Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Physics Class

Today's word is meander, because it's just a good word and you probably already know what it means.

Today I only had one class, Liberal Arts Physics, and the guy who was teaching, who was a substitute lecturer, had the really annoying habit of reading directly from the slides on his Powerpoint.  He also seemed really interested in the meteor shower tonight and thought that we would all go out and watch it. The only thing wrong with that is that this is Seattle. We can't even see the stars, there's so much light pollution.  And then he said that if it's not a clear enough night, we can find it on the NASA website or something. Meteor showers are relatively cool in person, but I feel like a recorded meteor shower would be fairly dull and un-awe-inspiring. I also learned that if the sun exploded or something, we wouldn't know about it on Earth until 8 minutes later. Not that we would know about it then either, since we would all be dead.

This picture is super relevant because I'm talking about physics and this is The Big Bang Theory.

Remember when everyone was freaking out about the large hadron collider back in 2008?   They thought that once the particles collided it might create a huge black hole that destroys the entire planet or thought it would cause a big bang and life would start evolving. Well have you heard a lot about it lately? Me neither. It turns out that the particles collided and life as we know it continued. As far as I can understand, the scientists are trying to prove the existence of dark matter and other quantum physics type things. The possible effects are the creation of microscopic black holes and hypothetical particles. It's all very conceptual and highly funded and who knows if anything will even come out of it. I'm not sure why I wrote about that but I did. It's like Y2K all over again. People really enjoy blowing things out of proportion. In the case of Y2K, they made something out of nothing, which is ironically what the large hadron collider is trying to do, make particles out of a vaccum. I'm not really science-oriented, but I thought that this was interesting. Quantum physics has fascinated me ever since I read Timeline by Michael Crichton and learned about dark matter.  I hope I didn't make your brain hurt and/or bore you to death. That's all for today.

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