"Question..." -Michael Collins

"Answer" -Xenia
"hahahaha" -everyone else.

Quoted from July '07
Lynchburg College, Va
Yes indeed i do miss you governor's school for science, math, and technology.

and the reasoning behind this memory...

"

Having had first hand experience using that type of pencil ,
the answer to the question is that in the old days the
filaments used in pencils were made of different material
than today's graphite which is charcoal colored and its
 particles separate easily on friction with the paper surface
leaving clear marks.  The old material did not leave much
of amark on the paper due to its high density.  It was water
soluble and if left in a water filled container ,will dissolve
 completely.  On contact with water it changes color from
dark charcoal like color to violet blue.  In order to leave a
clear mark on paper it was necessary to actually moisten the
 tip of the pencil filament with your saliva ,the
resulting product behaved and flowed like ink.

"

http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/1999-11/941497627.Sh.r.html

so now we know.
Add an ink-like, high-density pencil to my Christmas wishlist. Right below a vat of a non-newtonian liquid. Speaking of which, turns out that human (and probably other animals) blood is non-newtonian. Kudos to my brother for telling me about that.

your corneas can freeze...

...just in case you didn't have enough to worry about ;)

I neglected to bring home any mechanical pencils. Why am i always capable of envisioning an entire summer without graphite? It has yet to be done without regrets. As a result I've reverted to pencils that require sharpening. and you know what? there is something delightfully quaint and fun in using them. Makes me feel a little like an accountant. By the way does anyone know why detectives in old movies always lick their pencils while flipping open their notepads to jot down the facts of the case?

Back to Science! I do room service at the fanciest (oldest, and most haunted) hotel at the oceanfront. While carrying a tray from the oceanfront Cavalier to the Original Cavalier on the Hill. I realized I was a walking Physics 101 problem.
Q: If Xenia carries a 34 pound tray, resting one of the long edges along her waist , with her arms holding the handles on each side 26 cm from her waist the full width of the tray being 52 cm, what is the tension in her arms? Xenia is 5 feet 4 ( on a good day) and the distance from her waist to her shoulders is 17.5 inches. She is moving at a constant rate of 2.5 feet per second up a slope of 27 degrees. It's 87 degrees and everyone that walks by thanks her for bringing them breakfast (as though that's an original comment, come on people I do still optimistically believe in your ability to be creative and refreshing, prove me right!).

The Original Cavalier (Don't call it the old one, that's frowned upon)




The Oceanfront Cavalier







A view with both halves:

There's more than one of everything

I got confused while writing this... I originally wrote a note to myself "do blog on Matter Mirror and De Broglie waves and the connection" But ...
A) I can't find anything on a Matter Mirror and apparently (the coincidence would be too great to think it was an accident) Mirror Matter exists and is pretty cool all by itself
B) however Mirror Matter is not really connected to D-Brizzle's wave?


So anyways, De Broglie waves! Lets say you shine light down a corridor which has a corner where another corridor meets it. The light will bend when it meets the corridor, thereby lighting up the mysterious person that a minute ago was cloaked in the shadows. At this juncture Velma will shout Zoinks! and some fun techno music will begin playing. Additionally the flashlight used to light up the hallway will probably get dropped during the action, allowing us to continue watching this interesting property of light. This bending is a result of the Wave Nature of light (which as i previously discussed in another blog is only half the story). Now a man known as De Broglie asked himself if light can act as a wave and as a particle than why can't things with mass also act as both? The result was the De Broglie Wavelength!

De Broglie Wavelength=Planck's Constant/Momentum

This equation was proven by Lester Germer and Clinton Davisson when they shot electrons at a target of crystalline nickel and the experimental diffraction pattern matched the theoretical one.
Basically this theory means that things with mass have a wave property, and therefore also diffract when they encounter other things. some of you are probably scoffing at this idea since you have mass but don't undergo any of this silly so-called diffraction every time you encounter a doorway. This is because Planck's Constant is to the negative 34 power while your mass is in the tens of kilograms. (mass matters because momentum equals mass times velocity) divide a really tiny number to a proportionally much bigger one and you get an even smaller number. With such a tiny wavelength the diffraction is undetectable but theoretically you do get shifted over a colossally small fraction of a meter each time you pass through something.
So...You have a wavelength! Impress your friends by calculating your own! Post it on your facebook and watch the friend requests roll in!
This wavelength is also referred to as a matter wave which leads us to the interesting part of this post...
Mirror Matter! Shadow Matter! Alice Matter!
(three names for the same redonkulous concept)
Mirror Matter...
"is a hypothetical counterpart to ordinary matter." -Wiki
"is perfect to explain dark matter. It's dark and can only be detected through its gravity."-Dr. Foot
"doubles the amount of matter in the universe" -ABC news

Q: Where did this idea come from?
A: Normal elementary particles follow the rules of rotation and translation symmetry but not that of mirror symmetry (aka Parity).

Q: How do you explain this phenomenon?
A: By inventing a new type of particle!

Isn't physics fun?

