Schrodinger's Cat

Time for the much anticipated sequel to The Double Slit Paradox post! Here is the link to it if you haven't read it: http://standinginfrontoftheuniverse.blogspot.com/2011/06/double-slit-paradox.html.

So as you can guess the Schrodinger's Cat thought experimented by Erwin Schrodinger. At first he was trying to show how preposterous certain interpretations of the Uncertainty Principle to be used on more macroscopic scenarios. The Uncertainty Principle was created by Werner Heisenberg in 1927. He came up with this when he thought of a theoretical measuring device that could give scientists the precise velocity and position of a subatomic particle, e.g. an electron. This device shoots a single photon at an electron. The more precise of a location we want the smaller wavelength of the photon needs to be. However the shorter the frequency the more energy the photon has causing the unknown bounce of the photon off of the electron would have a larger effect (since we don't know where the electron exactly is we don't know where the photon is going to hit the electron so we won't know how electron is going to bounce off when the two collide). So the more we know the electron's position the less we are sure about its velocity and the more we know about its velocity the more uncertain we are about its position. So we have an inverse ratio between the electrons position and velocity. Now this isn't just faults in this hypothetical device. As it turns out its part of nature, for some reason, for us to be completely certain about multiple states of a particle, not with just position and velocity but other quantum states as well. 

The wave functions of the some of the orbits an electron of
a hydrogen atom. The whiter it is the more likely an electron
will be there when observed.

Somehow this led some physicists to the idea that when not observed particles expand to a wave function. This function gives us the probability of a particles state e.g. position. When the particle is observed the wave function will "collapse" to a random point in the wave function. The function of a particle will tell us the likely hood the particle will be there when it collapses. So now when physicists thought only photons had a wave/particle duality it turns out every particle can be either a particle or a wave. This electrons, protons, atoms, molecules and even.... you! *gasp*

That cat is asleep not dead!
But I guess people don't like pics of dead cats

So when this idea came out Schrodinger found this a little odd. This wave function meant that an unobserved particle could hold two states and be in two, or more, places at once. In a way to show how preposterous this could mean, Schrodinger came up with a little thought experiment. He got a completely sound proof and opaque box. In this box he put a cat and a quite devilish little device. This device has an unstable atom and a can detect when it decays. When it does so it unleashes a poison gas easily able to kill a small mammal such as a cat, especially when there is no circulation. When the cat and this device is placed in the box and sealed off there is no way to detect what is going on in the box. The decay of atoms and subatomic particles is governed by the Uncertainty Principle and is completely random when it does decay. However the rate at which this type of theoretical atom decays is known and after an hour there is a fifty/fifty chance that the atom decayed and didn't decay. 

So according to the current idea of quantum physics the atom decayed and is still intact simultaneously. This means that this device activated and did not activate and that the defenseless cat is still alive AND dead at the same time. However once someone opens the box than one of the two states is chosen and we would either see a non-conflicting alive OR dead cat. No one knows why Schrodinger picked a sort of morbid thought experiment (because no physicists wants to needlessly kill cats, maybe the device can feed the cat so the cat would be a bit peckish or well fed simultaneously instead of dead or alive), but I guess he just wanted to show how weird this new theory could be. 

However instead of debunking this new idea this thought experiment was taken honestly and many physicists think that the cat would indeed be alive and dead at the same time. Some people I think went a little crazy with this idea of observation itself being able to change the world around us. Some people thinks that consciousness, which is what makes us able to "observe" the world, is a fundamental part of the universe, maybe as some fundamental particle which is necessary for life or evidence as a universal consciousness that we are just part of which religions have called God. 

One guy I saw on "Through the wormhole" (and yes in hindsight I realized that's very similar to my subtitle thing and I did make mine later, but whatever I like mine and I'm sticking to it) actually saw this as a evidence that we are in some simulation or game since in video games it doesn't render anything the player isn't looking at or doesn't update objects that are decently far from an the player to increase the speed of the game. However there is a huge difference between rendering objects to a screen for a human to understand and the how objects need to be perceived to objects in the simulation it self. In video games points of the model a translated from the position on the model in respect to the objects position in the world, then translated in relative to the camera's position in the world, then projected to a 2d plane which is then rendered onto your screen (there's a few more steps from camera to the screen but there more technical and unnecessary for me to tell you, but that's right I'm learning stuff in video game school XD). This is required for objects to be seen and takes up allot of processing time which is why we don't do that for objects behind you or out of your field of view in a game or simulation. In real life, photons bounce off of objects and certain frequencies are absorbed, the rest go into your eye and hit certain light sensitive cells depending on their relative position to the eye. The entire frequency of white light, usually sunlight, minus the color absorbed by the object gives the incoming light the opposite color which we observe. This happens all the time in a light filled environment whether someone is looking at an object or not. For more reasons why I don't think this world is not a simulation observe this post: http://standinginfrontoftheuniverse.blogspot.com/2011/05/are-we-in-matrix.html

I, being a skeptic atheist, don't believe in anything special about us and do not think there is some sort of ethereal or physical "thing" that is consciousness. As I've said before nothing special happened when three to four billion years ago when life originated. The universe didn't go "These bags of chemicals shall be able to observe and collapse wave functions when these other organic chemicals have no such power!" However I do believe that particles can exist as a wave and have all the implications that come with it, especially since experiments, such as the Double Slit Experiment, prove it. I just think that the definition of "Observation" is misconstrued by some people. When I first heard about the Double Slit Experiment I was like "Whoa! If  I open and close my eyes it changes how electrons behave!?" But then reading it up some more I realized that by observing the electrons it something more like Heisenberg's theoretical measuring device. They hit the passing electrons with photons to see which slit it went through (I'm assuming you've read the post I linked at the top so read that first plox). And it was this bombardment that affected the particle and wave like patterns. So looking at something start up doesn't really affect the actions of the observed object since photons are constantly hitting you any ways. However if it's pitch dark, using a flash light to look at the world around you will affect it, not because you're looking at it but because you're hitting it with a flash light, or the photons from the flashlight rather. 

