Quark Strangeness and Yarn

Hello. This has strong ties with "Gauge this", but nothing is repeated, just reinforced.

Quark.

Armin Shimmerman? No.

I refer to the little people inside everything.

Here is what we have so far - - -

Atoms > > Nuclei > > protons and neutrons > > quarks?

What are they?

To illustrate, a potted history would help.

The Geeks, sorry, Greeks (bless 'em) figured out that stuff is made of smaller stuff.

They called them "atoms" and thought by reasoning alone, that nothing could be smaller. They were wrong.

Then John Dalton came along in the eighteenth century (didn't take THAT long, did it?) and did a bit more work on the idea, and came up with "elements".

There are 92 of these in nature, and what came about was that these "atoms" were not indivisible at all. Earnest Rutherford showed that by splitting them.

It turned out that they were made up of tinier bits which we called "electrons" and "protons". It took a while (until 1932 actually) to work out that there was another in there also (the "neutron"), but basically we thought we had the atom sussed.

What came about next was a mixture of conjugation and speculature ("conspecularity" if you like).

If protons were all the same electrical charge, and they were all packed together tightly in the nucleus, how come all atoms never flew apart ( a few do by themselves - this is called "radioactivity").

Think about it.

The only possible answer we could give was that there was another "force" stronger than electrostatics, but only available at very short distances ( a bit like two very passionate lovers )

To be picturesque, if I held a proton in each hand ( let's just say they were the size of tennis balls ), and tried to bring them together, I would feel an enormous force trying to keep them apart. This is called "electrostatic repulsion".

At some point, though, if I was strong enough, when these tennis balls were, say, 6cm apart, they would snap together as if there was an elastic band between them. This is called "the strong force".

Back to reality, then. This "strong force" (scientists are not heavily overvocabulariated) pulls the protons together inside the nucleus, despite the electrostatic process which asks them to go away.

But the end is NOT nigh.

It was established in the 1960's that this type of "strong" force was only a mere shadow of the strength of the "true nature of the Force" (see my post with the same title).

Okay, history lesson over.

The present case is this:

We now know that protons and neutrons are comprised of quarks. (See "three jets are better than two"). Electrons seem to have no structure at all (They may as well not be there). These quarks appear to act like electrons BUT we can never see one, simply because of this seeming cop-out of the very short range of the strong force. They remain inside the protons and neutrons and cannot get out.

They are constrained in a manner that is not unlike an elastic band.

Without going into further details, it will be sufficient to point out that it is like "electrostatic charge", but with not two but three different types of "charge".

They are called "red", "green", and "blue" (physicists are the World's Worst nomenclaturists (- apart from chemists, that is. I mean, who has ever heard of "1-bromo 3-dichloro 4-iodo pentane" for crying out loud???)

Anyway, back to the point, because this is what these "quarks" act like - points. The way of thinking now is that we imagine that inside the proton is a space as big as the earth. The three quarks in the proton will be smaller than a grain of sand each. They are free to roam, but can never get out. This is called "ultra-violet freedom".

BUT because of our quest to find the GUT (See my post "That GUT feeling"), the theory goes like this: If the quarks ever get close enough to shake hands (and we are talking two grains of sand in a container the size of the earth here), the WEAK force will assert itself and change one of them by exchanging one of the vector bosons, and the proton will effectively "decay" into a positron and an anti-neutrino. If this happens it is called "infra-red slavery" (We still are the champions of the non-vocabulary competitions - have to keep up appearances).

Because we are talking grains of sand inside a container the size of the Earth, it has been forecast that this will not happen for about :

100000000000000000000000000000000 years

(1 followed by 32 zeroes).

And I thought waiting for buses was bad

How to Twang a Tune

Ever wondered how a radio works? You twang it.

Here's how:

Timmy Mallett talks, and the moving air which is the sound of his voice jiggles a magnet inside a microphone, and his voice is converted into electrical squiggles in a wire.

