The Atom Smasher Effect

At last, an explanation of sorts, for my behaviour in the labs at Tokyo, Incheon, Oxford, Daresbury, Strasbourg et al.

The title of my Thesis was eventually “ Two-proton transfer reactions in the mass-100 region”, an explanation of which follows shortly, Here is the intro to get the mood set:

Atom Smashing.

Everything is made of atoms, but everything is different because there are 92 kinds of atoms, and at least 200 different weights and sizes. It is a good idea to envisage and atom as a little solar system with electrons orbiting a central nucleus. The following relates only to the nucleus.

To find out how all the atoms come together, we had chemists.

To find out why there are 92 different kinds of atom/nucleus etc, we had Atomic Scientists.

To investigate how only 92 came together, we had Nuclear Scientists.

To find out what the 92 nuclei were made of, we had Particle Scientists.

MY area of study comes somewhere between the last two.

I am a Scientist of Nuclear Structure.

My area studies the order behind all 92 atoms, which are officially called elements.
Basically, the question arose, “How is the middle bit of the atom (the nucleus) made up, and is there an order to it?”

To find out, we had to bash the things together.

My analogy is this: Cars. Imagine a long tunnel with an unknown car in the middle. Imagine the only way to find out what it is, was to send into the tunnel unmanned yet known cars at great speeds.

This is a 32-ton Q3D magnetic spectrometer, our "tunnel". The whole thing can be rotated around the target at various angles.
The three blue boxes on the left are huge magnets through which our "tunnel" curves through. The "sample" is the "target" or " unknown car" and is where the smashing takes place.
How do we find out what the unknown car is? We lie in wait at the other end of the tunnel and look at what bits come out. For me, it is the light blue line just after the last of the magnets.
The idea is the same in principle with my branch of physics, only the "cars" (0r "target") are replaced by atomic nuclei.
BUT we still wait at the other end to look at the debris. (that blue line)

Our "target" is our unknown car, and the "focal surface/plane" (the blue line) is the other end of the "tunnel".

After many hours and days of computing and analysis, we get something like this:

These pictures are roughly similar to diffraction patterns seen from light experiments. Note the angle along the bottom axis.
We rotate the spectrometer so that the aperture lies at different angles to the incoming beam, much like a normal spectrometer with a diffraction grating.

The solid and dotted lines are the predictions, the dots are the points seen from the end of the "tunnel".

The numbers are labels for us to tell what we are looking at.

It can be seen that sometimes the theory is good, whereas my results looked nothing like as accurate.

What is the overall picture? The work here is not actually my work, but is very similar, but both this and mine show that our ideas about what happens inside the nucleus are fairly accurate, but in some places, difficult to understand, rather like some of the effects of general relativity (at large masses), and special relativity (at large speeds).

The pictures above where there are solid lines but no dots are a graphic representation that we do NOT know all.

If you imagine this to be a diffraction pattern, with intensity of the "light" being the bumps, as seen from the side.

What was MY contribution? Over the five years I produced over 20 of these, each point representing a "run" on single angle measurement. As each was measured, it often took 2 hours to accumulate enough data to get a single dot.

What did MY data prove? The theory says that there are certain boundaries in the nucleus that like to be "full", a bit like electrons in atoms. My thesis proved there was one at 60 neutrons.

We used two proton transfer reactions . (Oxygen in (8 protons), Carbon out (6 protons)). Mass-100 region means the target had typically100 protons, and we used Molybdenum, Ruthenium, Cadmium, and Palladium amongst others.

My job in Korea will be to continue this work.

My job in Geneva? I will be manager of a project to collect not just ONE angle of data per run, but three, a project adopted by many labs across Europe. it is called SSA (Split-Slit Aperture)

The idea itself? My own!

Newton’s Laws of Motion

This is interesting because Sir Isaac Newton formulated these Laws from simple observations, exactly akin to the observations on this blog.

No, the apple did not fall on his head.

Here are the Laws:

Newton’s First Law: (N1) “A body at rest will stay at rest, and if being translated at a constant velocity, will keep on being translated at a constant velocity, unless acted upon by an external force”

Newton’s Second Law: (N2) “The resultant force on a body is equal to the rate of change of momentum of that body”

Newton’s Third Law: (N3) “To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”

The qualifying terms are: “Body”, “Force”, “Translated”, “Velocity”, “Momentum”, “Action”, “Reaction”. However, definitions will follow more easily if the “common sense” Laws are given first.

N1: “If you push a stopped thing it goes, and if you don’t, it won’t.” and

“ If you push something already going, it will either slow down or speed up, depending on which way you push.”

N2: “F = ma” or “Force equals mass times acceleration”

N3: “Push something and it will push back”.

Before the definition of the qualifying terms, some examples will clarify.

N1: Every thrown ball slows down and stops, because of air resistance.

N2: If you keep your foot down on the gas pedal in a car, it will get more and more fast.

N3: In empty space, if an astronaut pushes another astronaut, both will move away from each other at the same rate.

Definitions:

“Body” = anything that can move.

“Force” = a constant pushing.

“Translated” = moved in a straight line.

“Velocity” = speed in one direction only.

“Momentum” = mass x velocity

“Action” = a particular push.

“Reaction” = a particular push back.

Well, these are they. Apply these in the right way, and a lot of problems can be solved about things that move.

The trouble is, knowing which one to use in each situation.

There are more ways of formulating the Laws, but as given, the first set are the “official” versions, whereas the second set are the “normal “ versions that everyone has heard at least once.

The most used is the second. It crops up everywhere. Especially interesting is the case of applying it to a space rocket being launched, but that involves a real knowledge of calculus to solve (clue – you actually need the “official” version of N2, the “normal” N2 is insufficient!).

As a nuclear scientist, I use N1 quite a bit.

That Darn Quantum Mechanics again....

Here is a cool introduction to the bizarre world of Quantum Mechanics. It is a paraphrase of the opening chapter to "The Feynman Lectures in Physics" Book 3. It is a very plain and very simple demonstration of what we were up against in the 1930's, and it is EXCELLENT.



However, it lacks in two areas:

1. It does not mention that any wave effect (waves or electrons) is only possible if the wavelength of the "waving" is about the same size as the aperture. (simple wave theory)

2. It does not say why looking at the electron affects the pattern. The reason why is that until you look, there is an interference pattern, but if you look, you have to bounce a photon off the electron back into your eye to see it. This photon has momentum according to p = E/c, and although tiny, is just enough to push the electron off course from the interference pattern. If you lower the "wiggling" (the frequency) of the light so that this effect becomes less, the amount of photon momentum needed to tell which slit the photon has gone through is enough to not destroy the pattern, but the light is so dim, it is too dark to see which slit it has gone through. This reciprocal effect has a name , and it is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

What has four or six or even twelve strings, but no frets?

OR......"Music hath charms, etc" Part two

Once Again! As the brother of Manuel used to say,

That fancy music stuff where you play two notes at the same time is called “harmony”.

There is a simple and easy illustration of it using a chain (not thin necklace), with links about the same size and weight as a door-lock chain, but about 18 inches long.

What you do is hold it from the top and make your fingers go in a circle, to twirl it round slowly. It just goes in a loop, or rather, rotates in one.

Not very interesting. Something happens as you twirl it faster though, and it happens all of a sudden. As you twirl it faster, something quite unexpected happens – you get a kink in the rotating chain! A very marked “bulge” appears about 1/3 of the way down, and there is a point about 2/3 down, where the chain actually stays still!

