Personal Vendetta

WARNING !!! VERY SUBJECTIVE POST INDEED !!!

At the moment of writng, the Olympics medals table tells me that China are on equal footing with the USA, with 32 medals each, DESPITE the fact that China have 20 gold medals, and the USA just 10.

This incenses me. Why can't the IOC allow a points distribution, say 3 for gold, 2 for sliver, 1 for bronze?

In that case, China would have 79 points and the USA would have 61 points. Korea are still third!!!

What confuses me even further is that China are seen to be top of the table because they have more golds.

I wish Michael Phelps well, but I await the women's gymnastics when in my opinion, China will sweep the board. They already have the team gold and I actually saw the performances on the A-Bars and the floor. Those two little girls were priceless. There are two more golds there ready for the taking, in the individual competitions.

THIS is Quantum Mechanics

The Quantum world is really strange. Some of the effects defy explanation completely.

This is the one that threw my imagination off it's axis.

It is called "regeneration".

To put it normal terms, a particle dies and is reborn.

It's astonishing what happens....

The particle was one of the first of the "strange" particles, and it is called the K-0 meson.

And this thing was really strange.

First, here is a description of what was seen.

The beam of particles was produced. We shone it onto a detector (basically, a wall) which stopped them.

Quantum machanics predicted some would come out of the other side of the "wall". Its part of the rules these things obey.

After that, with another "wall", we detected the ANTIparticle of the K-0 meson.

This told us that the beam was a mixture of the K-0 meson and its antiparticle.

It gets really weird now.

The first "wall" stopped the K-0. The second stopped the antiparticle. So basically, nothing should have got through.

Yet, because of that same rule of quantum mechanics, the second "wall" did NOT stop all the particles.

So we set up a third "wall".

You'd expect to get just K-0 antiparticles.

We didn't. We got the K-0 again!

They were dead, and yet, somehow they were "reborn".

The explantion is really simple if you know QM.

In simple terms it's not one particle, but two.

It's very hard to explain.

It's called "Quantum Superposition".

In other words, it IS both particles at the same time. The reason why it is "reborn" is because it is NOT just the K-0 we detect. We detect both, but the effigies that "get through" both "walls" are neither K-0 nor it's antiparticle. The things we detect are only what the "walls" "feel". The stuff that comes out of any "wall" is a mixture of both particle and antiparticle.

The really weird thing is that if we shift the "wall" back 3 meters or so, we detect the OTHER one!

In other words, the "thing" we call the K-0 meson actually shifts between being itself and it own antiparticle. Over a distance of about 3 meters. We actually have calculated how far. It depends on the difference between their masses! (actually it depends on the reciprocal but there you go!)

This topic is closely related to how the sun shines, but that is another post!

Come in , number 254!

This ........ is Bob Beamon....






The Physics were thus...... Mexico City, 1968 Olympics. The Long Jump. The air is thinner there and no doubt contributed.

But My, oh My what a jump!.

To Boldly Go....

SUBJECTIVE POST!!!





This is a pastiche of everything Star Trek made for the screen. I recognise almost all of the segments.

It is a fact that the entire Star Trek phenomenon has done more for physics awareness than any Government has been able to do.

The debate goes on STAR WARS versus STAR TREK. I personally am up for Star trek because it is more science based, but I am biased.

I present this here because it appears to be an homage to the issue.

I was born too late and had science in me anyway, but more kids have been inspired by science because of Gene Roddenberry than their science teachers.

A true visionary.

( please notice that the team of heroes always number seven. The Original Series (Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scottie, Uhura, Chekov and Sulu), The Next Generation (Picard, Riker, Troi, Data, Worf, Dr.Crusher and Geordi), Deep Space Nine ( Kira, Odo, Quark, Sisko, Bashir, O'Brien, Dax), Voyager (Janeway, Chakotay, Torres, Seven, The Doc, Paris and Kim). This was probably inspired by The Magnificent Seven western)

((The video would have been ok except for the spelling mistake at the end.))

Just For Laughs Part 2

Robin Williams is never better than here as the Genie in Disney's "Aladdin". The Genie even looks like him.

NB This cartoon was the first animated feature where each character had it's own team of animators, characterisations, voices, producers and directors.

There is only One Big Bang...

For those of you in the know, ignore this, as it a return to the point of this Blog - to explain in simple terms things scientific.

Everybody has heard of the Big bang. And it's not Yuko, as she is far too small.

The Big Bang is supposed to be the beginning of everything. But is it not as simple as a big explosion.

We came to this conclusion because we discovered the Universe was expanding (See the Cepheid variables post).

So, we turned back time and thought backwards and it was obvious that in the past everything was in the same place.

And it went "Bang!".

However, it's not as simple as that. The equations tell us that not only everything was in the same place at the same time, but time and space were too. Another way to say this is that there was literally nothing "outside" the Big Bang.

