- Everson is located in the Nooksack River valley of northern Whatcom County, some 15 miles northeast of Bellingham. The site of a long-established village of the Nooksack Indian Tribe, the area saw settlement by pioneer homesteaders as early as 1858, during the Fraser River Gold Rush, when a community called The Crossing was established less than a mile west of present-day Everson. This settlement relocated east with the coming of the Bellingham Bay and British Columbia Railroad in 1891, and Everson was platted not long after. The town was named for its first settler, who had homesteaded the site in 1871. In the early twentieth century, two industries were formed by local residents, both of which grew rapidly and provided employment for much of the population: a cannery and a condensery. They joined already burgeoning timber mills established in the late nineteenth century. The railroad made possible the widespread distribution of local fruit, vegetable, dairy, and wood products regionally, nationally, and internationally, and Everson industries thrived for generations. As of 2014, Everson retained its small-town features with a population of slightly more than 2,500, while still providing native as well as specialty produce to the wider region.
- Quantum Mechanics (plato.standford.edu)
Quantum mechanics is, at least at first glance and at least in part, a mathematical machine for predicting the behaviors of microscopic particles — or, at least, of the measuring instruments we use to explore those behaviors — and in that capacity, it is spectacularly successful: in terms of power and precision, head and shoulders above any theory we have ever had. Mathematically, the theory is well understood; we know what its parts are, how they are put together, and why, in the mechanical sense (i.e., in a sense that can be answered by describing the internal grinding of gear against gear), the whole thing performs the way it does, how the information that gets fed in at one end is converted into what comes out the other. The question of what kind of a world it describes, however, is controversial; there is very little agreement, among physicists and among philosophers, about what the world is like according to quantum mechanics. Minimally interpreted, the theory describes a set of facts about the way the microscopic world impinges on the macroscopic one, how it affects our measuring instruments, described in everyday language or the language of classical mechanics. Disagreement centers on the question of what a microscopic world, which affects our apparatuses in the prescribed manner, is, or even could be, like intrinsically; or how those apparatuses could themselves be built out of microscopic parts of the sort the theory describes.