This is then carried, amplified, and these signals are converted into jiggling bits in a large metal pole (we call this an Antenna). (The bits that jiggle are called "electrons")

The jiggling creates radio waves that move through the air at the speed of light and eventually end up being picked up by a smaller Antenna (your radio), where the opposite happens - the radio waves start to jiggle the bits in the receiving Antenna.

These electrical jiggles are fed into one of "these circuits"

(Use the back button to get back here)

This is called an LCR circuit and consists of the tuning process. The signals leaving the radio station have a very definite frequency. The LCR circuit vibrates with another frequency.

How do we make certain they match? Simple. We twiddle a knob which changes the value of the capacitor, changing the frequency of the circuit. It's just the same when you twang a ruler - different lengths of ruler give different twangs, only with a radio, the value of the capacitor, not the length of the ruler, determines which "twang" the circuit will pick up from all the many different radio waves in the air.

Now, in the computer age, the capacitors of old have all been replaced by other things, but the principle is exactly the same.

You twang or tune your circuit to the frequency of the radio station you want to listen to. Even if it IS Timmy Mallett.

You Go For It

In the spirit of Eurovision I post this for my little cousin Yuko.

They are called "Hinoi Team" and Yuko can dance this one.

Keika is the leader and what is astonishing is that the girls were aged twelve and thirteen (two of each) at the time (2005)

Yuko can do this and I have no dance in me.

I am too old for this Sh*t, as Murtaugh would say.

The title is "Ike Ike", which means "Go, Go", or, in Western terms, "Go for it!"

Fifty Bonus points only for sussing the pun in the post title.

Don't get me wrong - I am not going soft - watch this space for a deep physics post.

No Way!

WARNING: OBJECTIVE POST!




The previous post was written by a love-sick pre-teen and she has offered an apology, poor girl.

The Eurovision Song Contest, lampooned by many and oft shunned because of the terrible music.

Saturday, May 16th, and there where 42 countries voting for 25 finalists (where does Europe HAVE 42 countries???).

This is a contest, the winner of which will be singing a song that would appeal to all the Euro members. Sadly, a few countries (like Armenia) still cling on to the myth that singing about their own culture is sufficient to win a contest spanning an entire continent.

Norway, by tradition or otherwise, usually finish last, many times with zero points. There seemed to be a chance in a million they would ever even get "un point". Most critics wrote them off as, at best, a "bad idea". No chance of winning anything.

And then, after many years in the Doldrums, Norway came up with this one. Alex is famous in Norway for both song and violin. I watched all 42 entries prior to the contest and noted three potential winners: Iceland, Norway and Estonia.

Alexander Rybak absolutely STORMED away with the victory, becoming the highest points scorer in the history of the 50+ year contest.

This author predicts a worldwide chart hit for this song.

For You, My Ben

WARNING: SUBJECTIVE POST!




Alex is so FIT, but Ben I love you.

I'm in love with a Fairy Tale....

Jeez I am so in love with you. You are my Fairy Tale, Ben, and I will never leave you

Gauge this!

This one is just about as fundamental as it gets. All of physics comes together because of "gauge fields".

The first to be discovered was gravity, (we studied the effects but didn't "know" what it was) and then electromagnetism. There are two more. But what are gauge fields?

To quote Sir Patrick Moore, "Well, we just don't know". We know what they DO, just not what they ARE.

Taking the first two forces to be discovered, gravity and electromagnetism, this is what happens.

Place something where there is a gravity gauge field (ie "gravity"), and it moves towards another thing according to rules we fully understand. The "field" is like a slope running downhill from the smaller to the bigger.

Place something in an electromagnetic gauge field, and nothing happens. That is, UNLESS that thing has something on it we call "electric charge". We also do not know what this is either, just that things either have it or not, and, what is more, it comes in two types. We call them "positive" and "negative". (We tried "Laurel" and "Hardy" but it didn't sound quite right). All we knew was that two of the same type were unfriendly and pushed each other away, and two which were different, became lovers and wanted to be together all the time. The "field" was like a slope running downhill from one type to another.