Picture related, but also pretty trippy. 

So now looking at the Schrodinger's Cat experiment with this mentality the answer, to me at least, but what do I know, is that the act of the device that is measuring the unstable atom causes the atom to collapse to the a single decayed/not decayed state. This means that no matter how much the box is sealed off it is still being observed by the device it self not some scientist. So the cat would remain in one state at all time, box being opened or closed regardless. Also I would like to think that the cat would be able to look at itself and decide if it's dead or not, but I guess that brings up other things. 

Once again I'm a 20 year old in a gaming school and not taking any quantum physics and am mostly self taught so I could be completely wrong and it would be awesome if some Ph.D in physics came up and told me some awesomeness and correct any mistakes or misinterpretations I made. However I stand in my "This world is not a computer simulation" claim. And of course having a Ph.D or anything is not a prerequisite to leaving comments on my blog (well I guess a computer and hands are but that's more of a physical than a rules thing), so fill free to comment cause, you know, it'll be cool 'n' junk. 

The Double Slit Paradox

So the double slit paradox experiment is good introduction to the weirdness of quantum physics.

So lets start this explanation off with things we can all understand. Imagine there is a guy with a machine gun and was shooting a wall in front of him. The gunner is not aiming at all so when he shoots a spray the spread of all the bullets would hit the entire wall so each point on the wall has the same chance of being hit by a bullet.







Now we put a metal wall in front of the wall with one vertical slit allowing the bullets to travel through. Now when he shoots his gun bullets would concentrate right behind the slit and barely hit any where else. If we were to put two side by side slits, like anyone would expect, there would be only two similar sized areas as the slits on the wall. Since the bullets don't interact with each other nothing spectacular happens.

Actually made these first three images believe it or not

The white levels on the back wall shows the intensity of the wave

So now we can more away from solid objects and move to waves. The most common and visible type of wave is water waves like in the ocean or like ripples. For this example we'll have a ripple tank, which is just a tank with water in it and has a wall that comes out of the surface and has slits in it to let the water waves through. So when we have one slot the maximum height of the waves is right behind the slot and spreads out away.

Notice the interference pattern in the back. 

When we add two slots something more interesting happens. The wave splits into two waves and these two waves interact with each other in a pattern known as the interference pattern. When two crests meet together they add up and get twice as high as the normal wave but when a crest and a trough meet they cancel each other out and the intensity of the waves at that point becomes nearly zero.

Nice top down .gif of how the interference works

So now we under stand how particles and waves react when going through one and two slits. When particles are shot through two slits we see two similar slits in the back, and when waves are shot through two slits we see an interference pattern. So now we go to the quantum level!

So lets imagine we have us an electron gun that shoots electrons out towards a surface that can detect electron collisions. So when there is nothing in the way every spot in the wall has an equal chance of being hit by the electron. When we have a barrier with one slit we see the similar vertical slit that happens in both both particles and waves. So that doesn't help us to see if electrons are true particles or behave like waves. So let us put two slits in this barrier. When scientists first did this they were surprised to see an interference pattern like with waves. They figured that the electrons near each other when they're are shot interfere with each other so they decided to configure the electron gun to shoot another electron when the last one hit the back so only one electron would be in the air at a time. When they did this the same interference pattern came up. 

Scientists figured that the electron has a 50% chance of going through slot one and a 50% chance of going through slot to so if it has the possibility of doing something something on the quantum level will do it, meaning that the electron goes through both and none of the slots at the same time!

To see what was really going on down there scientists set up detector to see exactly which slot an electron goes through or what it could possibly mean to go through two slots at once. However once they set up the detector the electrons acted like particles and two vertical slits appeared in the back. 

This means that particles on the sub atomic level objects act like particles and waves. When particles are not observed they exist in every possible position and take every possible path they could given by the Heisenberg Uncertainly Principle and the Planck constant forming a wave function. But when a particle becomes observed (whatever that really means) the wave function that holds all the possible positions and states "collapses" into one of it's possible state and that is when we say "There it is" but once we stop looking at it it expands into all of its possibilities again!

So that's it for now. Eventually I will post about the other introductory quantum paradox "Schrodinger's Cat", go into more depth about Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and other quantum funkiness.  

Here is a cat until the mean time

2012 APOCALYPSE!

Yeah! I figured since we're two and a half years from the date prophesied by the Mayans, Decemember 21st 2012, and since the discovery channel seems obsessed with the Apocalypse I guess I'll jump on the band wagon. As a human who relishes logic and the scientific process you can guess I don't believe in any superstitions prediction made by a stone age civilization thousands of years ago. I actually read a book a few years ago before the 2012 craze that was about the Apocalypse, what the Mayan prediction meant and how the Apocalypse might happen. The book is "Apocalypse 2012; An Investigation Into Civilization's End" by Lawrence E. Joseph if you feel like reading up on it, it's pretty good.

The Mayans more than any other civilization was captivated by the sky and stars. As far as archaeology can tell us they where building calanders and buildings to measure and track the movements of celestial bodies. They built calenders that predicted the cycles of the moon Sun and planets with precision far beyond their time. The calendar that tracked the Sun predicted it's movements from it's daily movement to the observable effect from the wobbling axis of the earth that cycles of thousands of years. It foretold the movements of the Sun for thousands of years but abruptly ends on the date 12/21/2012 in our calendar. Now many westerners interpreted that the Mayans meant that this was the end of world, if there is no one around to care what date it is than there would be no reason to make calendars past that point. Of course one could see it that the Mayans can't make stone calendars that go on forever and decided to stop there and make more calendars when they got to that point. Now that day isn't some date that the Mayans chose at random, December 21st will be the winter solstice for the year 2012, which is they shortest and coldest day of the year (at least for the Northern Hemisphere). This is also the time that the Sun ends up in between the Earth and the center of the Galaxy (yeah some how the Mayans figured that out, lolwut?) which happens every 26,000 years. So this 26,000 year period is a Mayan time frame that one could call an epoch. So the solar calendar they made was supposed to last till the end of the current epoch. Even though westerners went a bit wild with the Mayan Apocalypse, this date was not just some end of the year celebration for the Mayans either. They consider the contact the earth has with the center of the Galaxy as a good thing since they believed that's where everything came from (seriously the Mayans knew about the Galaxy while Europe thought the Earth was in the middle of concentric spheres and each heavenly body was connected to each one!) and that the loss of contact by the Sun's interference could have negative effects for the life on Earth. This date will bring the birth of a new Epoch but just as a birth of a human brings much pain and possibly death so could this date the Mayans believed.

