Question: Just turn on your TV set to witness the ghostly emanations of a long, long ago rather hallowed event, a chapter of cosmic creation. Do you know what time, what channel?
Answer: Any time you tune to a channel not used by your local cable company or network affiliates and see "snow" on the screen will do, say Vern Ostdiek and Donald Bord in "Inquiry into Physics." The snow — if you can believe it — is partly due to microwave radiation left over from the fiery explosion of space and time some 15 billion to 20 billion years ago, the formation of the universe popularly known as the "Big Bang." This radiation is picked up by your set as "noise."
Even before this cosmic background radiation was first identified — by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson in 1965, earning them a Nobel Prize — as the "smoking gun" evidence for a "moment of creation," astronomer Fred Hoyle (1950) had derisively dubbed it the "Big Bang." The catchy name stuck.
Then in 1993, "Sky and Telescope" magazine held a name-replacement contest, with Carl Sagan, Hugh Downs and writer Timothy Ferris as judges. After reviewing 13,000-plus submissions, the committee concluded: BIG BANG beat out the bunch.
Question: When you take time to help someone, incurring maybe even cost or risk, why do you do this? What does psychology say?
a. It's basically selfish, to make yourself feel good
b. It's evolutionary, as you foster the genes of your kin or kindred spirits
c. It's tit-for-tat, with you helping others now in hopes of being helped later
d. It flows out of the goodness of your heart
e. It's all of the above
Answer: You'd have to mark "e," stressing the continued mysteries of human motivation. And maybe not just human — a gorilla named Binti a few years ago rescued a 3-year-old boy who had fallen into the pit, giving him over to zookeepers.
Then there's the story about Abraham Lincoln stopping his coach to rescue drowning piglets by the road, recounts Elliot Aronson et al. in "Social Psychology." When his companion praised his generosity, Abe replied, "Why, bless your soul, Ed. But that was the essence of selfishness. I should have had no peace of mind had I just gone on."
More selfless are the acts of courage by "everyday" people like pilots who with their last breaths steer a failed craft to miss crowded buildings. Already giving themselves up for dead, they continue to think of others.
Why? Truly fascinating it is that a century after Freud, no single theory — evolutionary, social exchange, empathy, altruism — satisfactorily explains such exemplary deeds.
Question: What's the current thinking on the old question of "are two snowflakes ever exactly alike"?
Answer: All ice crystals are basically hexagonal, whether shaped as simple plates, bullets, needles, solid or hollow columns, dendrites, sheaths, says Asktheweatherman.Com.
Falling, they're a work-in-progress, riding air currents up and down, maybe for an hour or more, through regions of differing temperatures and humidities that leave their marks of growth and shape.
"Indeed it is extremely unlikely that two COMPLEX snow crystals will look exactly alike," says California Institute of Technology physicist Kenneth G. Libbrecht. But how about two small crystals?
Consider that not all water molecules are alike, with about 1/1,000 being atypical. Since even a small snow crystal has about a thousand million billion (18 zeros) water molecules, about a million billion (15 zeros) will be these "rogues," scattered throughout in unique ways.
So given a trillion trillion (24 zeros) crystals/year falling on Earth, the chance of two ever having the same water molecule layout is essentially zero!
The only exception would be tiny crystals with only maybe 10 molecules, all of which just MIGHT fit identically to some other crystal. "But they'd have to be assembled in a lab to be seen and would be invisible to the naked eye."
Send STRANGE questions to brothers Bill and Rich at strangetrue@compuserve.com