astrophysics
And I need to write a research paper on the youth-based counterculture (read: hippies) of the American 1960's. So I’m going to prattle on about nothing until I’ve got the words flowing.
I just found The Beatle’s "Abbey Road" in my parent's CD collection, which is really weird for some reason.
Oh! I have something much more interesting. The physics program at my school went to the San Francisco Exploratorium on Wednesday for a field trip. So. Much. Fun. Inside it looks like an old airplane hangar filled instead with tons of awesome, hands-on science-y stuff, and as an interesting side not, it was founded by Frank Oppenheimer, who worked on the Manhattan Project.
Anyways, the most fascinating thing I saw while I was there was this lecture. I have never been interested in a lecture before, but the entire room was absolutely captivated--imagine, a bunch of 16- to 18-year-olds (including a few stoners) fixated on a lecture. But it was just so good.
So basically, he talked about proportions at first. He gave the example of Earth vs. Mt. Everest. The Earth is about 8,000 miles in diameter; Mt. Everest is about 5 1/2 miles tall from sea level. That’s nothing in comparison. So then he said the Earth, with all its deep trenches and all its tall mountains and every discrepancy of height, if you shrunk the earth down to the size of a ping-pong ball, the Earth would actually be smoother than a ping-pong ball. Crazy, right?
So then he went more about relative sizes of things, and then on his slideshow, he pulled out this graph:
(link is to a better mathematical explanation)
Yeah, I hate graphs, too, but this one is really cool. what it is is a graph of everything in the universe, with mass going up on the y and the radius in meters going up along the x. the units are in increments of 10^whatever so that everything in the universe will fit on the graph, and as one can plainly see, everything in the universe fits within one little triangle. The slope of each of the legs of the triangle is 1. That means something, but I don't remember what. anyways, if you find the realm of quanta on there, that means that the stuff in that area has such a small size and such a small mass that regular experimental physics don't really apply, but rather quantum physics and mechanics do (so it would be things like protons, electrons, and other subatomic particles). He didn't spend much time on this, because the far more interesting part of the graph is the realm of black holes, which he spent quite a bit of time on.
A black hole is something with such a massive force of gravity that nothing can escape it--not light, not information, not anything. Gravity comes from mass, so if a large mass is retained while the size of an objects radius is shrunk far enough, the object will become a black hole. This means that almost anything could become a black hole if compacted enough: an average-sized person becomes a black hole when their radius (about 1 meter, the length of you forehead to roughly your belly button) is reduced down to 10^-29 (ish) meters. Larger objects have smaller radius changes before they become black holes, but every object has some point of no return. Then he brought up about what would happen if you were to fall into a black hole: if it was a smaller black hole, the gravitational force at your head would be so vastly different from the gravitational force at your feet that your very atoms would be ripped apart. But, he said, if the black hole was bigger, the force of gravity would be somewhat diffused. So, if you were to find a black hole big enough and fall into it, you could potentially survive and be aware of what was happening to you. Unfortunately, you could never tell anyone, because, as I’ve said, not even light or energy can escape the super-pull of a black hole. He also mentioned how there was a theory that all black holes dumped into the same place-a sort of common inescapable purgatory.
After black holes was the abyss. No one knows what’s in the abyss because it is outside the observable universe. To talk about this, he had to talk about how the universe is about 10^10 years old. This means only the light from objects 10^10 light-years away has had time to reach us. Our knowledge about the abyss is limited because no one can see it. And that was a nifty little segway into how looking through space is like look back in time. When you’re having a conversation with someone, you’re not seeing them as they are, but as there were a fraction of a second ago. When you look at the moon, you see it as it was two minutes ago. When you look at the sun, you see it 8.5 minutes ago. The closest star besides the sun, you see it 4 years ago. Then told us that the big bang theory isn’t actually a theory anymore, how it’s been proved and such. He talked about how pictures have been taken up to 100,000 years after the big bang (which is nothing, proportionally), and how scientists actually knew exactly what the universe was like up to just 3 tiny minutes after the bang. He told us this was because as the universe expanded, it cooled. Before 3 minutes, the universe was so hot and small that it was actually too opaque to see through, how it didn’t turn transparent until after that three minutes.
He also talked about how the Doppler Effect showed us how, as the universe is expanding, everything is moving away from us: as they move away, their lights get stretched out, creating a redshift and proving that they’re moving away. The trippy thing about that, though, everything is actually stationary, and more empty vacuum is just appearing between everything as the universe grows. Which is totally freaky.
Unfortunately, he only got an hour, so as he was running out of time, he briefly went over the search for new planets, and how they actually found one that has a presence of oxygen in the atmosphere. This is significant in that oxygen is very reactive, and in most planets it reacts with pretty much anything and leaves the atmosphere. Oxygen is only present on earth because of the presence of life. That was verrrrry interesting. He also rushed through mentioning that gravity readings of the universe show that the observable universe makes up only about 4% of everything there is, and that more that 20-25% is dark matter and the remaining 70-ish% is dark energy.
And that’s what I’m interested in: dark matter and antimatter. I was going to see a lecture on the latter at Stanford University, but it was on a Wednesday, so I couldn’t go. A classmate of mine went, though, and he said it was really cool.
Gaaaaaah I wish I could study just physics-I don’t need any of that boring old us history or English. Speaking of which, I have to go write that research paper. Lucky for me, I can write the same paper for both classes that I was assigned research papers in. whop-dee-do.