If you are really quick with practice, you can go even faster and get TWO “bulges”.

So what is happening? The chain is simply playing a “note”, only there is no sound. The principle is exactly the same though.

When slow, this is the lowest note, faster and the note is “higher”, in fact three times the frequency. Fastest, the note is still “higher”, in fact, five times the frequency. We call these the “Base frequency”, “1st harmonic” and “2nd harmonic”.

The same chain is making different “notes”. This is what piano strings also do. How do we use this? We just play two different notes at the same time, but in the piano’s case, it is not the same piece of wire, they are different wires, linked exactly like the “notes” in the chain.

Then things got really clever. The musicians finally found a use for the “sustain” pedal. This is the pedal on the piano, if you remember, that keeps the music going even after your finger has left the key. In certain circumstances, the musician wants to play a SINGLE note, but with a richer sound than normal. They found they could do this by allowing a note to harmonise with itself.

The concept of octaves here returns with a vengeance! To get a note to harmonise with itself, you press keys at the same time that are exactly an octave apart !!

To get the full effect of this, you must also press on the sustain pedal with your foot when doing this - phew! – three things at once, four if you are also reading music.

There are two striking examples of this happening. The first is Chopin’s Prelude No 14 in D Flat Major, which is also called the “Raindrop” prelude, for its repeated single note (A-flat) played with only the ring finger. Chopin wanted to bring drama into the middle of the piece (in songs, this is often called the “bridge”, but in classical music, it is called the “trio”). So he did exactly the above. You can actually tell the exact point when he switches from the single A-flat to two A-flats an octave apart. What is even more amazing, is that just over halfway through, the A-flat played by the left hand, becomes A-flat played by the right, and a little later, reverts back to the left hand! (so THAT is the difference!)

A more familiar example is the Chariots of Fire theme by Vangelis. It starts off, the percussion kicks in, and the melody is played. Then the second part of the melody is played, with fingers on two notes one octave apart ( this is a little more difficult than playing a single note all the time, and then just bridging the octave).

…and all this just from a little physics. However, these two posts only touch the surface of just what can be done, if you simply know how……….


PS If you can read music you probably don't need this link to prelude No 15

After you download Sibelius scorcher (the link is on the bottom of the page in IE6) you will see the sheet music, and can play the prelude and watch the music at the same time.

For the curious, "pp" means "very soft", "ff" means "very loud", the straight lines like slim sideways "v"s mean louder or softer as you go on, and the funny squiggles and dotted lines below each double line of music are actually squiggles to tell you when to press the foot-pedal.

The point where the "one-note an octave apart" happens is quite clear. Notice the "ff" above this double effect. This is exactly what I meant about the "richness" needed. Try it!

Incidentally, if you think the music boring, it is. It is as played by a computer with no human touches at all. Try listening to Artur Rubenstein, Rudolph Kerer, Vladimir Ashkenazy, or my favorites, Tamas Vasary and Igo Pogorelich. They are all different, and quite stimulating.

Losing My Religion

(SUBJECTIVE POST BY DEFINITION!)

Just WHAT is Religion?

Is it not a belief in that which we cannot see?

Or is that Faith?

As an observer, I often find it amusing (in the case of the Mohammed Teddy Bear) or annoying.

The latter being exhibited by a guy I met in our local pub last night. He and his companion were "Christians" in the broader sense of the word. They called themselves "Pentecostals" and the (older) guy was very interested in me (as a scientist) at first.

However, once I started to ask questions about the Bible he was unable to answer he lost interest. I asked him a few questions, and twice he went off at a tangent trying to answer them with quotes from the Bible. He failed, as I had to remind, twice, to "please answer the question".

I had gotten to thinking that to have faith is commendable, but to blindly believe is just folly, when he proved it with his answer to this one: "If God created the Heavens and the Earth and all that therein is in only six days, why has Jesus been in Heaven for over 2000 years "preparing a place" for the Christians to go to?"

His answer was -

"The Patience of the Lord".

I was dumbfounded.

In the words of Zen Buddhism, he "unasked" the question .

How on earth do they think they can get anyone to "Come to Jesus" (the only words spoken by his timid companion) with such rhetoric?

So I think I was justifiably annoyed at the attitude. Just as "killing all infidels" in Islam is slightly annoying too. The difference being only a matter of degree.

What has three pedals, four feet and stops? (Part one)

"Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast" or so the saying goes. Ok, so why is music so good to hear?

There's talk of such things like pitch, tempo, rhythm, melody, harmony, but none of these are ever thought about when listening. We just know it is good at the time. Truth is, we ARE using these concepts, but many people do not realise this.

A possible explantion may be put forward.

The simplest musical instrument possible can be found in the physics lab, and is called the "Sonometer". A very fancy name for what it is : One piece of metal wire stretched between two points. What you do is hit it. It goes either "bing" or " bong".

This, is music. Ok, so it is very simple, but the music we listen to consists of nothing but "bings" and "bongs", plus maybe a 'twing" or "twang", but the difference is that real music is the combination of these and their interaction. Actually, there are more than four, there are eight, and they are called an "octave".

But what exactly is a "bing"? The answer is a "bing' is that which you hear when you pull the wire up and let go. This is called "plucking" the wire.

So what is a "bong"? This answer is the same, but made with a longer sonometer or wire.

Both are called "notes". Thus, there are eight "notes" in an 'octave".

This is where the skill of the musician comes in. She combines each note or notes to make something good to hear.

To explain further, let's return to the sonometer. The earliest musicians thought "Why should I have a row of sonometers, when I can ask the local carpenter to put them all in a machine?" Well, he did, and it was called , figuratively speaking, the "harpsichord". What this did was it plucked a string of your choice when you pressed one of the "keys" - an array of mechanical objects arranged to finish on the front of the machine, looking rather like a straight set of white teeth. We now call this a "keyboard".

So now, you could get a "bing", "beng" ,"bong" and even a "bung" and all the other 4 notes. The reason why the keyboard had more then 1 octave was because the musician found that using more than 1 was better. Simply put, a higher octave has wires which are exactly half as short as the regular octave.The lower octave , of course, had wires exactly twice the length.

Then people found they could combine the notes in many different ways, and found that certain notes played in succession sounded much better than the same notes played at random. This was called a "melody". The simplest melody I can think of is the Kop at Liverpool FC singing "Walk On" ("bing-bang-bong") a melody of only three notes. Another simple melody but excellent to hear is "Crockett's Theme" by Jan Hammer - 14 notes coming together that sound REALLY GOOD.

But there are only so many good melodies to make, even with the whole keyboard and a gifted musician. One of the last masters of the Harpsichord was Bach, and probably took the concept of melody to its limits. (check out his "Well-Tempered Clavier")

Others found that combinations of notes played AT THE SAME TIME sounded better too. This was called "harmony".

It was also the case that musicians were getting tired of the same note always having the same amplitude. That is, play a key, and no matter what you did, the sound was always just as loud.

This led to the invention of the "piano forte" or 'piano" . This allowed the wire not to be plucked, but "hit" by a hammer, and, the softer or louder the hammer blow, the softer or louder the note became. This allowed a key to be depressed softly, "Biiiiingggg" or forcefully"BINGGGG". "Piano" is Italian for "soft" and "Forte" is italian for "loud".