Now I'm pretty sure the likely hood of civilization as we know it ending on that date is just as likely as any other day. However as it turns out, there is still a chance that mother nature could could end us at any moment with nary a warning. The rest of this post will talk about the possible ways humanity could come to a swift and painful end.

1. Sunspots
The Sun is not just a featureless ball of fire hanging in the sky. At such high temperatures and pressures the ball of hydrogen constantly fuses atoms together producing it's light and energy. In the past century scientists have found out the Sun is far more complex than anyone could imagine, with separate charateristic layers, a plasma surface that constantly moves and shifts and solar flares and storms many times larger than the earth, the Sun is definitely the most complicated system in our solar system. On the surface of the Sun's surface are sunspots that are essentially electromagnetic storm flinging massive amounts of radiation out into space. The number of spots on the Sun correspond with how turbulent the Sun is and how much solar radiation it spews into space. The Sun shoots out much more radiation than light and UV rays. This radiation would kill and harm most complex life on Earth. However, luckily for us, the Earth has a magnetic shield around it created by the molten iron core of the Earth that deflects the deadly radiation away from Earth.

This shield can only take so much energy from the Sun. When it becomes to much for it some of this radiation gets deflected towards the magnetic poles causing the Aurora Borealis. As it turns out though the Sun goes through cycles of allot of sunspots and few sunspots known as Solar Maximum and Solar Minimum. The time between each Maximum is eleven years. At this maximum the Sun shoots off more radiation than normal. Normally this wouldn't affect us since we're protected by the magnetic shield, however our satellites are not and can be stop functioning during this period or even permanently damaged. Most electronics are also more sensitive to sunspot activity than we are so now as we become more dependent on these technologies we need to pay more and more attention to sunspots especially during Solar Maximums. And when does the next solar Maximum occur? TWENTY TWELVE! And this article, http://science1.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2006/10mar_stormwarning/ says that this could be the worst Solar Maximum since 1958, but will have a much more heavy impact on us than fifty years ago as the global economy and infrastructure could easily be crippled by heavy solar activity that year.

2. Flipping of Earth's Magnetic Poles
As I've said the only protection we have from the Sun's solar radiation is Earth's magnetic shield. Without this our atmosphere could burn up and be blown away thinning it past human living conditions. Temperatures would sky rocket, Imagine global warming on steroids, we could not stand out side in sunlight for more than minutes at a time without receiving serious skin damage and cancer rates would sky rocket. Scientists have noticed that within the past decades the strength of the fields have noticeably weakened and have detected huge holes the size of countries in the shield, most of the time over oceans. Geologists also notice that iron deposits, which act as molecular magnets, line them selves with the poles when the rock was formed. They also notice the pattern that they suddenly point in the opposite directions. This leads to the conclusion that about every 100,000-1,000,000 years the poles shift while having a brief period of no shield cover. While it wouldn't be long enough to ebb away our atmosphere it would render almost every modern convenience pointless. No computer or electronical device would work while the poles are busy shifting. Many developed and developing nations would be sent back a century, and many would likely die in the sudden change. Scientists cannot predict when the next pole shift will occur or what causes this to happen in the first place. All we know that any one would call it a disaster on a global scale if this where to occur in modern times.

3. Yellowstone Super Volcano

An unexpected end to the humanity comes from the beautiful tranquil scenery of Yellowstone national park in Wyoming. As it turns out the entire park is actually the caldera of the largest volcano on Earth. Imagine a volcano with the trademark smoking crater on top. Yellowstone park is actually that crater which is 34 by 45 miles and the rest of the volcano sits beneath the surface. The famous geysers in Yellowstone is powered by the largest magma chamber in the world. If the supervolcano exploded it would not be like the volcanos in Hawaii that oozes out but akin to Mt. St. Helens but thousands if not millions times more powerful. The explosion would turn the land to molten slag in all of Wyoming and it's neighboring states, the explosion traveling faster than sound and within an hour millions would die. The surrounding ground in Yellowstone actually has some of the largest deposits of Uranium and would spread fallout all across the North American Continent causing cancer and deaths in many more. Most of the landmass and population of the world lives in the Northern hemisphere and all of it would be covered in ash that would blot out the sun for years killing crops and wildlife and leading to the starvation of much more people than the initial explosion and fallout. This would be a nuclear winter much colder and longer than anything The world's nuclear arsenal could produce. The Yellowstone super volcano luckily, according to geological records blows its cap every 600,000 to 700,000 years. Unfortunately the last time it did erupt was 640,000 years ago and rangers and geologists at Yellowstone have noticed that mountain ranges and valleys are bulging up due to the pressures of the volcanic gases and lava building up in the magma chamber. Bulges that have never been seen before since its making as a park in 1872.

