from Samuel Butler, Herman Melville, and Edgar Rice Burroughs to Sigmund Freud, William Gibson, and Donna Haraway, to Norbert Weiner, Sylvia Wynter, and Samuel R. Delany.”
Louis Chude-Sokei
is a professor of English at the University of Washington, Seattle. His essays have appeared widely in publications such as African American Review, Transition, and The Believer. He is the author of The Last “Darky”: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora, which was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.
If Sun-Ra is the Father of Afro-futurism, than it’s mother would have to be Octavia Butler. Highly influenced by the fantastic, sci-fi and a nuanced reading of the history of Black people in America, Octavia fused elements from ancient Africa, the modern and the future state to develop a manipulated metaphorical, social critique of race, class, gender, spirituality and sexuality. As a MacArthur genius, she was the first science fiction writer awardee.