Once the piano was born, a new generation of musicians came along to play it, notably, Rachmaniov, Beethoven and Chopin. More or less like new movements of music today eg, Punk taking over from Country Music, etc.

These piano musicians became masters of the "soft-loud".

It was actually said that Chopin composed his Etude in C-Minor because he was angry upon hearing his beloved Warsaw had fallen to the Russians in 1831, and it shows. He used the LOUD option with vehemence. However, he was also master of the "soft' option, for example, take Prelude N04 in E-Minor, and he uses both options in the Prelude No14 in D-Flat-major.

It must be remembered that the analyses presented use the piano as example , being easier, but the arguments, are, in fact, general.

But the piano had more scope than this. It has another feature, called "sustain". This is because when you release a key, the note stops ringing. But sometimes this is unwanted, and this is where the right hand pedal (sustain pedal) comes in. If this pedal is kicked down and held there as you press the key, the sound is as if you still have your finger there!

The left hand pedal does the opposite, and deadens the note as soon as both a pressed.

BUT, what happens when you want a richer sound? You gotta use physics! It's best explained with the sonometer. Think of what happens with two sonometers side by side, one double the length of the other, and you pluck both wires. You get a "bing AND a "bong", but they seem related - are they? Yes, they are. As one is double the length, that is, gives a lower sound. Everybody has twanged a ruler in school at some point - the more ruler to "twang' , the lower the sound is. The sonometer just measures how much lower. Here's an idea - try plucking the longer wire twice as high and let go, you get another 'bing" but louder, and....different..?

Hmmm.

What is happening now is NOT as simple. But easy now you know the above.....

Just what IS the difference between left and right?

Beware: This may damage your health!

The Mathematical equations that physics gives us tell us that Charge (C), Time (T) and Parity (P) ("left-rightness") are equally represented.

That is, you can each reverse all three quite easily and the equations will still look, and behave, the same as before.

The answer to the question "What is the difference between "right" and "left"?" is therefore this : there IS no difference.

Indeed, if an alien tells us he is "blurk-handed" does he mean our left or our right? There is no way of knowing. To most people, this makes sense, even though "left' and "right" "seem" different, there is no descriptive way to distinguish one from the other.

However, I DID say "to most people". Ask anyone who knows any quantum mechanics, and she will say immediately "Yes, there IS a difference". This is because the difference is only visible at quantum level, and it is called CPT violation, discovered by Madam Wu in the 1950's (see History of Science: Parity Violation) . Basically, it is the way an isotope of Cobalt behaves.

It always emits electrons in the same direction, no matter which way you point it. If you turned it upside-down, it should give off the elctrons in the opposite direction, but it doesn't.

So all the alien has to do is say, "my blurk (or sklurk) hand is in the direction of emission of the cobalt electrons", and we will know which of OUR hands he is referring to.

The upshot is that nature is right-handed (or left-handed, we cannot tell which!).

Now that we have proved that left/right are unequal, to cancel it out we should prove that black/white are equal, but we should be doubly careful of those "Ped Xing"s.

How many did you get?

First batch:

Alpha) If an airplane gets 'lift' from its wings, how can it fly upside down?

In the case where there are no airlons, and attachments to adjust the "angle of attack", and airplane with just wing-shaped wings is impossible to fly upside down, as "lift" would trurn into"drop".

Bethe) If I toss a coin onto the nearest table, why is the probability that it will be heads NOT 1/2?

The probability that a coin toss onto a table (NOT the hand) is NOT 1/2 because of the possibility, however unlikely, that it will land on edge and stay there.

Gamow) What is the probability that YOU have more then the average number of limbs?

The probability that YOU have more than the average number of limbs is so close to unity, it makes no difference. Recalling that the "average number of limbs" is simply the total number of limbs divided by the number of people counted, the answer is almost certainly 3.99999999 and not 4, as some people will NOT have 4 limbs. Also, there will almost certainly be more people with less than 4 , than people with more than 4, so this makes the "average" just less than 4.

Second Batch:

1. What is the only word in the English language to have two consecutive "I"s?

Skiing.

2. What is the only word in the English language to have 4 (whoops - 3) sets of consecutive double letters?

Bookkeeper

3. What is the longest word in English with no vowels?

Rhythms

4. What is the only word in the English language that changes pronunciation when captialtised?

"to polish" means to make something shine or to clean; "to be Polish" means being from the country of Poland.

5. True or false: " This sentence is false."

The sentence is neither true nor false. This is a veritable can of worms. I have already written a post about the implications ", viz: ( This sentence is false......? )

6. True or false: "Thes sentence has foure mistokes in it. "

True. There are four mistakes, the fourth being that the number you can see is three, whilst it says "four".

7. True or false : "This sentence is six words long if it were six words shorter. "

True. Take the last six words away, it becomes another sentence of six words.

8. True or false: "This plong contains many non-braspish English doodocks but the overall klerpendall can be spackried from the context."

True. translation" This sentence contains many non-standard English words, but the overall meaning can be inferred from the context"

Apologies for number 2. I put this forward as proof that I do not "search" for any of these.

So you think you know Japanese?

1. What is the only word in the English language to have two consecutive "I"s?

2. What is the only word in the English language to have 4 sets of consecutive double letters?

3. What is the longest word in English with no vowels?

4. What is the only word in the English language that changes pronunciation when captialtised?

5. True or false: " This sentence is false."

6. True or false: "Thes sentence has foure mistokes in it. "

7. True or false : "This sentence is six words long if it were six words shorter. "

8. True or false: "This plong contains many non-braspish English doodocks but the overall klerpendall can be spackried from the context."


Have fun!

A bit of Fun.....

Here are a few (more lighthearted ones), then....

Alpha) If an airplane gets 'lift' from its wings, how can it fly upside down?

Bethe) If I toss a coin onto the nearest table, why is the probability that it will be heads NOT 1/2?

Gamow) What is the probability that YOU have more then the average number of limbs?

Five out of Six ain't bad....

1)You have two coins in your pocket that add up to 26 cents. One of them is not a quarter. What are the coins? (easy)

Solution: A quarter and a penny. The one that is NOT the quarter is the penny. A play on words.

2) A cylindrical hole 6 inches long is drilled straight through the center of a solid sphere. What is the volume remaining in the sphere? (hard)

Solution: 36 Pi cubic inches.

If you want to avoid the calculations in Solution 1, simply take a look directly at Solution 2 below it.

Solution 1
Let R be the radius of the sphere. As the illustration indicates, the radius of the cylindrical hole will then be the square root of R² - 9, and the altitude of the spherical caps at each end of the cylinder will be R - 3. To determine the residue after the cylinder and caps have been removed, we add the volume of the cylinder, 6π(R² - 9), to twice the volume of the spherical cap, and subtract the total from the volume of the sphere, 4πR³/3. The volume of the cap is obtained by the following formula, in which A stands for its altitude and r for its radius: πA(3r² + A²)/6.

When this computation is made, all terms obligingly cancel out except 36π - the volume of the residue in cubic inches. In other words, the residue is constant regardless of the hole's diameter or the size of the sphere!

Solution 2
John W. Campbell, Jr., editor of Astounding Science Fiction, was one of several readers who solved the sphere problem quickly by reasoning adroitly as follows: The problem would not be given unless it has a unique solution. If it has a unique solution, the volume must be a constant which would hold even when the hole is reduced to zero radius. Therefore the residue must equal the volume of a sphere with a diameter of six inches, namely 36π.