4. Gamma Ray Burst
A more interesting scenario, at least in my opinion, is the Earth getting hit by a gamma ray burst. Aside from the Big Bang the most energetic and destructive (well I guess the Big Bang wasn't destructive but it was a BIG Bang) event in the universe is a super nova. When a star more massive than our sun dies, rather than inflating into a red giant than dying down into a brown dwarf till the end of time, it explodes violently releasing more energy in that one explosion than our Sun during its whole life. During this explosion it launches two beams of intense energy called gamma ray bursts along the rotational poles of the star. While most of the energy dies down logarithmically over space, these bursts are essentially directed gamma lasers that that send directed energy to the ends of the galaxy. Any planet that dares stand in its way will have no idea what happened to hit. If a gamma ray burst where headed towards us there would be no way of telling since the burst travels as fast as light so the instant we see the nova it will have hit Earth. Within seconds the entire atmosphere will burn up and possibly blown away into space. The surface of the Earth will heat up to thousands of degrees vaporizing all life except for the lucky and hardy single celled organisms. There would simply be no way to predict or prevent such a catastrophe. Scientists predict that supernovae along with their gamma ray burst happens in the milky way every fifty years or so, however for a burst to hit us straight on the accuracy it would need to hit us at the distances of light years is so extraordinary that we shan't need to worry about it. But the chance of such an incident happening is completely random and unpredictable.
ARTICLE: http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20040108&slug=extinct08

5. Galactic Cloud
Another quite unexpected possible cause for the Apocalypse is that our solar system is going through an energetic section of the galaxy. This cloud is most likely made from the debris of a nova or supernova and is made out of hydrogen and left over radiation. As our solar system flies through this cloud the solar winds emanating from the sun pushes the cloud out of the way much in the way a boat pushes the water away at its bow. And like a ship plowing through water the gases are cresting up and the "bow" of the solar system and are beginning to push through and leak into the solar system. These gases and radiation are adding more and more energy to the planetary systems and in the past couple of decades uncharacteristic patterns in planetary weather are being detected, a frozen moon on Saturn has had geysers on its surface that have not been seen since its discovery and a new red spot has been detected on Jupiter that may become as big as the first big red spot that's an electromagnetic storm larger than the planet Earth. As this energy reaches Earth it could increase the effects of global warming and puts more pressure on Earth's magnetic shield. When this energy reaches the Sun it could easily unbalance and energize the complicated systems in the Sun. If it reaches the sun at solar maximum, which is already supposed to be really strong the extra energy could make the this solar maximum the largest sunspot storm in human history. If the shield weakens due to the polar shift or the energy cloud at the same time we have an unprecedented solar maximum the consequences to human civilization on 2012 could be unimaginable.

6. Meteor

Probably the most famous way to bring about the Apocalypse would have to be a meteor colliding with the Earth. Popularized in many movies and brought the end to the most famous family of animals, the Dinosaurs, 65 million years ago the threat of a meteor is a serious threat. According to this chart: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/ there are only two known asteroids that threaten Earth, 2011 AG5 and 2007 VK184 which might hit us by 2040-2047 and 2048-2057 respectively. Luckily they only measure a 1 on the Torino scale where 0 is absolutely non-threatening and 10 is the most dangerous, so they are the most non-threatening while still being a threat. However there are many unknown asteroids and comets which could hit us at any moment. Threats come from three main areas; the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter has 700,000 to 1.7 million asteroids with a diameter of a kilometer or more. This is the most likely place for an apocalyptic object to come from but also the most observed, although an unexpected collision among two large asteroid could send one towards us. Another place is the Kupier belt reaching from the orbit of Neptune past Pluto which are estimated to hold 70,000 objects with a diameter larger than 100 kilometers while only over a thousand are known about. The last and most unknown source of dangerous objects is the Oort cloud which is about a light year away from the Sun. The Oort cloud is most believed to be the source of the 200 year comets that have highly elliptical orbits. As these comets head almost directly into the sun these icy comets could easily careen into the Earth.

As always the question of the Apocalypse is not how but when. As Godwin's law says that the longer a conversation continues the probability of Hitler being brought up approaches 100%, the longer Humanity lives on the probability of an Apocalyptic event destroying us approaches 100%. One day a catastrophic event will happen that will change what life will be like on the planet Earth. According to geological records of animal fossils major extinctions the scale of the fall of the Dinosaurs and greater happens 62-65 million years and the last major extinction was 65 million years ago. Hopefully this post shows the importance of Human colonization of other planets. In the future humanity needs to have other places to live so we would be able to evacuate any planet that is threatened and be able to reterramorph the planet and repopulate it. This would be the only way to ensure our survival until the end of the Universe or the end of time.

What exactly is fire?

Here is a quick little post that people might enjoy knowing about. Ever since I was a wee little child, I wondered to myself "What exactly is fire?" I knew it wasn't matter, nor could it be pure energy, something was going on that educational books and shows where not telling me. With out any answers, Internet wasn't as big at the time nor as helpful, I eventually forgot about that question but every time I saw that dancing flame blackening contorting and vaporizing what ever its fuel source was that question still beckoned int the back of my head (and yes I think I'm a bit of a pyro, but I love me some fire).

Now many years later with an enhanced knowledge of science and physics, at least more enhanced than an eight year old, I pieced together the various clues until I came to the answer! The answer lies in the physical structure of the atom itself! *Crash of Lightning* Of course the shown model of the atom is wrong, electrons orbiting around a nucleus like planets around a sun is easier to imagine than an "electron cloud" that shows the probability of an electrons position which can change based off of observation due to the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle.

A non-ionized lithium atom. Why lithium? Because Google Images say so!

So you here you can see the different shells that surround the atom. The lowest shell can only have two electrons in it at a time and the second can have eight and so on. In the non excited state all the electrons go to the lowest shell they can and fill up the next shell until all the electrons are accommodated for. How ever an electron can become "excited" and rise to a higher shell. Since this is moving away from the oppositely charged nucleus it requires energy to move away from it, much like how it takes energy to move away from the Earth. Purely randomly (I say this cautiously) an electron can settle back down from it's excited state down to it's normal state in a lower shell. This causes a release of energy which then turns into a photon. The frequency of the photon depends on how many shells the electron dropped down to, the more shells it fell the higher the frequency. 

So now what can add energy to an atom causing its electron to become excited? Heat. And the hotter a body the higher the electrons will jump when they become excited. So even in space a warm body without any other matter for the body to leak heat to through conduction, it will still cool down since it has excited electrons which throw away energy in the form of photons. So right now every object that you are seeing is releasing light constantly. So why can't we see in the dark? As I said the warmer an object is the higher an electron jumps and than when it falls the higher the maximum frequency of light it emits. At normal Earth temperatures objects radiate light in the infrared spectrum which is invisible to the human eye. And yes this is exactly how night vision infrared goggles work, they have detectors which can pick up the heat radiated by bodies in Earth like temperatures (that always confused me, I was like wait infrared is heat? But it's just a small spectrum of all light! How can it be heat?). 