I just found The Beatle’s "Abbey Road" in my parent's CD collection, which is really weird for some reason.
Oh! I have something much more interesting. The physics program at my school went to the San Francisco Exploratorium on Wednesday for a field trip. So. Much. Fun. Inside it looks like an old airplane hangar filled instead with tons of awesome, hands-on science-y stuff, and as an interesting side not, it was founded by Frank Oppenheimer, who worked on the Manhattan Project.
Anyways, the most fascinating thing I saw while I was there was this lecture. I have never been interested in a lecture before, but the entire room was absolutely captivated--imagine, a bunch of 16- to 18-year-olds (including a few stoners) fixated on a lecture. But it was just so good.
So basically, he talked about proportions at first. He gave the example of Earth vs. Mt. Everest. The Earth is about 8,000 miles in diameter; Mt. Everest is about 5 1/2 miles tall from sea level. That’s nothing in comparison. So then he said the Earth, with all its deep trenches and all its tall mountains and every discrepancy of height, if you shrunk the earth down to the size of a ping-pong ball, the Earth would actually be smoother than a ping-pong ball. Crazy, right?
So then he went more about relative sizes of things, and then on his slideshow, he pulled out this graph:
(link is to a better mathematical explanation)
Yeah, I hate graphs, too, but this one is really cool. what it is is a graph of everything in the universe, with mass going up on the y and the radius in meters going up along the x. the units are in increments of 10^whatever so that everything in the universe will fit on the graph, and as one can plainly see, everything in the universe fits within one little triangle. The slope of each of the legs of the triangle is 1. That means something, but I don't remember what. anyways, if you find the realm of quanta on there, that means that the stuff in that area has such a small size and such a small mass that regular experimental physics don't really apply, but rather quantum physics and mechanics do (so it would be things like protons, electrons, and other subatomic particles). He didn't spend much time on this, because the far more interesting part of the graph is the realm of black holes, which he spent quite a bit of time on.
A black hole is something with such a massive force of gravity that nothing can escape it--not light, not information, not anything. Gravity comes from mass, so if a large mass is retained while the size of an objects radius is shrunk far enough, the object will become a black hole. This means that almost anything could become a black hole if compacted enough: an average-sized person becomes a black hole when their radius (about 1 meter, the length of you forehead to roughly your belly button) is reduced down to 10^-29 (ish) meters. Larger objects have smaller radius changes before they become black holes, but every object has some point of no return. Then he brought up about what would happen if you were to fall into a black hole: if it was a smaller black hole, the gravitational force at your head would be so vastly different from the gravitational force at your feet that your very atoms would be ripped apart. But, he said, if the black hole was bigger, the force of gravity would be somewhat diffused. So, if you were to find a black hole big enough and fall into it, you could potentially survive and be aware of what was happening to you. Unfortunately, you could never tell anyone, because, as I’ve said, not even light or energy can escape the super-pull of a black hole. He also mentioned how there was a theory that all black holes dumped into the same place-a sort of common inescapable purgatory.
After black holes was the abyss. No one knows what’s in the abyss because it is outside the observable universe. To talk about this, he had to talk about how the universe is about 10^10 years old. This means only the light from objects 10^10 light-years away has had time to reach us. Our knowledge about the abyss is limited because no one can see it. And that was a nifty little segway into how looking through space is like look back in time. When you’re having a conversation with someone, you’re not seeing them as they are, but as there were a fraction of a second ago. When you look at the moon, you see it as it was two minutes ago. When you look at the sun, you see it 8.5 minutes ago. The closest star besides the sun, you see it 4 years ago. Then told us that the big bang theory isn’t actually a theory anymore, how it’s been proved and such. He talked about how pictures have been taken up to 100,000 years after the big bang (which is nothing, proportionally), and how scientists actually knew exactly what the universe was like up to just 3 tiny minutes after the bang. He told us this was because as the universe expanded, it cooled. Before 3 minutes, the universe was so hot and small that it was actually too opaque to see through, how it didn’t turn transparent until after that three minutes.
He also talked about how the Doppler Effect showed us how, as the universe is expanding, everything is moving away from us: as they move away, their lights get stretched out, creating a redshift and proving that they’re moving away. The trippy thing about that, though, everything is actually stationary, and more empty vacuum is just appearing between everything as the universe grows. Which is totally freaky.
Unfortunately, he only got an hour, so as he was running out of time, he briefly went over the search for new planets, and how they actually found one that has a presence of oxygen in the atmosphere. This is significant in that oxygen is very reactive, and in most planets it reacts with pretty much anything and leaves the atmosphere. Oxygen is only present on earth because of the presence of life. That was verrrrry interesting. He also rushed through mentioning that gravity readings of the universe show that the observable universe makes up only about 4% of everything there is, and that more that 20-25% is dark matter and the remaining 70-ish% is dark energy.
And that’s what I’m interested in: dark matter and antimatter. I was going to see a lecture on the latter at Stanford University, but it was on a Wednesday, so I couldn’t go. A classmate of mine went, though, and he said it was really cool.
Gaaaaaah I wish I could study just physics-I don’t need any of that boring old us history or English. Speaking of which, I have to go write that research paper. Lucky for me, I can write the same paper for both classes that I was assigned research papers in. whop-dee-do.