3) Three rabbits are crossing the road, a busy road. A father rabbit, a mother rabbit, and a baby rabbit. Suddenly the strong father rabbit sees a chance, takes up baby in his arm, and drags the mother rabbit by the other hand across the road. They arrive there without injury. The baby rabbit then says "Thank you daddy, for getting all two of us across the road safely" Please explain. (medium)

Solution: The baby rabbit was so young it could not count beyond two.

4) You have three cards, (two aces and a queen), all face down. You are asked to find the queen, and you are asked to pick one card only. Then , the magician looks at them all, and promptly turns face up , an ace. What is the probability that your card is the queen? (hard)

Solution: 1 in 3. The probability that your card is the Queen is 1 in 3 because you chose it before the magician turned over any cards. In fact, at any time after the choice, he can always turn over an ace. Try it with the whole pack – it is easier to see then. The dealer then turns over 50 cards that are NOT your chosen one. In this case, the probability remains 1 in 52, As the magician can ALWAYS turn face up 50 cards that are NOT yours!!! Poor Jeffrey!

5) A snail falls into a well which is 20 meters deep. He starts to climb up immediately, and in the daytime, he goes three meters up, but at night falls two meters back again. Assuming he starts the ascent at dawn on the first day, how many days is it before he emerges? (easy)

Solution: 18 days. After 17 days and nights, he is 3 meters below the rim. On the morning of the 18th day, he simply climbs up his lasy daily 3 meters to EMERGE triumphant.

The Unfashionable End........

Recently, Al Gore, who "WAS the Next President of the United States" along with the UN, received the Nobel Peace prize for amplifying Global Awareness to Global Warming.

Mr Gore also made a 94 minute film about his worldwide lecture to this end.

It is called "Inconvenient Truth" and he presents with almost callous aplomb the case Against the World not responding to Global Warming, and why. He also offers a solution. Towards, the end of the video, this image is shown on the giant screen.

The salient point to the image is just to the right of the arrow, so small you may miss it otherwise.

It is The Earth. As seen by Voyager 1 , from 4 billion miles away, beyond the influence of the sun.

If it has been said that a picture paints a thousand words, then this one dramatically paints how small we all are in the cosmic scheme of things. All the calamities, triumphs, injustices and achievements of mankind, all the places you have ever been to, and all the people you have ever known, are contained in that little dot.

Insignificant, perhaps, but, to us, it is our only home.

Comments are invited from viewers of the video.

Phone "Games"

When the home computer industry was in its infancy (25 years ago), games players were considered fortunate to play a game that required only 48Kb. RAM of memory. They were played on a normal TV and the controller option was the keyboard, usually the arrow keys, or, if you are lucky, OPQA. Primitive, huh?

In short, limited gameplay, bad and tiny graphics with equally bad resolution, with keyboard control.

Nowadays, with quad-core pcs and more games consoles than actual games, you CAN play decent games. BUT what do the "trendy" peeps do? Get games for their phones, of course!

These also have limited gameplay (they don't download Halo 3 , do they?), with tiny graphics (hey! it's on a phone!), and are keyboard controlled (unless you have seen a phone with a joystick).

Sound familiar? Yes, you are right, we are back where we where 25 years ago, only this time they are called "phone games". No-one calls these "primitive" because the are the "latest stuff"!!!!

Five Clues........One for each 10 of the 50 comments.

At most, you have between you, three of these original five correct. here are some clues to help you along.....


1) You have two coins in your pocket that add up to 26 cents. One of them is not a quarter. What are the coins? (easy)
Clue: It's a play on words.

2) A cylindrical hole 6 inches long is drilled straight through the center of a solid sphere. What is the volume remaining in the sphere? (hard)
Clue: This can be solved in 3 ways, from hardest to easiest........calculus, algebra, logic.

3) Three rabbits are crossing the road, a busy road. A father rabbit, a mother rabbit, and a baby rabbit. Suddenly the strong father rabbit sees a chance, takes up baby in his arm, and drags the mother rabbit by the other hand across the road. They arrive there without injury. The baby rabbit then says "Thank you daddy, for getting all two of us across the road safely" Please explain. (medium)
Clue: You need lateral thinking.

4) You have three cards, (two aces and a queen), all face down. You are asked to find the queen, and you are asked to pick one card only. Then , the magician looks at them all, and promptly turns face up , an ace. What is the probability that your card is the queen? (hard)
Clue: the answer is counter-intuitive.

5) A snail falls into a well which is 20 meters deep. He starts to climb up immediately, and in the daytime, he goes three meters up, but at night falls two meters back again. Assuming he starts the ascent at dawn on the first day, how many days is it before he emerges? (easy)
Clue: This is math plus a little bit of logic.

Try again, guys, and I MAY continues with the left-right conundrum (if not, then you get a sharp rap on the (left-right) knuckles) .

Michelle Kwan, go home!

SUBJECTIVE POST!!!!

Once upon a time, there was a little Japanese girl from Nagoya called Midori Ito. Her passion for Ice Skating was unparalleled. She practiced from an early age, and soon rose to become one of Japan's best Figure Skaters. Then came the 1990 World Championships.

To understand Ice Skating as it was then, it has to be realised that the Single Men and Single Ladies' competitions ran as so, in 3 phases: Phase 1: the figures. This is where the skater had to do compulsory slow figure 8's and circles, much like dressage is for the Equine sports. Phase 2: the Short Programme. This is where each skater had to do a 3-4 minute dance rountine based upon certain "required elements" and "jumps", as asked for by the judges. Phase 3:
The Free Programme. This is where the skater was given Carte Blanche to show exactly what he/she could do, in 6-8 minutes.

In 1990, the closest rival was Jill Trenary, from the USA. And after a complete failure on Phase 1 (finishing 10th), and winning Phase 2, Midori Ito had to come out for the Free Programme and "Skate for her Life", as Irene Cara would say.

What came next was the single most beautiful, synchronised performance ever seen in ANY sport, let alone Figure Skating. Dancing to a concatenated and condensed "Sheherezade", by Rimsky Korsakov, what followed was something that had I been there, I would have been jumping for joy.

Look out for these jumps: 2nd Jump, a triple Axel. Most men even find a double Axel hard. She takes off from her left foot facing forwards, twirls round three and a half times, and lands on her right foot going backwards. Towards the end, she does two massive Triple Toe Loops (forward facing jumps) in succession and nearly ends up on a photographer's lap, and with a flourish , and in perfect timing with the Eastern music, finishes with a close spiral. Result, with three maximum 6.0 's she wins the Free Programme.

I urge my reader to see this to the end as it simply is poetry in motion, AND her name is Ito as well!

Solutions Often Bring New Problems.....

.......as we scientists know. It often happens, solve one problem, and a whole plethora of new ones rear their ugly collective head in protest.

I am about to prove that this not only happens in Physics, it happens in blogs as well.

Recall that strange picture I posted on August 15th, entitled

Not a Math Riddle for a Change......

If not, have a look at it. Only five comments, though.

Here is the same image followed by two subsequent others:




The first image is the original puzzle. The second a fraction of a second later, and the third, later still.



When I say 'later' I mean about '1/10,000,000' th of a second.

It is of course, a nuclear bomb, photographed very soon after detonation.

Not in Nevada, but New Mexico. In fact, it is Trinity. The curious shapes seen are a feature of the vaporisation of the tower it was on, visible in photo 1. It was so hot, the sand was turned to glass, and the Indians sell the pieces for $1 each. I have one myself!