Once more, we do not know what these things are, just what they do.

We knew that these "charged particles" exchanged another, the photon, in order to be friendly or hostile. We called this an "exchange" particle.

Then we formulated a theory that to hold an atomic nucleus together, there had to be another gauge field that was stronger than the electromagnetic field, but only at very short distances. If you think abut it, the atomic nucleus has lots of particles in, some with no "charge", others with the SAME charge. Yes, I know I said stuff of the SAME type are hostile, that is why we figured out there must be a stronger "attractive" force only available inside this nucleus thing, otherwise it would fly apart (if you get a big enough nucleus, it actually does "fly" apart because it is simply too big, and we call this "radioactivity". Some guys (embarrassingly calling themselves "nuclear scientists" - my own field) even used this to make a very big bomb called "The Atom Bomb". Because of this force which acts at extremely short range, unlike the electromagnetic field (which has infinite range and therefore whose exchange particle, the photon, has zero mass), the exchange particle had to have real mass. (the mass of the exchange particle is inversely proportional to the range of whichever force we study)

Then, just before the atom smashing started, Hideki Yukawa predicted from analogy with the electromagnetic field in 1935, that the exchange particle for this "strong" force, would be 260-270 times heavier than the electron, and it would show up in our atom smashers.

What we found was startling. We found a new particle only 207 times the electron mass.

What was going on? It was actually the wrong particle, and we now know it as the mu-meson, or muon.

The one we were looking for duly turned up and we called it the pi-meson, or the pion. ("mu" and "pi" are Greek letters, "pi" being better known in mathematical circles)

The upshot was this:

All gauge fields "exchange" particles, rather like they play "catch", in order to do stuff.

Now, we had four forces, electromagnetism; the "strong" force (the one that prevents the nucleus from flying apart); the "weak" force (which doesn't do much except help change particles to others with help from the conversation of energy); and er, gravity (that thing that helps apples to fall from trees)

What are their exchange particles?

electromagnetism: the photon (has been known for years, it is "light")

strong: initially, pions, that stuck nuclear stuff together, but as wisdom blossomed, gluons, that stick the quarks together (theoretically, cannot be detected, only indirectly observable in "three-jet events* (see my post "Three jets are better than two")) ("quarks" are still more bits inside the bits inside the nuclei - a bit like those Russian Dolls - and yes, the buck stops there)

weak: Intermediate vector bosons, the W+ , W- and the Z-0. (predicted in the 1970's, observed in the 1980's)

gravity: ?

Gravity is, and always will seem to be, a complete headache. It's exchange particle is speculated to be the "graviton", but has never been seen, directly or indirectly.

WARNING - SUBJECTIVE BIT!

It is the opinion of this author that Einstein failed in his attempt to unify gravity with the other three forces because gravity is NOT a gauge field, but a geometric effect. I submit that there are only three forces, plus gravity, which Einstein himself proved to be geometric.

I find it hard to believe that if gravity IS a gauge field, spacetime would be, by definition, quantized, that is, there is a smallest bit of space beyond which we cannot measure because nothing smaller exists.

END OF SUBJECTIVE BIT

Closure

There was some confusion about my last post.

Some clarification is needed.

In thermodynamics, a "closed system" means energy can neither enter or leave. To talk about the universe as a "closed" thermodynamic system may not have any meaning, as nothing exists "outside" it, as there is no "outside".

In Cosmology, because of the expansion of the Universe, it has been speculated that the Universe falls into one of three categories: Open, Closed or Flat.

This is a gravitational consideration, and has nothing to do with thermodynamics.

The question involves the amount of matter in the Universe. Is gravity enough to stop the expansion? If it is, the expansion will stop, and a contraction will ensue, resulting in a "Big Crunch", or "GnabGib". This is a closed Universe.

As opposed to an Open Universe, in which the expansion continues forever.

AND a Flat Universe where gravity is just enough to halt the expansion only.

Trusting that Closure has been reached....

