It was nice and sunny this morning when I sat down at Starbucks to do some blogging, so I wrote a new Forbes post about the quantum physics that makes sunshine possible. This also brings in xkcd’s take on the fundamental forces, and even a little bit of SteelyKid.
Sadly, it’s now grey and dreary, but that’s spring in New England for you. But if you’d like a small amount of quantum-mechanical sunshine, head on over to Forbes and check it out.
I think you’d like this paper, in which a “weakless universe” is constructed (by adjusting other Standard Model parameters) that still has sunshine and pretty much everything else: http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0604027