The electromagnetic (light) spectrum, in case you were curious 

So now we can understand what happens when metal becomes really warm. As an electron stove turns on it's maximum frequency starts entering the lowest frequency of visible light, red, and now we see it glowing a nice red. If we continue to warm up the metal it goes through the entire spectrum and starts emitting frequencies at all visible levels which our eyes detect as white, so it's now burning white hot. If we keep on raising the temperature it will eventually start emitting ultraviolet rays, but I don't think any stoves get that hot. This is exactly how light bulbs work. You take tungsten, which is a good conductor and has a high melting point, put it in a vacuumed environment which light can still penetrate so that it doesn't burn the air and destroy itself, and than run electricity though it which warms the filament to very high temperatures therefore causing it to emit visible light. This also happens on the sun since the nuclear fission of hydrogen realeases allot of energy and heat but since it is at such high temperatures it releases light at all frequencies all the way up to gamma rays. So the sun isn't fire but is much more complicated and I'm not going to go into that in this post. 

So what exactly is fire? Well it is an an exothermic reaction between two chemicals, one is most of the time oxygen, that in order to start the reaction the fuel sources need a certain level of heat to start the process but the chemical reaction releases enough or more heat in the process to keep the chemical reaction going given that there is enough of both fuel sources to keep it up. The reactions most of the time give enough heat to radiate light at frequencies that we can see, most commonly from red to yellow. This chemical reaction also heats up the nearby air and as the heated air's density lowers due to the increased heat, it rises since the gravitational pull of the earth pulls more on the denser colder air. As the heated air makes contact with the colder air the lose heat through convection and begin to radiate heat at levels our eyes can not detect. Fluctuations in the density of air due to movement and other factors also cause the rising heated air to not go in a straight path but move around unpredictably (I heard that a super computer can not predict the movement of the flame and smoke of a match). So essentially at it's base, fire is pretty much hot air. So I hope you actually found this post helpful since fire is a pretty integral part of human life.

YAY fire in a bottle cap!

Also any questions and corrections be welcome by anyone, including you shady anons who randomly stumble upon this page. 

Technological Singularity

2.6 million years ago our human ancestors created the first stone tool starting the tool revolution, which helped us in our quest to kill animals for food and eventually many other helpful jobs, such as skinning animals for their furs and making temporary shelters. This allowed us to get an advantage over other predators and let us defend our selves and kill and eat larger animals, allowing our species to spread all over the planet. 10,000 years ago we began the agricultural revolution starting the fertile crescent int the middle east, the Indus river valley in Pakistan/India, and in the Yangtze river in China as well as in the America's. This allowed us to settle down and stay in one place. This allowed support for larger populations and let larger groups of people together letting larger amounts of people to share a language and cultures. And not everybody needed to work to make food so where able to spend their time making pottery, clothes, buildings, art and have certain people think about laws and philosophy giving rise to governments and religions, culminating into what we now call civilizations. About three to two centuries ago the power of non-human and non-animal sources of energy came to the full realization as people took full advantage of water and wind power as well as taking advantage of new sources such as steam, coal, gas and eventually oil. This lead to the industrial revolution as mechanizing the process of creating goods allowed for mass-production and mass-power as steam powered boats paddled against the wind, trains brought people and goods across continents within days, automobiles brought people into the city while living comfortably away in the suburbs, and planes took people into the skies and across the world. And in the last fifty years we've been through the digital revolutions where since there inception at the end of WWII computers have been getting faster and faster while getting smaller and smaller and in the 90's the internet brought the entire world to the entire world, where anywhere there was an internet connection (which now with satellites, WiFi and 4G seems to be everywhere) anyone can connect to every other computer and learn ideas impossibly much faster than what could be imagined even a century before, and those same people can but their ideas out to the world (much like I am) and anyone can discuss their thoughts and findings.

As you can see in the previous paragraph a definite pattern emerges throughout human history. Each point I mentioned brought forth a new technological revolution having unbelievably more benefits than the last forever changing humanity as we knew it. But there is another as important piece of this pattern each time between the next revolution and the before it is much smaller by a magnitude of ten or more. If one extrapolates, if the last time frame between this revolution and the one before it was measured in a matter of centuries, then the next revolution should come within a matter of decades. But the question is what is the next revolution going to be and what would it be like?

Of course no one can know the details of the revolution before us (try imagining Napoleon trying to imagine a smart phone, or a Sumerian farmer trying to imagine a tractor) but of course many people can't help to imagine what the future might bring. Many scientists, mostly computer scientists imagine a Technological Singularity. Now what that means is that, if the rate of progress continues the path it is than within a century change would happen so quickly that a technological revolution would happen every year, than month, than, day, than hour, than minute, than second etc. Change would happen so quickly so fast that it would be impossible to predict what would happen after the singularity much like it's impossible to predict, with our current laws of physics, what would happen past the event horizon of a black hole singularity.

Kinda confusing but it's just saying as time goes by important events happen quicker and quicker. Also it's on a logarithmic scale, not a constant one, so this trend is happening at an exponential rate.

And now what would cause us to go past this metaphorical "event horizon"? Well as we advance to day we just use our intelligence plus the measuring tools we made before to make new discoveries allowing us to make better tools, which is why technological advancement accelerates the way it does now. The significant thing about the next revolution is that soon we will have the tools to make greater intelligences, which could make more discoveries allowing them to make better tools and better intelligences which would increase the rate of advancement even more exponential-er, which would be allot. There are many ideas hat what these super intelligent beings could be. They could be robots with AI, that either make improvements on themselves or make AI's that are smarter than them. They could be humans that change their genetic make up to increase ther intelligence allong with some other attributes, which could also carry the wave of perfecting genetic altering make even smarter children which at one point would diverge from the species we call human. Or it could be a mix where humans alter the size of there brain though genetics and have robotic implants for extra storage increased speed, establishing human to human connections and increase human sensory input. I prefer the last mostly because such human and robotic merging is taking place right now and that would be awesome (never forget the awesome factor when it comes to exploring scientific frontiers! Why did we go to the moon? Because it's there? Because it's hard? No, because it was awesome, and no one can disagree with me on that).