Why is this neccessary? Can't we just accept that nature didn't mean particles to follow parity?
Of Course Not! That would mean nature is uneven on some levels. And what kind of a world is that?
So the idea of mirror matter was formed, the theory being that every particle has a matching mirror particle. When a normal particle interacts with another in a left handed interaction (whatever that means) the mirror particle would interact in a right handed one.
This would "restore [parity] as a fundamental symmetry of nature." -Wikipedia

Do i honestly understand this? No, but i find it fascinating every time physicists make something up because they want nature to behave a certain way but their tests prove that it doesn't. and ninety percent of the time the new thing can't be observed.

Find my post lackluster? go reengage your mind with one of these:
Physics Games


Today's Cosmic Brownie Points go as always to anyone who knows where the title of the post comes from. Additionally Mario gets (insert your favorite number here, Mario) Points for being an incredible reader. Tes commentaires ont toujours vraiment apprécié.

p.s. thank goodness for automatic saving on blogspot.

I've never seen a moose... today was no exception

so in an interesting turn of events beginning with this comic...




I once again stumbled across fractals and Mandelbrot patterns. I say once again because I first had the pleasure of encountering fractals in one of Piers Anthony's novels called presciently Fractal Mode which I don't fully remember because halfway through reading it I realized that it was the second in a series which I had never read. However somewhere in the novel they talk about fractals which came as a surprise to me because i thought that was just a cool word they were using in the title (i was probably 10 or so at the time so don't be too quick to judge ) basically they somehow end up in a "fractalian" world that i belive is only one part of a larger fractal pattern that continues forever (as fractals do) though plant leaves and everything else. and of course the heroes of this novella were sure to see part of the larger fractal and discover just how infinite both it and the small fractals were. (disclaimer: yes i know that you can't really say large or small in context with this because its all incredibly perspective based, nevertheless)
This comic led me to wiki to find out what exactly MATHNET was. Turns out there used to be a kids tv show where the policemen always had to use some kind of mathematical thing to solve the case they were working on. One of these cases involved fractals. which look like this:







In this particular case a spiral has many spirals spiralling off of it. each of these in turn have more spirals spiralling with their own spirals. artists have used fractals to make all kinds of crazy images with the aid of computers. examples can be seen just by typing fractal into google.
However fractals need not be self similar in the way this one is. the most famous of all fractals is the Mandlebrot which is not self-similar as is evident in the following images:


The Mandlebrot Set

A zoom-in of the mandlebrot

A different zoom-in of the Mandlebrot



Fractals are not just a mathematical/geometric idea.They are found in real life as demonstrated by this cauliflower:



Physicists often speak of a spherical chicken. Here we can see a fractal cow:



I forgot how i discovered this but... there is apparantly an online site attempting to list all fictional books with ties to mathematics. So just in case you're in need of summer reading material, I give you...
mathfiction!


also i recently(as in an hour and a half ago) began following this blog:
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/
where the writer blogs about new advances or discoveries in science. pretty interesting, a ton of updates, and would probably be my primary source of material (today's blog was actually supposed to be about the parallel universe post) if I was selfish enough to keep it to myself. a few favorite posts include:
Anti-matter
Humans ate the Neanderthals
Parallel universes real?

and props to xkcd.com for the comic at the beginning and wikipedia as always for supplying most of the pictures except for the fractal cow to which i give thanks to http://www.mndl.hu/works/fractalcow and google for leading me to that site.

the opposite of laundry?

I am officially the proud owner of a 5 by 5 Rubik's cube. That is to say, the frustrated and confused owner of a 5 by 5 Rubik's cube. In other and slightly more interesting news: Credit cards, Student ID's and anything else with one of those black strips on the back of it work because of Magnetic Flux! Flux is the amount of something passing through an area. the Magnetic Flux is the amount of magnetic field lines passing through an area. aka Flux = B * A * cos(theta). Now most often its the CHANGE in this flux that's important. In other words how much stuff goes through the area in a particular amount of time. and this! is what makes your credit card work , (and thereby sink you into debt with the rest of America ). That black strip on the back of your credit card (or Disney Pass !) is Magnetic. Therefore when you swipe it the flux changes dramatically which induces a current! (more on this in another post) and the machine responds by giving you your candy (assuming its a vending machine). This is also why you have to do it fast, because otherwise the change in flux per time will be a lot less and the current induced won't be big enough to make the machine work.

Interestingly enough, this same basic method can be used to ensure that the light at the intersection changes when you pull up. Cars have ferrofluids in their suspension (?, I'm not completely sure where the ferrofluids are)...

so actually, after digging around on Google i couldn't find any support for this claim other than Dr. Martin's verbalization in class. what i did discover is that Ferrari uses ferrofluids in some of their cars' suspensions' and who can argue with Ferrari? (answer: a proud owner of a Lamborghini)

case in point...