The best way to illustrate this is to think 4-dimensionally. Very hard to see, but the model usually used is that the 4 dimensions of spacetime can be represented in three.

By a balloon. An inflating balloon is easy to see, and if you have dots on it to represent the galaxies, it is clear to see that all the dots "move away" from each other, BUT there is no "center" that they are moving away "from".

The surface of the balloon represents both time and space "expanding".

So how did it start? That is another post, however.

The balloon model has been going for years, but not many people outside science circles have heard of it.

There are three models of this expansion. 1. Open (the universe will continue expanding forever)

2. Closed (the universe will stop expanding, slow down, and gravity will pull everything back into a "Big Crunch"

3.Neither. (The universe will stagnate and end up neither expanding nor crunching)

And now the time for enlightenment. How many people have realised the significance of my blog url, www.gnabgib.blogspot.com??.

It's another phrase coined by us for scenario (2) above! "GNABGIB" is "Big Bang" backwards, and both phrases are used! Gotcha!

As promised.....

Just a little calculus off the top of my head. As far as I know, this is completely original.

I have never seen this in any of the textbooks.

It goes further....

In part 2, the brackets are very important, because of the way they are envisaged. I only give one interpretation.

There is another, giving a completely different answer.

Maybe I will give that other interpretation in another post...

Space, the Final Frontier...

(The Andromeda Galaxy yesterday)

Ever paused to consider exactly HOW we know the Andromeda Galaxy is the nearest galaxy to us?

The answer to that is actually in debate in some circles.

In fact, the whole "distance measurement to other heavenly bodies" is an entire subject up for debate amongst certain people.

It may be useful therefore, to provide a brief history of how we got to this position.

Way back when we discovered the "wanderers" (planets) we used Newton's Laws to determine how far they were from us. This done, we then used those same laws to conclude how far the nearest stars were from the difference between their apparent "brightness" and the brightness we should expect them to be by virtue of their "spectra" (plural of "spectrum), because different sized stars gave off different kinds of light, once again, according to Newton's Laws.

Then comes the Bone of Contention.

The Cepheid Variables.

These particular stars pulsated. And this pulsation period (how often they went off and on) was related in a very simple way to their brightness. SO! NOW we had a tool to measure far bigger distances.

Then someone with an enormous telescope noticed Cepheids in Andromeda, and from the rate at which they switched "on" and "off" came to the conclusion that Andromeda was a massive distance from us, 2.5 million light years (a light year is the distance light travels in a whole year) from us.

Maybe a few other galaxies were discovered using the "Cepheid variable yardstick", but from then on, the galaxies were so distant that these stars just could not be seen.

Then came another breakthrough. Edwin Hubble realised that the Universe was expanding, and that all galaxies were receding from each other. It was at first thought that they were all receding from EARTH but a bit of quick fourth-dimensional thinking dispelled that. The idea was that the Universe could be envisaged as sitting on the surface of a balloon, which was being inflated. Any point on the balloon could be seen to be receding from every other point, so there was no "centre" to the expansion at all.

Anyway, once this "expansion" hypothesis had been accepted, a new yardstick came into play - the Redshift.

It is the same effect heard when police sirens approach you, pass you, then recede from you. A definite change in pitch is heard to the notes emitted from the siren. This is called the "Doppler" effect. The same thing happens to light, only with light, it is what you SEE that it affected. And what you SEE, as something goes away from you, is a shift of the spectrum towards the red end. Or, if it is coming at you, the blue end.


This "redshift" was calibrated with the known galaxies whose distance we knew from the Cepheids, and then extrapolated to include far more distant galaxies. Thus was born the "Hubble Constant" This is a measure of how fast the Universe is expanding, mostly based on those Cepheid Variables we can actually see.

It is currently about 80 km per second for each meagaparsec further out the galaxy is (a "parsec is about 6.2 light years). In other words, if we find a galaxy that is moving away from us at 80 km per second (determined by the redshift) then if we find one that is receding at 160 km per second, it is roughly twice as far away.

The Hubble Constant started out at more than double what we think it is now. To this day, no-one knows its true value simply from lack of data.

Anyway, to the main point. All these distances rely on correlation between brightness, the Cepheids, and redshift.

The method with the least data is that with the Cepheids. In other words, we are still not quite sure exactly how far things are "up".

Then there are the Quasars. These are extremely bright objects that some of us thought were stars at first (they were called "Quasi-Stellar" radio sources, the "quasi" taken to mean "likened to", from which sprouted the name), but according to their redshifts, were GI-normous distances away.

Nowadays, the current view is that they are the nuclei of very distant galaxies that are very active. It was once thought that, since they are about 13 billion light years away, and that the age of the Universe is about 14.5 billion years, that what we might be seeing was the Big Bang itself.