There are many cases of human and machine joining together as the date of this post. Obviously there are prosthetic limbs for amputees which get more complicated and elaborate (a person with a fake leg could walk right by you and you wouldn't know if they were wearing pants over their leg). But other more advanced technologies are around to. Some paralyzed people have wires attached to there brain and thourgh the pure power of thought a man could move a mouse across a computer screen and play simple games. A blind lady had a camera replace her eye which was connected to a small computer in the back of her head which electrified certain parts of her visual section of the brain when the camera saw lights in certain corresponding areas and soon she was able to see fuzzy black and white images of her surroundings and was even able to identify things like a sailboat. That may seem small now but soon maybe she could see in 1080i or even resolutions higher than the eye can see now.

And of course, here is a monkey with a robot arm.

A computer attached to the monkey's brain controls the arms movements. At first the monkey doesn't know at all how to move it but as it's brain learns it finds out that the only way to eat the marsh mellow in front of it is to use it's new arm and grab the sweet treat and put the arm right in front of it's mouth. At one point (not shown in this video) the monkey starts to lick the marsh mellow residue on the robo-arm rather than grab a new marsh mellow which they said that meant the monkey was starting to accept the fact that the robo-arm is actually part of him/her. Even in the military is starting to fuse man and machine making a Iron Man suit/ Mjolnir Powered Assault Armour like suit that increases the soldiers strength incredibly allowing to carry a hundred pounds of equipment or more for hours without breaking a sweat or even feel like he's in a robotic suit. 

Because people <3 visual stimulation. I can't help but say "That's so F**king cool!!"

There are also ideas to make glasses or goggles with built in computer's that can overlay images onto what you see. If they are able to connect to the internet the second you look at somebody it can Google them and look up their Facebook profile and give you everything you may need to know. It can overlay GPS directions on the very road you're looking at and looking at a building could give you it's street address. Looking at anything these devices could give us any amount of knowledge there is about that thing increasing the knowledge of any human being with them. Eventually they may even be set down to the size of contacts to essentially invisibly become a part of you. One day we'll think how we ever got around without these devices.

We could also implant computers into our brain, letting us save videos with taken with our contacts and saving them to a 20 terrabyte hardrive (probably under estimating) so we can do what I always dreamed of. Living in a world where we can rewind experiences and memories much like we can do now with TiVo or Forge in Halo (thats two references to that game now, (the MJONIR armor for those unaware) and yet I'm not a fan of that game hmm.....), so if you forgot where you left your keys rewind to where you came back home drunk last night and find that you left them in the fridge?? Weird.... Anyways, certain CPU could be added into our brain to help us with things that human brains are atrocious at, mostly math skills. Imagine being able to do 238,432.234234 times 342.3672291 in your head in less than a 60th of a second, you're brain will send it to the robo CPU it'll crunch the number and the numbers appear magically in your mind like you did it yourself, and you could say you didn't. And once we find out how to program intuition, creativity and problem solving skills we can improve upon that. 

Eventually we would find out how to do better things through mechanical means than biological and slowly making our selves completely mechanical beings, much like the movie "Bicentennial Man" but in reverse. We couldn't exactly say when the exact moment of being a being of flesh to a being of machine. And to further extrapolate as computers become ever more connected becoming faster as computer farms work together to solve a single problem, our robotic heirs might eventually come together into one sentient being controlling several bodies, much like a hive mind or something, where all of humanity become one being constantly discovering more secrets, recording more facts, and further improving itself until maybe it encapsulates the entire Universe and it becomes one sentient being and from there I don't know, nor do I have any Idea when these things can happen. 

And so we stand at an important crucible of humanity where we forever and indelibly change what it means forever as we pass through the Technological Singularity. 

P.S.

If you wanna look up the guy who thought about this allot more than I did here's a link to a site that was written by Vernor Vinge in 1993 and how he predicts that the Technological Singularity will happen before 2030 oooohOOOOHohOOOOHoohOHohOHHhhoohOO!!!!!!!!!!

P.P.S.
Wow just realized 3 hours after I uploaded this post that I actually didn't put the link so here you go:http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html

Do aliens exist?

This simple question is not so easy to answer and has a lot of implications to how we should act as a species. To answer this question I'ma split up into three parts. Does life exist at all outside of the planet? If so do intelligent life forms exist possibly with their own civilizations? And if that is so as well does have aliens visited our planet?

Question one: Does life exist at all outside of the planet?
Well given the fact that I even propose the other two questions you can assume that my assumption is yes. Why I think that is due to the laws of probability. Let's do some math now similar to what was done in Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" called the drake equation. Lets try to see how many stars in our very own galaxy could harbor life. So given the estimation that their are 100 billion stars in our galaxy we will apply some factors (mostly estimated) to this number and the result will give us a rough estimation of how abundant life is in the galaxy. So starting with a number of 100 billion we guess the percentage of stars that have planets and multiply these numbers together. So about a quarter of stars have their own planets so 100 billion times 0.25 gives us 25 billion stars that have planets. So now we times that by the average number of planets per solar system, five. So 25 billion times 5 gives us 125 billion planets in the galaxy. So lets times that number by the percentage of hospitable planets. Using our solar system as a guide lets say one out of eight planets has the potential of life. So 125 billion time 1/8 (or 125 billion divided by eight) gives us 15.625 billion planets that can harbor life potentially. So even given a very small percentage of the chance of life arising although it might be very big,  since life came very quickly on earth even when is was still cooling down from being a giant ball of lava, the chances of life existing outside of our solar system is too huge to ignore. Theres even a chance that life could be on planets or moons in our solar system. With evidence of water and a much thicker atmosphere on mars life, at least on a microbial scale, could have existed. And on the moon of Jupiter, Europa, life could exist miles beneath it's ice surface. As it orbits Jupiter the gravitational pull of the gas giant pulls on the solid core, akin to how the moon pulls on the oceans to make tides, making enough friction to raise the temperature  for liquid water to exist and with the miles of ice to protect the environment there from solar radiation life could easily occur there.