But! since we're already talking about ferrofluids, lets look at something almost as sexy...



so this is a Ferrofluid. Its actually surprisingly easy to make, i had the opportunity to do so this past semester in my Nanotechnology Lab and we each manged to make it spike though we didn't have quite as cool towers as seen in this video. Its basically a liquid that when introduced to a magnetic field becomes polarised and ends up spiking. This particular one moves when the music starts and a stronger magnetic field is created. The structure that it moves on is simply an iron core and one electromagnet.

more information (and my source) at:
http://hackedgadgets.com/2007/04/19/ferrofluid-morpho-towers-two-standing-spirals/

the lambo pic was straight off of Google's image search.


il y a deux assez décent "cela est qu'elle a dit" blagues dans le premier paragraphe p.s.

You're HIDEOUS! and Sexy...

"Happiness is self-propagating. Begin it, spread it, live it."

I can't remember if this is an actual quote or something out of my own mind. The important thing to realize is that Light is also self-propagating and this is one of the reasons it can exist and travel in a vacuum. Light in general is probably one of the coolest things in nature. in A Wrinkle in Time the kids at one point end up in a world where the creatures are very kind and sensitive but have no eyes to speak of. Color can not be explained nor even really the concept of seeing. Furthermore light is both a particle and a wave which even though i understand the reasons for this dual nature still strikes me as odd. What else do we see this in? I'm thinking there must exist some other examples of things with a dual nature of some kind even if it can't be explained with either of these particular descriptions.

Cosmic brownie points as always for anyone who knows where the title of this post comes from.

You like the blue skirt

I had a tiny green composition notebook, four by three inches, that i used to write down my homework and whatever else i needed to remember this school year. On the first page my mom wrote, "Have a lot of fun and new experiences." followed by her love and wishes of good luck. just a small note that cheered me up on lonely days and reminded me not to spend all my days in the library. Adventures came and i met amazing people. the kind of people who leave comments such as this on my facebook,

"I thought this was essential information to your future career: Astronomers have the light-year, but nuclear physicists need an analogous unit for measuring tiny distances. Happily, they have one: The Physics Handbook for Science and Engineering defines the "beard-second" as the length the average physicist's beard grows in one second, or about 5 nanometers.Google will even make the conversion for you — type 1 inch in beard-seconds into your search box."

and this story....

"Some time ago I received a call from a colleague. He was about to give a student a zero for his answer to a physics question, while the student claimed a perfect score. The instructor and the student agreed to an impartial arbiter, and I was selected. I read the examination question:

"SHOW HOW IS IT POSSIBLE TO DETERMINE THE HEIGHT OF A TALL BUILDING WITH THE AID OF A BAROMETER."

The student had answered, "Take the barometer to the top of the building, attach a long rope to it, lower it to the street, and then bring the rope up, measuring the length of the rope. The length of the rope is the height of the building."

The student really had a strong case for full credit since he had really answered the question completely and correctly! On the other hand, if full credit were given, it could well contribute to a high grade in his physics course and to certify competence in physics, but the answer did not confirm this.

I suggested that the student have another try. I gave the student six minutes to answer the question with the warning that the answer should show some knowledge of physics. At the end of five minutes, he had not written anything. I asked if he wished to give up, but he said he had many answers to this problem; he was just thinking of the best one. I excused myself for interrupting him and asked him to please go on.

In the next minute, he dashed off his answer which read: "Take the barometer to the top of the building and lean over the edge of the roof. Drop the barometer, timing its fall with a stopwatch. Then, using the formula x=0.5*a*t^^2, calculate the height of the building."

At this point, I asked my colleague if he would give up. He conceded, and gave the student almost full credit. While leaving my colleague's office, I recalled that the student had said that he had other answers to the problem, so I asked him what they were.

"Well," said the student, "there are many ways of getting the height of a tall building with the aid of a barometer. For example, you could take the barometer out on a sunny day and measure the height of the barometer, the length of its shadow, and the length of the shadow of the building, and by the use of simple proportion, determine the height of the building."

"Fine," I said, "and others?"

"Yes," said the student, "there is a very basic measurement method you will like. In this method, you take the barometer and begin to walk up the stairs. As you climb the stairs, you mark off the length of the barometer along the wall. You then count the number of marks, and this will give you the height of the building in barometer units."

"A very direct method."

"Of course. If you want a more sophisticated method, you can tie the barometer to the end of a string, swing it as a pendulum, and determine the value of g at the street level and at the top of the building. From the difference between the two values of g, the height of the building, in principle, can be calculated."

"On this same tact, you could take the barometer to the top of the building, attach a long rope to it, lower it to just above the street, and then swing it as a pendulum. You could then calculate the height of the building by the period of the precession".

"Finally," he concluded, "there are many other ways of solving the problem.

Probably the best," he said, "is to take the barometer to the basement and knock on the superintendent's door. When the superintendent answers, you speak to him as follows: 'Mr. Superintendent, here is a fine barometer. If you will tell me the height of the building, I will give you this barometer."

At this point, I asked the student if he really did not know the conventional answer to this question. He admitted that he did, but said that he was fed up with high school and college instructors trying to teach him how to think.

The student was Neils Bohr and the arbiter was Ernest Rutherford.

"

Props for both go to Wiley.

for more physics fun check out some of the links on this website:

http://www.cimat.mx/~gil/