Well, that is the solution.

For that, there is a price, as promised. More new problems, as here the students have just started returning to the University.

How many can you answer? Just five for perusal, and for you all to comment upon.

1) You have two coins in your pocket that add up to 26 cents. One of them is not a quarter. What are the coins? (easy)

2) A cylindrical hole 6 inches long is drilled straight through the center of a solid sphere. What is the volume remaining in the sphere? (hard)

3) Three rabbits are crossing the road, a busy road. A father rabbit, a mother rabbit, and a baby rabbit. Suddenly the strong father rabbit sees a chance, takes up baby in his arm, and drags the mother rabbit by the other hand across the road. They arrive there without injury. The baby rabbit then says "Thank you daddy, for getting all two of us across the road safely" Please explain. (medium)

4) You have three cards, (two aces and a queen), all face down. You are asked to find the queen, and you are asked to pick one card only. Then , the magician looks at them all, and promptly turns face up , an ace. What is the probability that your card is the queen? (hard)

5) A snail falls into a well which is 20 meters deep. He starts to climb up immediately, and in the daytime, he goes three meters up, but at night falls two meters back again. Assuming he starts the ascent at dawn on the first day, how many days is it before he emerges? (easy)

Blame it on the freshers, who never do any work in the first week anyway.

Isn't this lovely?

As of 26 September, no-one here has even got three out of five correct yet, and you all must be punished by a sixth, since no-one has remembered my birthday (Hey - look it up, I know you are smart-ish).

This one is insuperably difficult, and if anyone gets THIS correct, and I am satisfied that the answer is original, AND you understand it, then the reward shall be a gift from you to me and I will forget that you forgot.

6) What is the difference between left and right?

So certain am I? So certain I am.

Explanation of Orbit

No, we are not talking about any such William, nor chewing gum, I really mean what happens when an object goes round the Earth without falling down.

My young mind could not figure it out. How COULD an object NOT fall, and just go round? Surely gravity would get it in the end?

Many years later, when I was about 14, I got an A-Ha! solution (ask Martin Gardner, Bless 'im!). And now on this blog, I am calling AIM#2.

Here's how the object does it, let's call it a cricket ball.

What happens when you throw it straight up? It comes down on your head, of course!

What happens if you don't throw it straight up? It always comes down just out of reach in that pond over there.

What happens if you throw it parallel to the ground (horizontally, I mean)? It still comes down, but this time it rolls under the only car visible, again, just out of reach, of course.

If you throw it harder horizontally, it will still come down, but this time it will land much further away, and roll onto the nearby freeway.

This is because the ball comes down in a curve, a well-defined curve, as dictated by Newton's Laws.

Well, we all know that the earth is curved too, don't we?

So the ball travels in a curve, and the earth, as the ball travels, curves down under it.

So, what if the speed of the ball is so big, that any falling it does, is compensated for by the curvature of the Earth, curving away underneath? Theoretically, it would never come down, in that case! This, my loyal reader, is, in essence, what 'orbit' is.

You never see it with cricket balls because 1) it is very hard to throw them at such a high speed, and 2) air resistance will always slow it down.

BUT, in space, where there is no air, and the spaceships have rockets to give them the great speeds needed, it is VERY possible.

And that, indeed, is what 'orbit' is.

There is a relation between height of the orbit and the speed needed to keep the object in orbit, though. In short, the higher the orbit, the slower the object has to go.

Reasoning thus, Arthur C. Clarke (author of 2001: A Space Odyssey) came up with the idea of the communications satellite, which are orbiting satellites that travel so slow that in relation to a fixed point on the earth, they are still. They stay over that point all the time. How can this be? This is easily answered too, because orbit depends upon the relation between the 'falling away' of the earth due to curvature, not to speed relative to any point on it. The fact that these satellites turn around the Earth at the same speed as the Earth itself turns around daily,
is the whole key to it. Their 'orbit speed' is the same as the Earth's speed on its axis, so they appear stationary in the sky.

This whole idea now forms the basis of the communications revolution, and without it, we would not have satellite TV, weather satellites, GPS etc.

Pity about poor Mr Clarke, he could have made a fortune, but neglected to put a patent on his idea, so he gets nothing!

What is the difference between Special Relativity, and General Relativity?

Here is the first part of General Relativity. However......

Do NOT be put off! Please read further!

Not a lot of people know this, but Einstein only published 3 papers. One on the explanation of Brownian motion (movement of atoms in a gas), another on the explanation of the photoelectric effect (what happens when a light is shone onto a metal), the latter of which was established from the then new quantum theory, and his triumph, “On the electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”.

The third became known as “Special Relativity”, published in 1905. (hereafter, referred to as “SR”). It dealt with objects travelling very fast, but not being accelerated.

What has this to do with the gobbledegook you see here?

Well, Einstein was not happy with his SR theory, as it assumed constant velocity.

He wanted to encompass it into a theory of relativity that took into account acceleration as well, and his idea led to THAT gobbledegook up there, of which this is only the first few lines.

It took a long time ( I think it is obvious why!), but in 1916 he came up with General Relativity (hereafter referred to as “GR”). In it, he incorporated acceleration, but at a cost. He had to introduce a fourth dimension, along with the other three we know and love (the straight lines of – “here-there”, “up-down”, “right-left”). The other dimension we also knew and loved was simply “time”. He called his new ‘creation’ , “Spacetime”, and it meant not one of the four could exist without the other three.

He even borrowed a branch of abstract math from some guy named Riemann that had hitherto no foreseen practical applications. Einstein needed equations in 4, not 3, dimensions. Ok, we math people who already know linear algebra, are aware that math can be carried out in any number of dimensions (some call it Matrix Algebra), but Einstein was the first to make use of it beyond three dimensions, and what is more, he was able to show that it could be proved practically, a fact not physically proved until 1919 with Eddington.

It is called ‘Tensor theory’. The “theory” bit, describing the mathematical, not the physical aspects. Einstein made tensor algebra real.

So how did this make physics better?

One BIG thing it altered, was the physical perception of ‘gravity’. It was now longer a 'force' (take note , Luke), but a physical , geometric effect.

Essentially what had happened was this: this guy Riemann, much earlier, had ‘culled’ a branch of math from nowhere called ‘Riemannian Geometry’, which dealt with the scenario that space need not be ‘flat’, as we know it , Jim.

Einstein simply applied it to the geometry of his Spacetime, PLUS, there was one complication…..mass. In the words of John Wheeler….”Matter tells space how to curve, and space tells matter how to move”. There was a lot of math, and I MEAN a lot, and the example, given is just a taster.

What you see there is just ONE component of the math needed to describe GR in just two dimensions. Yes, I did say only TWO dimensions. This is what you see there. The other components occupy another two pages, and for four dimensions, correspondingly more.

Before you ask, yes, I do understand the components individually, that is, the spatial functions which descibe space itelf, the second order partial differentals which descibe it's curvature, and the trigonometric functions, which are an inevitable consquence of curves. This is calculus with a vengeance!

Anyway, the difference between SR and GR is that owing to the Principle of relativity (all physics laws remain the same no matter where or who or when you are), SR explains extreme velocities (speeds), GR explains extreme accelerations (changes in speeds). It is interesting to note that because of the Principle of relativity, accelerations are treated the same way as the state of being in a gravitational field.