Question two: Does intelligent life or extrasolar civilizations exist?
My answer to this is a definite maybe. This comes from the logical stand point and further extension of the Drake equation and that would be totally awesome! So lets say that life occurs on 50% of all the planets that could harbor life half of 15.625 billion would be 7.8125 billion (lets round to 8 billion since these are all estimations anyway) planets that have life. Now we fraction in how many of these planets have intelligent life to get to at least mammalian levels of intelligence. Lets be a bit harsh and say only 1% of these planets have life that evolve to this point and 99% of the other planets have life that stays at the microbial scale. So that would give us 80 million planets with divers and complicated life forms. Now which of these have species that reach around human intelligence or greater and manage to build advanced civilizations. I think planets that have such high life forms it would be pretty likely that one species would walk down the evolutionary path of advanced cognitive development and realize that there is allot more you can do with intelligence than make spears and slings but lets say 50% of planets that have complicated life forms gets a species capable of forming a civilization. So using these estimations we get that 40 million planets in the galaxy alone (not to mention there are an unknown amount of galaxies in the universe) that have had civilizations grace them at one point of the galaxies history. The last and more somber part of the Drake equation is the faction of civilizations that manage to not kill themselves. Within a few thousand years of human civilization (~0.00001% of the age of the universe) humanity has lately become a hairs width of complete annihilation on multiple equations, with the possibility still ahead in the future. Since we are the only civilization we know of we have know way of knowing how often a civilization can get past the point of being able to destroy it's entire home planet to the point of establishing multiple colonies on multiple planets and stars (which would be the point of permanence where the civilization could quit possibly live on until the end of creation. But even with quite low numbers 40 million civilizations in total is a large number some I would place my bets that there are several inter solar civilizations as I type this blog of mine.

Question three: Have alien civilizations ever been to Earth?
This I think would be the most important question out of the three because it could be integral to how we are as a species and as a civilization now. My assumption right now is no, I don't think aliens have ever in the history of out planet visited it. Even with all the sightings and testimonies of sane people about UFOs and alien encounters I'm not convinced that aliens would ever just come and look for a few seconds than disappear. I try to think of this situation from a human perspective (just as any self centered human that's never met an alien civilization would). If thousands of years from now we could had the ability to quickly and cheaply travel between the stars and the stretches of the milky way and we noticed a planet of reasonable size, in the Goldilocks zone of temperature where liquid water could be achieved, had a metallic core that could form a magnetic shield to protect life and was made up of just the right elements for life to occur we would definitely check it out for our quest for extraterrestrial life. But if we found a civilization just past the industrial age (given that all civilizations roughly follow the same pattern ours did) we wouldn't just hover for a bit never actually making contact, or just experimenting on random civilians that no one would believe. We would be like "Yo dawg! whats up? We Humans and we think we tight as shit and wanna rap with ya'll mutha aliens" (this is the future where all the upper class people talk like this and you wouldn't even want to know how future gangsters talk like). We'd be too curious to stand idly by and curiosity would be the pillar of any space faring civilization as well if they want to know the secrets of the universe to bend it to their will.

If aliens did make contact I would guess four outcomes would happen.
1. The most likely is that they would be friendly and curious just like I imagine we would act. They would come down and make there presence known trying to learn our history and teach us what they know and try to ascend us to their level of technology and hopefully we would begin a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship with them and any other civilizations that they know about. Much like the situation in Mass Effect and end up in a diverse galaxy like in Star Trek or Star Wars (I might be a little to optimistic about this situation than I should but I think the nerd in me wants this possibility to become true too much).

2. The next most likely scenario (or maybe the most likely according to some) is a situation more like the European exploits of the Americas. Where the space faring civilization simply doesn't care about us at all and only kills us if we get in there way. They would come to earth seeking resources or land for a new colony and most likely hurting us due to their damage to our environment, and could and would easily destroy any military power if we would try to stand up (imagine an apache helicopter fighting off a tribe off Apache Native Americans but even more one sided). Also if life is even more common than we think they might not care about losing our biodiversity since we would only be one of thousands or billions of known planets with life.  Due to the fact that the closest example we can get to alien civilizations colliding is the western exploration of the Native American populace things might not look to good for us given that situation.

3. The not so likely but would explain the UFO situation is that life could be quite rare in the galaxy and an alien civilization might see us as promising and wants to leave us alone for us to develop us on our own. Or we could be seen as some sort of zoo that would help contain galactic biodiversity and they only come to study us and to gawk at our silly exploits as scientists and tourists. This could be the case but I just couldn't Imagine that as being a more likely case than the previous two.

4. The least likely but weirdest situation is the "Ancient Astronaut" theory. This is the theory that at some point during our evolution an alien civilization came down to help us along the way. Either turning us from apes to humans or just giving us the basic knowledge of civilization. A possible example is the movie "2001 Space Odyssey" (possible as in the entire movie is up for interpretation) where the tribe of apes that got kicked out of a watering hole by a rival tribe encountered an alien obelisk that seem to either enhance their intelligence or  impart the knowledge of tools and let the tribe take back the watering hole by using animal bones as weapons and from there on out continue the making of tools improving their quality of life up till today. Many people who believe in this theory say there is evidence in the art of ancient civilizations. In an Egyptian tomb is a rendering of what could possibly be a light bulb and in Mayan drawings there is what could be interpreted as an astronaut on a rocket ship that is about to take off, both of these civilizations where very advanced for there day and possibly explains how they built such huge stone structures with apparently only human of animal power and how many civilizations have many uncanny similarities in patterns or architecture. Even cave paintings of aboriginals in Australia have figures that look like astronauts with an aura around there head that look like space helmets. This is also the explanation for what they ancients got there ideas from gods from that they were accentually the aliens that descended from the sky and gave humanity the gift of fire, language, the written word, and many other integral parts of any civilization (much like the story of Assassin's Creed, that silly game).

