Name Day

Here in Hungary, they have this thing called Name Day.  Every name is assigned a day of the year. Since there are more names than days, you will share your name day with other names.  If you have a name that is so unique (i.e. Moon Unit) your parents will dictate a name day.

My brother-in-law's name is Tibor and every year, his name day falls on April 14th. 

We celebrate name days just like birthdays without the cake.  The are presents and the Name Day Person is the special one for the day.

I have a rather large Hungarian family:
Erika - wife
Bence - step son
Echo - dog (good girl...see picture)
Tibor - brother-in-law
Eva - sister-in-law
Piroska - mother-in-law
Kata - niece
Dorka - other niece
Tibor senior - Father-in-law that I rarely see

Every name day or birthday, we all get together and celebrate the occasion.  I think this is great.  This entire family gets together 1 or 2 weekend days a month and celebrates being a family.  There is a big dinner and presents and everyone lays around for a few hours just visiting.

I love how I am as much a part of this family as any other member. 

Tomorrow morning, I get a 5:00 am taxi to the airport.  Time to return to the States.  Time to enter my "other" world. 

This is not an easy thing to do.  I am use to having my wife around and now I just have my dog.  Once I get use to that, I travel back to Hungary and have to get use to sharing my time with someone else.  It's a constant struggle.  I can usually adjust to my new conditions about as fast as I adjust to the time differences.

Someone once asked my wife, "Why do you do it?  Why do you carry on such a long distance relationship?" 

Her answer, "Because its worth it."

I couldn't agree more.

http://www.worldgratitudelist.com     Leave a list.  Read a list.  Be happy.

j

Photonic Visions

This is my last weekend in Hungary.  I travel to Kentucky on Monday and then on to California (home) sometime later in the week.

We had a BBQ today with a group of my Hungarian friends.  We always try to get together with them when I am in town.    There are 4 couples.

One of the guys is an astrophysicist.  He is, as you might expect, really, really smart.  I use him to bounce ideas off of for my science fiction book.  In fact, I have named one of the characters in my book after him.

Anyway, I like to pose questions to him with regards to Einstein and relativity.  Black holes, light speed and all of that type of stuff has always interested me.

So today I say, "Alright Gyula (pronounced Jula),  suppose I am accelerating on my way to light speed.  I want to go to a star one light year away.  Now, the closer I get to light speed, the shorter the trip feels to me.  As a matter of fact, if I am at light speed, then the trip from earth to the start would appear to have occurred instantaneously although those watching from earth would have seen it take me a year to get there.  Am I right?"

Gyula has a funny way about him.  He is thoughtful, not because the question is hard, but because he is trying to find an answer that someone like me can understand.  Eventually, he says, "No, you cannot travel at the speed of light because you have mass.  It would take infinite energy to accelerate any amount of mass to that speed."

I am ready for this answer and come back with, "Suppose a photon, which has no mass, and is traveling at the speed of light all the time makes this trip.  Wouldn't it seem to the photon that it took zero time to travel one light year?  In fact, couldn't this same photon travel a million light years and have no time seem to pass?  Going even farther, since no time is passing as it makes these trips, couldn't the photon make an infinite amount of trips since they all take zero time?  In fact, wouldn't it appear to the photon that it was in all locations all of the time at the same time?  Wouldn't the photon think it was the only photon in existence?"

Gyula ponders this one for a few moments before answering, "Yes, but it would be wrong."

This, to me, was a hilarious answer.

By the way, today's picture depicts the infamous double-slit experiment.  If you have seen, What the Bleep Do We Know, this is discussed there.  The second smartest man in the last hundred years, Richard Feynman was asked about the results and said, "Maybe everything that can possibly happened has already happened and by observing, we are calling a probabilistic result into existence."

Short blog.  Too much BBQ make Jim a sleepy boy.


http://www.worldgratitudelist.com     Leave a list.   Read a list.   Be happy.

j