The Principle of relativity is explained in a recent post.

BUT what most people do not realise , is that like SR, GR has also been venerated many times with practical demonstrations.

If Einstein is really 'wrong', he is only 'wrong' in the sense that Newton was.

Both scientists have been proven to be right.

Oh Woe to you people who 'believe' Einstein was 'wrong', as, in effect, you will have to 'prove' Newton 'wrong' too.

...and who can argue with that?

Take On Me.........?

This astonishing video appeared in 1985 in England from Norwegian (Yes, you did read it right !) band A-Ha. It was a top 5 in the UK charts. Astonishing because there are no computers involved.

Nothing had ever been done like this before, and it was WAY before videos became 'Statements, Harrumph', and before any directors were complacent about the facilities at their disposal.

I ask that you play it for the sheer genius it was. It actually has a story.

It a feast for the eyes. A wonder to behold.


This is ...... a.....

After All that Palava.......

.....Time for a bit of a larf.

Students, myself having been one,
make the oddest mistakes.

Here is an Homage to them
(the mistakes, not the students)


 'The World According to Student Bloopers'

                by Richard Lederer

                 St. Paul's School

(Verbatim, The Language Quarterly, Vol. XIII, No. 4)


The inhabitants of ancient Egypt were called mummies.
They lived in the Sarah Dessert and traveled by Camelot.
The climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants
have to live elsewhere, so certain areas of the
dessert are cultivated by irritation.
The Egyptians built the Pyramids in the shape of a huge
triangular cube.  The Pramids are a range of mountains
between France and Spain.

The Bible is full of interesting caricatures.
In the first book of the Bible, Guinesses,
Adam and Eve were created from an apple tree.
Oneof their children, Cain, once asked,
"Am I my brother's son?"  God asked
Abraham to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Montezuma.
Jacob, son of Isaac, stole his brother's birth mark.
Jacob was a patriarch who brought up his twelve
sons to be patriarchs, but they did not take to it.
One of Jacob's sons, Joseph, gave refuse to the
Israelites.

Pharaoh forced the Hebrew slaves
to make bread without straw.
Moses led them to the Red Sea,
where they made unleavened bread,
which is bread made without any ingredients.
Afterwards, Moses went up on Mount Cyanide
to get the ten commandments.
David was a Hebrew king skilled at playing the liar.
He fought with the Philatelists,
a race of people who lived in Biblical times.
Solomon, one of David's sons, had 500 wives and 500
porcupines.

Without the Greeks we wouldn't have history.
The Greeks invented three kinds of columns --
Corinthian, Doric, and Ironic.  They also had myths.
A myth is a female moth.  One myth says that
the mother of Achilles dipped him in the
River Stynx until he became intollerable.
Achilles appears in The Illiad, by Homer.
Homer also wrote the Oddity,
in which Penelope was the last hardship
that Ulysses endured on his journey.
Actually, Homer was not written by Homer
but by another man of that name.

Socrates was a famous Greek teacher
who went around giving people advice.
They killed him.
Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock.

In the Olympic Games, Greeks ran races, jumped,
hurled the biscuits and threw the java.
The reward to the victor was a coral wreath.
The government of Athens was democratic
because people took the law into their
own hands.  There were no wars in Greece,
as the mountains were so high
that they couldn't climb over to see
what their neighbors were doing.
When they fought with the Persians,
the Greeks were outnumbered because
the Persians had more men.

Eventually, the Ramons conquered the Geeks.
History calls people Romans because
hey never stayed in one place for very long.
At Roman banquets, the guests wore
garlics in their hair.
Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the
battlefields of Gaul.
The Ides of March murdered him because
they thought he was going to be made king.
Nero was a cruel tyranny who would torture
his poor subjects by playing the fiddle
to them.

Then came the Middle Ages.
King Alfred conquered the Dames, King Arthur lived
in the Age of Shivery,
King Harold mustarded his troops
before the Battle of Hastings,
Joan of Arc was cannonized by Bernard Shaw,
and victims of the Black Death grew boobs
on their necks.
Finally the Magna Carta provided
that no free man should be hanged twice for the same
offense.

In midevil times most of the people were alliterate.
The greatest writer of the time was Chaucer,
who wrote many poems and verses and also
wrote literature.

Another tale tells of William Tell, who shot an arrow
through an apple while standing on his son's head.

The Renaissance was an age in which
more individuals felt the value of their human being.
Martin Luther was nailed to the church door at
Wittenburg for selling papal indulgences.
He died a horrible death, being excommunicated by a bull.
It was the painter Donatello's interest in the
female nude that made him the father of the Renaissance.
It was an age of great inventions and discoveries.
Gutenberg invented the Bible.
Sir Walter Raleigh is a historical figure
because he invented cigarettes.
Another important invention was the circulation of blood.
Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world
with a 100-foot clipper.

The government of England was a limited mockery.
Henry VIII found walking difficult
because he had an abbess on his knee.
Queen Elizabeth was the "Virgin Queen."
As a queen she was a success.  When Elizabeth
exposed herself before her troops,
they all shouted, "hurrah."  Then her
navy went out and defeated the Spanish Armadillo.

The greatest writer of the Renaissance
was William Shakespear. Shakespear never made much money
and is famous only because of his plays.
He lived at Windsor with his merry wives,
writing tragedies, comedies, and errors.
In one of Shakespear's famous plays,
Hamlet rations out his situation by relieving himself
in a long soliloquy.
In another, Lady Macbeth tries to convince Macbeth
to kill the King by attacking his manhood.
Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic couplet.
Writing at the same time as Shakespear
was Miguel Cervantes.
He wrote Donkey Hote.
The next great author was John Milton.
Milton wrote Paradise Lost.
Then his wife died and he wrote Paradise Regained.

During the Renaissance America began.
Christopher Columbus was a great navigator who
discovered America while cursing about the Atlantic.
His ships were called the Nina, the Pinta,
and the Santa Fe.
Later, the Pilgrims crossed the Ocean,
and this was known as Pilgrims Progress.
When they landed at Plymouth Rock,
they were greeted by the Indians, who came
down the hill rolling their war hoops before them.
The Indian squabs carried porpoises on their back.
Many of the Indian heroes were killed,
along with their cabooses which proved very fatal to them.
The winter of 1620 was a hard one for the settlers.
Many people died and many babies were born.
Captain John Smith was responsible for all this.

One of the causes of the Revolutionary Wars
was the English put tacks in their tea.
Also, the colonists would send their parcels through the
post without stamps.  During the War,
the Red Coats and Paul Revere was throwing balls
over stone walls.
The dogs were barking and the peacocks
were crowing.
Finally, The colonists won the War and no longer
had to pay for taxis.

Delegates from the original thirteen states
formed the Contented Congress.
Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin,
and Benjamin Franklin were two
singers of the Declaration of Independence.
Franklin had gone to Boston carrying all his clothes
in his pocket and a loaf of bread under each arm.
He invented electricity by rubbing cats
backwards and declared, "A horse divided against
itself cannot stand."
Franklin died in 1790 and is still
dead.

George Washington married Martha Curtis and
in due time became the Father of Our Country.
Then the Constitution of the United States was
adopted to secure domestic hostility.
Under the Constitution the people
enjoyed the right to keep bare arms.

