Frank Grimer writes, > Horace's interesting post on chemically induced half-life > change of Be-7 has encouraged me to speculate further on > the comparison between the chart of the nuclides and the > suction power relations for clays.
For those who scoff at the notion of some underlying linkage which may exist between operational modalites of clay - compared with the much smaller geometric scale of atoms of the periodic table, let me recommend as a guide the marvelous explication of science which derives from "looking at the big picture" or to bastardize another overused idiom -being able to see both the forest and the trees. It is called "Ubiquity" by Mark Buchanan and available from Amazon and elsewhere: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/060960810X/102-7567915-4306512?v=glance Buchanan introduces readers to a developing branch of science that seeks order in what otherwise seems to be random events by using "power laws"... so this is a giant step beyond Gleick's "Chaos" and Waldrop's "Complexity" which were previous breakthroughs in using language instead of mathematics as tools to understanding the physical world. >From Publishers Weekly "Buchanan, an editor and writer for "Nature" and "New Scientist" proposes to apply so-called nonequilibrium physics to cataclysms in human history. This form of physics involves the study of systems in perpetual imbalance... " Jones