The Laws of Conversation

Whoops, lo siento mucho - I mean conservation

In physics there are many conservation laws. But what does that actually mean?
It is best illustrated by an example, and the one most people feel comfortable with is The Conservation of Energy.

This "Conservation of Energy" means that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, just converted from one form to another. It is an expression of the first Law of Thermodynamics.

In any physical process, the total amount of energy IN A CLOSED SYSTEM is constant and never changes. Closed systems mean that in the action studied, no energy is let in or out through some predetermined boundaries.

For some "closed systems" it is easy to understand this concept. Take for example, making a cup of tea. Into a closed room, take a recently boiled kettle, a cup, a teaspoon of sugar and a jug of milk. From outside the room, via robotic arms, you put some sugar and milk into the cup, with a teabag. Then you pour the near-boiling water into the cup and stir it.

Tea up! What has just happened? Well, the heat (energy) from the water has heated the cup, milk and tea. The hot water brings the flavor from the tea, dissolves the sugar, and the temperature of the cup of tea is now less than the initial water.

If a calculation is made (it's pretty simple) of all the energy before pouring, and after the tea has been brewed, the temperature of the milk has gone up, and the temperature of the water that made the tea, gone down, a similar measurement is made, there will have been no change. If the amount (mass) of each is taken into account (not to mention the energy released by the melted sugar), the amount of energy available before, is the same (exactly) as after.

If you think this was complicated, Consider the energy changes if the tea is made on a one meter table, then the full cup dropped to the floor to shatter. There are at least eight energy changes. Can you name them? In order?

Not only energy is conserved, either.

Momentum is mass x velocity, that is conserved also.
Electric charge is conserved.
Angular momentum ( r x p, when p is momentum, and r is the distance from the rotation point. However, the "x" is not a multiplication sign, but the "cross product" of two vectors)is also conserved.
Color charge is also conserved.

..and the somewhat esoterically sounding, "weak isospin" is also conserved.

There are other quantities conserved, but only under certain conditions.

The Warped Nature of Man

WARNING - SUBJECTIVE POST


There has been recent speculation in the (non-scientific) press about space travel in general and about warp drive in particular.

Warp drive was invented by Gene Roddenberry to enable the Enterprise to travel large distances easily.

Special relativity prevents objects with non-zero mass even travelling at the speed of light,let alone exceeding it.

The idea of warp drive is that the craft does not really travel, but the spacetime around it is warped in such a way as to flip the craft forward.

One analogy is perhaps a long red carpet, the type Hollywood uses. take one end, and rapidly move it up and down vertically. A "wave" moves down the carpet if you are lucky. These waves are called "transverse waves" because the direction of the oscillation is perpendicular to the direction of the wave.

Another analogy is that these "space-waves" may be longitudinal, the direction of oscillation being along the wave direction. Examples are slinky waves or sound waves.

These are two different type of warp drive.

It goes without saying that the technology to manipulate spacetime in this manner is only fiction and in reality, maybe a million years away, a fact that the warped news reports were happy to omit.

As such, I treat these ideas not as science fiction, but science fantasy, but I will admit that at some time in the very far future, it may be possible.

Having said that, this post is firmly labelled as "subjective"

Primordinal Soup

Time and again here, we will be returning to THAT man, Kurt Godel, the guy who proved that not everything is provable within mathematics.

A simple example follows, it is called "The Goldbach Conjecture", and involves prime numbers.

Now, a prime number is a number which has no factors, that is, can only be divided by itself and 1.

Obviously, no even number (apart from 2) can be a prime number, since all even numbers are divisible by 2.

Which of these are prime numbers? 3, 11, 21, 31, 41, 51.

The answers are 3, 11, 31, and 41, because 21 is 7x3, 51 is 17x3. These are called "composites".

The Goldbach Conjecture says this:

"Every even number is the sum of two (odd) prime numbers" (the word "odd" is there because 2 is excluded).