Abraham Lincoln became America's greatest Precedent.
Lincoln's mother died in infancy, a
nd he was born in a log cabin which he built with his
own hands.
When Lincoln was President,
he wore only a tall silk hat.
He said, "In onion there is strength."
Abraham Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg
Address while traveling from Washington to Gettysburg
on the back of an envelope.
He also freed the slaves by signing the Emasculation
Proclamation, and the Fourteenth Amendment
gave the ex-Negroes citizenship.
But the Clue Clux Clan would
torcher and lynch the ex-Negroes and other
innocent victims.
It claimed it represented law and odor.
On the night of April 14, 1865,
Lincoln went to the theater and got shot in his seat
by one of the actors in a moving picture show.
The believed assinator was John Wilkes Booth,
a supposingly insane actor.
This ruined Booth's career.

Meanwhile in Europe, the enlightenment was a
reasonable time.
Voltare invented electricity and also wrote a book
called Candy.
Gravity was invented by Isaac Walton.
It is chiefly noticeable in the Autumn, when
the apples are falling off the trees.

Bach was the most famous composer in the world.
and so was Handel. Handel was half German,
half Italian, and half English.  He was very
large.  Bach died from 1750 to the present.
Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf.
He was so deaf he wrote loud music.
He took long walks in the forest
even when everyone was calling for him.
Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died for this.

France was in a very serious state.
The French Revolution was accomplished
before it happened.
The Marseillaise was the theme song of
the French Revolution, and it catapulted into Napoleon.
During the Napoleonic Wars,
the crowned heads of Europe were trembling in their
shoes.  Then the Spanish gorillas
came down from the hills and nipped at
Napoleon's flanks.
Napoleon became ill with bladder problems and was very
tense and unrestrained.
He wanted an heir to inherit his power, but since
Josephine was a baroness, she couldn't bear children.

The sun never set on the British Empire
because the British Empire is in the East
and the sun sets in the West.
Queen Victoria was the longest queen.
She sat on a thorn for 63 years.
Her reclining years and finally
the end of her life were exemplatory of a
great personality.
Her death was the final event which ended her reign.

The nineteenth century was a time of
many great inventions and thoughts.
The invention of the steamboat
caused a network of rivers to spring up.
Cyrus McCormick invented the McCormick raper,
which did the work of a hundred men.
Samuel Morse invented a code of telepathy.
Louis Pasteur discovered a cure for rabbis.
Charles Darwin was a naturalist who
wrote the Organ of the Species.
Madman Curie discovered radium.
And Karl Marx became one of the Marx brothers.

The First World War,
caused by the assignation of the Arch-Duck by a
surf, ushered in a new error
in the anals of human history.

Was Einstein Right or Wrong?

Good question. Here are two answers:

To non-scientists who have not been trained in physics and who have nothing better to do: "EINSTEIN IS WRONG".

To scientists who use Enstein's equations almost every day, having used them practically : "EINSTEIN IS RIGHT".

Make up your own mind, the comment box is free for anyone.

Eintstein WAS wrong!

Was Einstein wrong about the speed of light? Can it be broken? Some physicists claim to have done in the following experiment....

The experiment in question has a particle that travels from an emitter to a detector. During the time it takes to get from end to the other, it passes through some sort of substance. When the particle is timed, the travel time through the substance in the way, is LESS than the travel time that light would have taken for the same distance.

So the particle appears to be travelling faster than light.

Actually, it appears to be travelling faster than light in that medium, which we all know is perfectly possible.

However, certain questions raise their heads over this result.

The theory of Relativity actually says that no information can travel faster than light, in fact if you look further down my blog to the post on "Phase Velocity" and "Group Velocity" (June 25, 2005) you will find another, apparently similar, conflict there.

Having studied quantum mechanics, the concepts of Group Velocity and Phase Velocity are well known to me, as is the Tunnel Effect.

The "Tunnel Effect" is a quantum mechanical effect only. It's main use is in Josephson Junctions, transistors that use the effect. The effect is this: Under certain circumstances, particles that bounce against a wall, the particles sometimes go right through the wall, and the time it takes to do this seems to be immeasurable.

The present conflict arose because the particles these scientists used appeared to be travelling faster than light, because the particles were using the "Tunnelling Effect" to get through the suff that is in the way. What the particle is doing before and after the tunnelling is completely described by a wave equation known as 'Shrodinger's Equation'. BUT, during the tunnelling, the particle is described by a different wave function (in fact, it is an exponential curve) and therefore we can tell virtually nothing about it (as usually, the particle is in the middle of a solid piece of material), other than the fact the probability amplitude (the information needed to tell us where it IS) decreases exponentially.

Most physicists already agree it is a paradox, but the fact is that the particles are travelling in a medium (compare glass) whose speed of light there is LOWER than the speed of light in a vacuum, perhaps there is no paradox at all. Particles have, after all, been seen to travel faster than the light in that particular medium, giving rise to "Cerenkov Radiation". This effect is striking when one glimpses the water bath of a nuclear reactor, which appears to 'shine' blue. No, it is not a dye, but the electrons emitted by the core are travelling faster than the speed of light in the water, and the blue is the Cerenkov radiation emitted by them.

But the equations in this case, the equations of special relativity, tell us exactly WHY nothing can go faster than light in a vacuum. Is the particle in this particular experiment violating this? NO, because it is NOT travelling faster than light in a vacuum.

However, the experiment given is only a consequence of quantum mechanics, as an exhibition such as depicted , can only be demonstrated by the tunnelling effect, which is an effect that is only valid for particles in the atomic realm.

There are no implications here whatsoever that the same effect can be , nor ever will be, applied to material, macroscopic particles like a car, a dog, or tennis ball. ALL must conform to the equation that says that, for them, light speed (as in the speed of light in a vacuum) is, in fact, impossible.

Here's the proof - the simple consideration that the speed of light is the same, the following three equations simply came through from the math, where v = speed, T = Time, L=Length, m=mass. c, of course, is the speed of light in a vacuum. The "0" means each of these as measured when v = 0.

Please don't worry about the math, because the most important thing here is in equation 3, the last one.........


.......in the last equation, it is clear the mass increases the faster you go, because that thing in the "[]" is always increasing, and look what happens when v=c >>>>> m(v) becomes infinite!

Obviously this cannot happen, so particles can never travel at the speed of light in a vacuum.

Anyone who "thinks" this is untrue is invited to 'disprove' these equations, which were first studied by Fitzgerald and Lorentz, just before Einstein actually used them in his Special Relativity paper ", On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies", in 1905.

If all this appears difficult, it is childsplay compared to the General Theory of Relativity (1915).

I think the reason why Physics is so dependent upon math is PATENTly obvious here.

Black Holes

Why are they black?

....because no light ever comes from them.

So as to understand this, a few simple ideas: How high do you have to throw a ball so as to give it an orbit? Or.....How fast does the ball have to go to get an orbit? Or even to leave the earth completely?

The answer lies in the algebra of Newton's gravity, but it turns out to be a simple number.

About 10 Km per second. Pretty fast. if you throw up a ball at that speed, you will never see it again.

It has left gravity behind. When I found this out, my young ignorant mind immediately found itself faced with another question: " If this is true, then how come a rocket 'gets up there', as it is clearly NOT travelling at 10km per sec at take off?" Years later, I realised that it was slow at first because it was accelerating to the eventual 10km per sec, which would finally be achieved at a dozen miles up of so.

So, we have the 'escape velocity' here is 10 km per sec. 'Here' being the Earth.

