Pssst! You! Yeah, you... are a passenger on a planet... on a blue-green planet that's orbiting a golden star. And right now we are traveling through a place in our yearly orbit (a place called May 1st) that's a sexy old holiday. It goes by different names in different countries, but for all of us who live in the northern hemisphere, this is the mid-point of spring. Spring is at the height of her power. And this is worth celebrating if you're like me; I delight in the love affair between Sun-light and Earth-green. I celebrate the baby pumpkins this love affair is birthing in my front yard.

Here in Hawaii we call this holiday Lei Day, but it's also called May Day. And, for as long as anyone can remember, the May Day revelry has always started the evening before, on April 30th.

The date: April 30th, 1897. The place: Cavendish Labs, Cambridge University. The event: Quantum physics is born, thanks to the accidental discovery of something that scientists decide to call an "electron." Now, you may know that the flow of electrons is electricity. It gives us all things electrified, electronic, and with an "e-" at the beginning, like e-mail. Yet... the electron... is a trickster; it defies all our efforts to pin it down to any one point - and to measure it. It was so beyond the grasp of the scientists who discovered it that they joked about its discovery with champagne and a toast: "To the electron, may it remain forever useless!"

Ever since, scientists have been struggling with the strangeness of the world that electrons inhabit - the world that's down, down, down inside the atoms that you and I and everything is made of. This sub-atomic world is so bizarre that even the great Albert Einstein did everything in his power to prove that quantum physics is too spooky to be possible. But Einstein failed, and now one third of our U.S. economy is rooted in products like hard drives and iPods that owe their existence to the magic of quantum physics.

The date: April 30th of this year. The place: northern hemisphere. Spring is in full-swing. And I'm celebrating this by bringing you a message from the frontiers of science: Researchers are flabbergasted to find that plants use quantum physics to manufacture their bodies out of sunlight. In fact, plants' knowledge of quantum physics is why they harvest sunlight far more efficiently than human-made solar panels do.

Here's how it works: Sunlight penetrates the leaf. As the light moves through the leaf it is embraced by different parts of the leaf. But these embraces are not one after another, after another, along a receiving line. No, sunlight is embraced by many different leaf parts simultaneously. Somehow, the distances between the parts is magically transcended. Apparently... all these different leaf parts so love the sun's light that they are happy to share it.

This orgy of efficiency and productivity is what we celebrate when we celebrate this magical mid-point of spring. And I hope that you're enjoying it.

This is Harriet Witt, your guide for this little ride on our passenger planet.


If you have any questions, drop Harriet an email: harriet@passengerplanet.com


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