Let's call this the "GC" property of a number

Examples:

12 = 5 + 7
22 = 19 + 3 = 17 + 5
32 = 19 + 13 = 29 + 3
42 = 19 + 23 = 29 = 13 = 31 + 11 = 37 + 5

are all "GC".

The question arises: Is the Goldbach Conjecture true?

That is, is EVERY even number like this? Actually, it has never been proved or disproved. We just know that there are lots of them. No highest even number has ever been found, yet there is no proof that that there are infinitely many of them.

It has been speculated that this is one of those truths which can never be proved, the existence of which was showed by Godel in 1931.

There IS stuff out there that is true, but nevertheless cannot be proved.

Let's introduce a similar concept - the "Reverse Goldbach Conjecture". This says:

"Every even number is the difference of two (odd) prime numbers".

Let's call this the "RGC" property.

This has ramifications for computers.

Let's pick a number, say a trillion.

Is It GC or RGC or both, or neither?

You can write a program to test all primes up to a trillion to test if it is GC, and the program will finish at 1 trillion with an answer, YES, or NO. This called a "bounded" test.

However, testing for RGC is a bit more complicated, simply because a subtraction is involved. Testing for RGC has to start at 1 trillion and go UP, trying to find two odd primes which, when the smaller is subtracted from the larger, a trillion emerges.

It is not obvious how far up the number ladder we will have to go to get such a pair, if we ever find one.

For being GC, the testing process terminates in a finite amount of time, always.

For being RGC, the testing process may take us to numbers so high, it may take decades to find the pair, but there also exists the possibility that such a pair does not exist. Either way, we may never know. This kind of test is called "unbounded".

I mentioned computers because computers are particularly good at making loops to test for ever-increasing numbers.

The ramification is that the programmer must make sure his "loops are "bounded", and never "unbounded".

I have made that mistake myself with simple FORTRAN programs.

Great Things are Afoot

Units. What are they? They are the means by which we measure how much of something we have got.

How far can this car go?

What time is it?

How much is a can of coke?

How much beer have I drunk tonight?

Knowing the answers to these questions enables us tell whether or not we can get there, late or not, have time to buy as many Coca-Cola's we need, how many beers I can safely consume before I go home, and how far it is to the nearest ReHab.

Of course, science has to be a little more exact than saying "a few", "enough, or "too many".

In fact, we have to be very precise about everything we measure.

The first example may be the simplest: Distance. How far away is that tree? The ancient civilisations used a "cubit",the distance from the tip of the fingers to the elbow of a regular guy.

Old England invented the "foot" consisting of twelve "inches". The "yard", being three "feet".

The trouble with these from a physics point of view was that there was no universal standard "foot" upon which everyone agreed.

The same applied to weight and the measurement of time.

After a nit of huffing and puffing (it was called the "cgs" system (centimeter - gram - second)), an international organisation called "SI" (Systeme Internationale) based in France, decided once and for all to actually define "length", "weight" and "time".

The Meter - the length of a platinum-Iridiumn bar in a lab at Sevres.

The Kilogram - a certain quantity of water (more in a minute).

The Second - 9,129,631,770 vibrations of a Caesium atom.

The history is fascinating. The thing about the decimal system is that all quantities are measured in multiples of ten, being prefixed by Latin words signifying how many tens:

Deca - 10
Kilo - 1,000
Mega - 1,000,000
Giga - 1,000,000,000
Tera - 1,000,000,000,000

and if you want to go smaller:

deci - 0.1
centi - 0.001
milli - 0.0001
micro - 0.000001
nano - 0.000000001
pico - 0.000000000001
femto - 0.000000000000000001

(This is just a selection of about 30 in all, but are the most common)

Doing a length conversion,
One "inch" was equal to about 2,54 centimeters
one "foot" was equal to about 1.5 decimeters.

The kilogram was deliberately defined to be the mass (weight) of exactly one cubic decimeter of water at 20 deg centigrade.

This was also defined as the "liter". However, it is not entirely exact. a cubic deciliter of water actually holds 1.0000028 (I forget how may zeroes) liters of water, due to an oversight in the definition, which remains ever since.