How about the sun? the sun's 'escape vleocity' is about 500km per sec. Bigger, yes, but you get the idea. The heavier the 'planet or 'star', the bigger the 'escape velocity' is. Stands to reason, if gravity is higher, it is harder to 'get away'!!

What about heavier stars? Yes, escape velocity still gets bigger the heavier the star. ( I say 'star' because a planet that heavy automatically becomes a star because the internal pressure starts nuclear reactions, which is what a Star is. Afer all, the planet Jupiter was almost a star, but it wasn't quite big enough)

Does this go on forever? No, it does not, because what happens when the escape velocity is the speed of light?

If you think about it, even light cannot escape then, and so we have it ~ a "Black Hole".

That's it!!

(Of course, there are a lot more fascinating things about black holes to tell, but this is just to answer a question I was posed: " What is a Black Hole?".

Any more answers needed can be found in later posts.

Parry Hotter and the Order of the Phoenix

I HATE him! I HATE him!

WHO.......?

Mr Harry Potter of course! The bar-steward, who obviously had the hots for poor little Japanese girl Cho Chang, the girl who had just about recovered from the death of her boyfriend Cedric in " Parry Hotter and the Goblet of Fire", takes advantage of her frailty and tongue-wrestles with her in his class.

THEN.....he dumps her for Ron's littler sister Ginny!

AND.....how could he possibly dump a lovely Japanese girl anyway? How dare he parry a hotter girl!

WHAT.......has Starry Blotter got against little Japanese girls?????

IS HE........Mad as Moody?

Oooh I'm trembling like a Blast-Ended Skrewt on Polyjuice Potion, so don't call me "Moaning Myrtle" but "Antagonised Aki".


(NB THIS POST HAS BEEN "COMEDIC RELIEFIO"!!)

Not a Math Riddle for a Change......

Is it a lollipop? is it a balloon? Is it cotton Candy?

NO it's......

...well........ what do you think it is?

Clues, it is not a sea anaenome, nor is it anything fluffy. In fact, you would very DEFINITELY not want to cuddle this....

It is not bubble gum.....

It ain't a cloud, nor is it a UFO, not even a weather balloon....

This unretouched photo was taken from 7 miles away.

The tower you see is about 33 meters tall.

Got it yet?

Put you answers in the comments, if you please!

Any opinions will be hotly debated, I promise!

As of September 10th, only 5 comments! Come on Guys, you have to be more eager than that!

Oh Mom! WHY can't I see the new Harry Potter Movie?

Well, after months of deliberation and nearly three weeks of reading, I finished The Book.

Harry Potter Book Number Seven " Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows ".

And yes, as expected, it is full of action, and yes, there were deaths (five, I counted, of the main characters).

It completes everything in dashing detail as if weaving a particularly complex Indian Sari for several Prized Rajkumaris.

There is a lot of violence in the book, and it will probably merit a "15" in the cinemas, as it is beyond the "12" certificate. Hence the title of this post!!

(SUBJECTIVE DETERMINATION)

(FACTS): These are Spoilers!


Take it from me, Dumbledore is still alive, and those destined to die in this last book are Fred Weasley, Tonks and Lupin, Mad-Eye, Colin Creevy, and He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. However, avenging his parents, a completely Unexpected Hero turns up in the shape of............Nah, that would spoil it, oh, and it turns out that Severus Snape is on the side of.......Nah, that would spoil it, too!

Einstein WAS right....

....Einstein was probably one of them!

(Close Encounters of the Third Kind)

In my last post on relativity, I intimated that the speed of light IS constant. By constant, this means the same for all observers.

Those smart-asses who say 'but the speed of light in glass and water is different, so it can't be constant' have entirely missed the point. "Constant" refers to all observers travelling in the same medium that light is travelling through at the time, be it water, air, or a vacuum.

Indeed a vacuum is always chosen because in all measurements of the speed of light, none is ever bigger than that measured in free space.

NOW we start. I doubt many people do not know where all this came from, but it is quite simple, and is called "The Principle of Relativity".

To make you realise what it is, perhaps a few questions would suffice.

How fast are you going right now? Most of you will say you are sitting, and are therefore not moving. A few will say " At about 100kph, I am on a train". The question really is, how fast you travelling relative to the Earth. The first group has answer 0 kph, and second group 100 kph, relative to the Earth.

But how fast is the Earth moving? Well, relative to the Sun, about 30,000 kph, as the Earth goes around it.

How fast is the sun moving? Well, relative to the galactic center, about another 250,000 kph.

We don't notice this because of a blanket surrounding us called "The Atmosphere" which travels along with the Earth, so we are only aware of travel on the Earth.

So, how fast are we really travelling? 100kph? 30,000 kph? 250,000 kph?, or their sum, 260,100 kph?

Yes, but what is the Galaxy moving relative to? The answer is the Local Group, and the point is, the process can go on for a long time to calculate real speeds.

So, how fast you are going actually means "How fast are you travelling past object X".

Simple mechanics with a little thought.

However, Einstein went further. His question was this:

" If in free space, with no 'object X's' to measure with, how fast are you travelling past that there other spacecraft? With a little more thought, you can see that the answer is not clearly cut, for you could be stationary, and the other spacecraft is moving past you. SO, who , in the end, can say which one is moving and which stationary? Indeed, BOTH spacecraft could be moving and you would never know the difference!

Next time you take the kids out for a drive, get in and ask them to hide under a blanket at the back, so they cannot see out. Next, jump up and down in your seat a little, your wife too, and the kids will be convinced you have started!

Point is, if you have nothing by which to tell you if you are moving (a tree, a bump in the road, another spacecraft), it is impossible to tell if you are or not! Ask the pioneers of sea exploration 200-300 years ago, they knew all about it.

Put succinctly, "free motion is impossible to detect" - the Principle of Relativity. This is where the word comes from - you have to be moving relative to something to tell that you ARE moving. THIS is the central tenet of Relativity.

What has the speed of light to do with this? Well, if true , there are certain consequences.

Einstein realised that the speed of light simply cannot be anything else BUT the speed of light, and that it was the same for all travellers, no matter how fast they travel. Otherwise they could work out how fast they were moving. For instance, if you are travelling towards another planet at 30,000 kph, the speed of light would be (speed of light (minus) 30,000 kph). SO you can calculate your speed. BUT the Principle of Relativity forbids this, therefore the speed of light is the same for them, as it is for us, here on Earth.

This principle has explained many things, a good example is a star going round another. Try to think what you would see if the speed of light were slowed down when the rotating star moved away, and what you would see when it was speeded up as it moved towards you. You would see the star in two places at once! This of course, does not happen, and is well explained by the constancy of the speed of light.

Another proof of the Principle of Relativity is in electromagnetism. Sometime back I was writing about the speed of light and electricity, and that it had actually been derived (logically deduced from) electricity and magnetism considerations alone. This also means it does not change.

Contrary to popular belief, light is not a barrier like sound is, it is more like a forcefield that grows stronger the nearer you get to it. Whereas sound barriers can be broken, it is physically impossible to go even as fast as light, let alone go faster.

When I say physically impossible, this is fact, because the harder you push to go faster, the energy you put in goes to increasing the mass (according to E = Mc**2), not to increasing the speed. Ask any particle physicist or nuclear scientist. BUT this is the realm of Special Relativity, and deserves another post, as does General Relativity. Both theories came about because of the simple tenet of the "Principle of Relativity".

From little acorns do mighty oak trees grow.