There have even been theories based upon the fact that quasars are no more than local star (in our own galaxy) whose redshift is due to something else.

The entire point being, the measurement of distances in space is sketchy to say the least, a point glossed over in many books on astronomy.

Recently, a new yardstick has emerged - Supernovae (what happens to a star when its nuclear fuel runs out? It goes bang!). There are very definite equations describing what would happen to a star and how bright it should be when this happens.

So, as before, the brightness of a supernova BANG will be an indication of how far away it would be. Theoretically, at least. Unfortunately, these are so rare, we still await salient data to test this out.

The conclusion?

E.T. may be nearer than at first thought!

"If You Can Meet With Triumph and Disaster...

...and treat those two impostors just the same".

are words from Kipling's "If", those that adorn the threshold to the Centre Court, Wimbledon Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, London SW19.

Never have those words meant more than in Last Sunday's epic Men's final between Roger Federer (Switzerland) and Rafael Nadal (Spain). It is of interest to note that Rafael Nadal does not read his lines, but has seemingly memorised them, as opposed to Roger Federer, who merely reads his (admittedly, the longer portions, but nevertheless........)

It went to five sets, was the longest ever final, was the latest final ever to finish at 21.15, and most commentators agree it was the most dramatic ever, and the BBC very wisely asked the two players to recite poem to be broadcast prior to their fantastic battle. Four hours Forty-Eight minutes of absolute delight cannot be condensed into one video, so the poem is presented here.

I may add that having seen it BEFORE the match, there was still a tear in my eye.

THIS is theatre as only the BBC know how to do.....

More Heat from the Arrow of Time

Continuing the theme of "Heat" and "Energy" led to a startling conclusion.

So we have three laws of Thermodynamics. All sorts of concepts have sprung out of this field, such as "Statistical Mechanics", "Carnot Cyles", "Heat Efficiency", and "Ideal Heat Enchangers".

However, the most infulential was the concept of "Entropy".

Simply put, Entropy is the measure of how disorderly a system is. The more disorderly, the more entropy. For example, a teacup falls to the floor and smashes. It falls apart but gains a lot more entropy because it is far more disoredered after the smash.

More accurately, we say "system" has gained entropy, the "system" being the cup PLUS the floor.

All this is intricately connected with thermodynamics, and is one of the central tenets of the field. Recall the three Laws of thermodynamics, cynics' version:

Law 1: "You cannot make a profit, only break even"
Law 2: "You can only break even if banking is free"
Law 3; "The bank is always closed"

Taken all together , they simply state that "you can never break even". the translation of this into real physics means that, in any process whatsoever, ANY process, there will always be heat loss, and that no "system" is 100% efficient.

Thought of this way, it actually means that a perpetual motion motion machine is not only impossible, it is forbidden even in principle.

However, this ia a digression to say the least, if not less.

The whole entropy thing hangs completely on the second law, which can be "translated" into yet another statement:

"The change in entropy in any system is always greater than zero"

In scientific parlance,

" dS > 0 "

where "S" is entropy and the little "d" is the universal scientific symbol for "change".

Bear this in mind, because it has as a far deeper significance than at first meets the eye.

For now, though, consider physics in general. All physics is governed by laws, and those laws are expressed through mathematical formulae. Formulae are made up of letters, symbols and numbers, and usually some are quite familiar. "x", for instance, can be a number representing a distance, a volume, etc. Capital "t", or T, is usually "Temperature" and capital "p", or P is usually Pressure. "q" is usually electric charge, and E usually Electric field (sometimes it is Energy, too).

A lot of these "variables have "direction", too. For instance going North is the opposite of going South, so we call them "x" and "-x" (it does not matter which). We all know that electric charge is either positive of negative, so we write "q" or "-q" depending on whether the charge is positive or negative.

However, we can't write "T and "-T" simply because the equations won't allow it (yes, I know you can have negative temperature in life, such as liquid nitrogen boils at -196 deg C, but that is a consequence of the arbitrary scale, namely the Celsius scale).In the physics world, all temperatures start at absolute zero so it does not make any sense to have a negative temperature. More easy to understand is pressure - you most definitely cannot have a negative pressure.

The point is this: The equations sometimes don't care if the thing has a positive or negative sign. When you plug in the values and turn the handle, the answers always come out the same even if some things have a minus sign in front of them. Time, "t" is one of them. That is, the equations don't care if you put a "-t" instead of every "t" because the answers are always the same.

You can run the equations backwards in time and the numbers don't care!

Time has no "arrow"!

Here's the rub: The second law of thermodynamics contradicts this!

For example, take the smashed cup. No way in the Universe do you ever see the cup reassemble itself and jump back into your hand, do you, complete with anti-smashing sound?!

Time DOES have an "arrow"!

Which is correct? They can't BOTH be right!