The meter was redefined as the length of the equator divided into 40,000 equal bits, and then re-redefined as a specific number of wavelengths of radiation from a specific atom. It was subsequently re-re-redefined as "the length of the path traveled by light in vacuum during the time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second. ("299 792 458" is the number of meters light travels in one second in free space)

This system was first called the "MKS" system (Meter-Kilogram-Second),which was then revised to include units of electricity (the Amp) and energy (the Joule) amongst other things.

This system, which remains today, is called the SI system.

Simple, Innit?

A Circular Argument

This is a question oft asked by non-physicists:

"If a hole was drilled right through the Earth from one side to the other what would happen if a man jumped into it?"

Ok, we know that the Earth had a liquid core, but let's assume for the sake of argument, that it is solid all the way through, and there is hole right through it.

Incredibly, the answer lies in something I covered very recently, Simple Harmonic Motion.

Ignoring air resistance for now, the guy jumps in *(let's make the hole about 2.5 meters in diameter - the reason will become clear later on) and gravity accelerates him towards the centre, at the rate of "g", the acceleration due to gravity at the surface. The key to understanding this is to realise that the guy's acceleration depends on how much of the Earth is beneath him.

So as he falls, his acceleration gets less, until he reaches the centre. He overshoots the centre, and now starts to slow down, as gravity now acts against him.

Now what? Well, he keeps getting slower and slower, and because of the symmetry, emerges at the other end at exactly the same height at which he jumped in.

He stops for a microsecond, then falls back again, and the same thing happens, but in the other direction. presently, he emerges where he first jumped in. He falls back again, and it starts once more (remember we are ignoring air resistance).

he keeps going back and forth forever.

I guess you can figure out what happens if we include air resistance. he does the same, but each time he changes direction, he will do that at successively lower points inside the hole.

He goes back and forth, each time being shorter than the last, until finally air resistance stops him at the centre of the Earth.

He is suspended at the centre of the Earth, because all parts of the Earth attract him equally. Furthermore, he cannot get out by himself, as he he is too short to grasp both sides of the tunnel to give him traction! A ladder has to be lowered from either end of the hole for him to climb up (a long climb!)

Anyway, in the original scenario, the guy oscillates across the Earth's centre with SHM.

What is even more interesting is this - if you could sit in a stationary orbit (where you are above the same point on the Earth's surface all the time) and watch what happens, of course, with a telescope, you would see the guy disappear, then after some time he would emerge from the other end. NOW, if you hurled an object (again ignoring air resistance) perpendicularly directly away from you so that it entered into orbit, say , one meter above the ground, it would travel around the Earth in such a way (at constant speed, no acceleration) that when the guy emerged at the other end, it would hit him!

The travel time for the guy to travel through the earth at an acceleration, and then a deceleration, is exactly the same as an object (of the same mass) going around the Earth at constant speed.

How do we know all this? The simple equations of SHM tell us. The simplest way of describing it is to say the SHM exhibited by the guy inside the Earth is the "projection" (shadow) of the circular motion of the object in orbit outside the Earth.

Simple Harmonic Motion is the projection onto a plane of circular motion.

Don't Try This At Home

Here we go again - General Relativity. This time a relatively simple question - in fact two - what exactly will you see as you watch your Asronaut companion as he falls into a black hole, and what will he see?

Suppose for argument's sake we start off at a reasonable distance, say maybe 40,000 km outside the event horizon of a minimum mass "natural" black hole (one formed from gravity) of 2.3 solar masses.

40,000 km is the circumference of the earth at the equator.

The rocket engines just counteract the pull of gravity, so that your craft stays stationary.

Your companion decides to make the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of science, and steps out of the airlock.

Immediately, gravity starts to pull him towards the black hole, and he drifts past the rear of the craft.

You train a telescope on him.

As he falls nearer and nearer to the event horizon, because of the rules of General Relativity, two things happen.

1. The image you see of him gets redder and redder and fainter and fainter.

2. He seems to fall more slowly the nearer he gets to the event horizon.

(NB the "event horizon" is that whuch if crossed, nothing can get back)

These are real events, not optical illusions.

The redshift is "gravitational" redshift, not "doppler" redshift, which is caused by objects moving rapidly away.

The first effect is due to the gravity not "slowing" the light down, but reducing it's frequency. Eventually you friend will completely fade away from view. He will still be there, you just can't see him, because gravity squeezes the energy from the light coming from him.

The second effect is more dramatic. He will appear to fall ever slower and ever slower. If he waved to you, and if you could see it, it would be like seeing a super slomo camera. The reason is that gravity actually slows down time. It does not appear to, it actually does.

So a seeming paradox is reached - your suicidal friend eventually becomes invisible and stops in time ( a bit like Alexander the Great below). If you could see him, he would appear frozen in time at the event horizon.

So what is happening?

To answer this, we must go to the second question - what does your suicidal friend see?

As he falls in at normal speed, he sees the actions of YOU getting forever faster, BUT he can still see you in normal light. The only difference is that his field of view is reduced. He will see the entire universe closing in on a porthole-like opening in a black void. The further he falls in, the smaller the porthole gets until when he crosses the event horizon, and he does, that porthole shrinks to nothing, just before the whole Universe stops dead. When his world is completely black, he has passed over the event horizon in what he perceives as normal time.

How can reconcile this seemingly paradoxical view?

The clue is in the name of the theory - "relativity". But who is "right"?

That's easy - since the suicidal friend is accelerating HE is the one who experiences the changes, BUT, as his body experiences them all at the same time, it all seems normal to him. To keep the balance of things, he perceives the same as you, timewise, but it is actually the suicidal astronaut whose time actually slows down.

What you see is more bizarre that what he sees.

From your point of view, he never gets there.

From his point of view, he gets there in a finite amount of time but you, and the rest of the universe, disappear from his sight, all squashed into an infinitely small "porthole" which winks out of existence.

All this is academic, of course, since, he would be "pummelled" to death way before any of this (see !" A New Meaning to Gymnastics")

Evolution as We Don't Know it

This is a memorised paraphrase from the "Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy":

I quote:

Human evolution has often been categorised into three distinct and increasingly sophisticated phases, known as the "How, Why, and Where" phases.

For example:

Survival:

1. "How do we eat?"

2. "Why do we eat?"

3. "Where shall we have lunch?"

Warfare is similar only in the fact that there still three phases:

Warfare:

1. "I am going to kill you because you killed my brother."

2. "I am am going to kill you because I killed YOUR brother."

3. "I am going to kill MY brother and then kill YOU on the pretext that YOUR brother did it."

Unquote

Aki's Take on this:

Science:

1. "I am going to invent something which will revolutionise the World."

2. "I am going to invent something else I should have thought of before that."

3. "I am now going to invent something so complicated that it will take a fourth invention just to understand it."

A relection on Technology

Okay, so this image is only vaguely related to the subject matter here. It shows dispersion of white light into it's constituent colors.

Light passing through a glass prism.

To explain fiber optics, it is necessary to start at the beginning. When light passes through something more dense than air, it is refracted, that is what makes ponds seem shallower than they are, and leads to illusions like this:



The pencil appears bent because the light from it is bent, that is, the trajectory is altered.

This is what is happening:



What happens if the angle of incidence is increased? There will come a point when the emergent ray just creeps along the interface. What happens when the angle of incidence is increased even further?

THIS:



The right-most example is what happens - the light beam is completely reflected.
100% reflection, unlike ordinary mirrors,which absorb some of the light, Total Internal Reflection reflects ALL the light.

Scientists of the digital age realised that this could be the basis for very efficient communication, in that a light beam (laser) could be reflected like this many times along a glass tube, thus:



Pluses: Loss of information zero; noise, zero.

Minuses: Optical cable is expensive.

In short, fiber-optic technology utilises perfect mirrors. Yet another application of lasers Normal light does not work because it has a finite coherence length (more about that later)

All done with mirrors.

The Korea Herald

This an Anechoic chamber. It is designed to study acoustics, and as such, eliminates all echoes. It is constructed from thousands of foam pyramids which absorb sound so completely, stepping into one is quite unnerving.

Normally, the brain takes into account the fact that your own voice is echoed from at least three walls, but the speed of sound in that small space is sufficient to make the time delay undetectable. As opposed to a wide valley, where you can hear your echo 1, 2 or 3 seconds after.

The brain compensates and we do not notice it.

However, in here, the brain is thrown completely off-balance as there are no echoes to compensate for. It gets confused, and the result is disorientation. Quite a conundrum.

I was in one a few years back in one of the labs, and I had the weird feeling that when I spoke, I was the only person present. In fact, I had a lab assistant with me, but even so, it is a very strange experience and hard to put into words. Had I been able to, I had a distinct impression that none would be heard.

Shades of the images of Sarah Connor outside the kids' playground just before the nuclear strike in T2:


The title is an allusion to the local newspaper at my Liverpool location, as the Korea Herald is the top English Newspaper here in Korea.

In the puzzle section, the English conundrums are quite difficult sometimes.

Pointing in the Right Direction

Many people are scared of vectors too. So what are they?

There are two types of quantity in physics, vectors and the other kind.

The best way to discover what they are is to let reader figure it out for herself. I learned this technique from my own Professors.

The following is a list of vectors:

Electric Field, Magnetic Field, Acceleration, Force, Velocity.

The following can never be vectors:

Energy, Mass, Pressure, Temperature, Speed.

Can you see the pattern? Put another way, does it matter which way they are pointing?

Can some even point?

Maybe you have already guessed it. Vectors are quantities that point in a certain direction. More simply, you cannot specify where energy , temperature etc point, but it DOES matter where force points, because one way can speed you up, and the other way, although it be identical in size, will slow you down.

The direction an electric field points matters also, as positive charges always move towards negative ones.

What is more baffling, though, is that you can perform vector algebra and even vector calculus.

Normally, we only deal with vectors in three dimensions, but a whole branch of mathematics was developed to handle vectors in ANY number of dimensions. This was called Vector Algebra.

As a scientist, we often make calculations using vector calculus.

Einstein used the former and the latter to perform his calculations (for "calculations" please read "algebraic formulae")in four dimensions, and thus General Relativity was born.

What is even more confusing is that in Optics, a certain type of vector is named after the man who identified it.

His name: Poynting!

Poised for Effect

Being a scientist, I get the chance to experience many different and interesting things. I was once invited to tour a military base in the top left hand corner of England. These guys tested tank shells by firing them out to sea at the Isle of Man. You could hear the noise from two miles away.

I was invited to stand behind one as it fired a shell. There were three of us, and precautions were taken. Ear plugs, ear muffs and hands pressed to the ears. We stood in a three-sided shelter the shape of half a hexagon, with a plexiglass window in the middle wall. We faced the back of the tank, whilst our backs were exposed to the air.

It fired it's shell, looking exactly like the photo above. the whole 61 tonne tank jumped about 5 cm into the air. The sound was deafening. I think it was a 4.0 on the Richter scale.

But that was not the most surprising thing.

The blast wave from the air travelled right around the shelter and entered from the rear, actually pushing us forward TOWARDS the tank. My hair was blown forward across my face, I nearly lost my balance, and my poise almost received irreparable damage!

I was treated to lunch at the Officer's Mess.

Conflict of Interest

Ricky Hatton not looking at his best.

Las Vegas boxing match this lunchtime.

Manny Pacquiao (Philippines) taking on Ricky Hatton (North West of England).

Irrestistable object meets immovable force.

Unfortunately for Hatton, the force of gravity beat him and he ended up like this. The reports say that this second round technical knockout had Hatton out cold before he hit the floor.

Conflict of interest because I have homes in both places!

Conflict of interest because it could have been an interesting conflict!

Ako'y Pilipino!