All of these possibilities are, well, possible and I definitely can't say which is right or wrong, I'm just saying which I think are most likely. The main reason why I think aliens have never come to Earth and why I don't think they even know about Earth is, once again, the matter of probabilities. As I said there are about 100 billion stars in this galaxy and it's around 100,000 light years in diameter. Our sun is completely average and unexceptional and the earth is nearly impossible to detect from more than a light year away so there is no reason why an advanced space faring civilization would spend any particular attention to this sector of the galaxy and even though we have been constantly sending signals out past the solar system for the past century now our signals would only fill the smallest fraction of the universe and most likely not have reached the ears of any civilization able to detect such signals so they would have no idea that there is a prospering civilization well on it's way to leaving it's home planet ready to explore.

If, thousands of years from now, we explore our galaxy and find that there is no other hint of life, then we must appreciate the honor and luck we have to exist as a life form, as a species, and as an advanced civilization. We must make sure that we accept the honor and duty of being the sole protector of life and make sure that it prospers through out the galaxy as our son will inevitably blow up and destroy the Earth. However, I'm not a betting man but I would safely put my life savings on the fact that there is at least one advanced civilization out there wondering there same perplexing thought we do. 

Future of Human Exploration II

So let's finish this topic of human space flight. I'm definitely sure that we'd be able to colonize the rest the solar system specifically the moon, Mars, and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. A new engine has actually been designed that could be much faster than conventional rocket engines now. Called the VASIMR (Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket), this new engine creates ionized superheated plasma which it ejects from the rear of the ship pushing it forward. Although it gives less oomph than solid fuel rockets it is much more energy efficient and the vacuum of space lets the engine build up speed over time. To prevent the plasma from touching the engine VASIMR uses electro-magnets to create and maneuver the plasma out of the engine.  

The engine is estimated to be able to get a manned ship to mars in forty days given a power source of 200 megawatt source  which a VASIMR engine with such a power source has not been prototyped but should be able to be made within a reasonable amount of time. With this technology perfected interplanetary trade will definitely be feasible. 


As for extra solar travel one interesting design I saw was in Carl Sagan's "Cosmos". When hydrogen fusion is perfected the ship will use stocked up hydrogen for nuclear fusion to accelerate it to a descent fraction of the speed of light at that point the front of the ship will have a huge funnel multiple square miles in size will collect the few hydrogen atoms that float out in the deep space. At such high speeds even the fact that there a barely any hydrogen items the speed at which the ship goes it will collect enough to keep the hydrogen fusion going allowing the ship to carry less than enough fuel to travel such distances but the constant acceleration will still allow the ship to go around 90% the speed of light or maybe even past that. 


Even though habitable planets outside the solar system could be many light years causing the trip to last even more years than that but thats only relative to the earth and other "stationary" colonies. To the pilots and passengers on the ship time will pass by differently, the closer to the speed of light the less amount of time the trip seems to take (where to a photon the trip across galaxy takes instantly, also the distance between any to points to a photon is always zero, think about it), so a round trip to could take years on earth will seem like only a few months for the passenger (or even less depending on how fast the ship goes) giving you the twins paradox where to twins will end up different ages when one returns from a near light space trip (don't ask or me to explain exactly how the twin paradox works cause it's crazy cuz to the twin on the ship the twin on earth travels near the speed of light and should be younger than the pilot, it's got sumthing to do with the fact that it's the space twin that does the acceleration). While traveling between colonies would take a descent delay it's definitely possible once we can get near light speed travel. 


If we can somehow learn how to bend space and time itself and teleport across the universe faster than light other weird things can happen. Where the twin paradox occurs with near light speed and time stops when an observer travels at the speed of light well guess what one can actually travel back in time if one can travel faster than light. As far as I can tell our technology is nowhere near that point if that is even possible and I have no idea what consequences would happen if such technology is possible and how we could get around it.


Well thats pretty much what I have on my mind about space travel and "The Future of Human Exploration." Colonizing other planets and exploring the galaxy is important and necessary to our survival and development as a species and to our civilization. I aint no promising Star Wars (I'm an English guru!) but I think reasonable colonization and trade is possible within a mellenia.

Future of Human Exploration

The story of humanity has always been one of exploration, colonization and adapting to meet any environmental obstacles that stand in their way. Ever since we evolved we have felt a need to leave our cradle in Africa and explore the continent. Eventually crossed into the Middle East eventually going into Europe and Asia having to adapt to the extreme colds of the north during the Ice Age having to make clothes and master the art of fire. Some humans even made their way into the Americas populating the entire length of both north and south continents. As technology developed and ocean going ship designs became more sophisticated Europeans began a new wave of exploration, reaching India by sea by going around Africa and Christopher's famous voyage lead to the western colonization of the America's and soon they circumnavigate the world. Even the frozen wastes of the poles and the depths of the oceans were explored even if they were not colonized.

Once the west colonized many parts of the world and global trade began to connect the entire planet a new wave  of exploration began as a competition between the two major powers of the globe. After a few years the USSR sent Sputnik into orbit and made Yuri Gagarin the first man into space the USA became the first nation to put men onto another heavenly body besides Earth. In no time at all humanity took advantage of the technology to reach space by setting up numerous satellites furthering connecting our world.

Unfortunately it seems we have stopped there. Although many probes have landed on Mars and passed by Pluto and our telescopes peer farther and farther into the Universe and its past it seems that we don't have any plans to go farther. If humanity wished to grow and develop we need to continue to explore and colonize the Universe. And now that we have weapons that have the power to destroy all life on Earth and other galactic catastrophes that are even more destructive leaving the earth permanently becomes a matter of survival for our species and our greatly coveted civilization.

One piece of technology that will greatly help us get into space is the space elevator. These will be stations that are in geosynchronous orbit around the planet so that it will naturally stay over the same spot on the Earth.  They would be connected onto the Earth through extremely long cables. Elevators would be able to travel up and down these cables, powered by lasers shot from the base on the ground it would not need to carry it's own fuel with it as it leaves the Earth's gravitational pull. With traditional rockets fuel makes up a huge fraction of the weight as vast amount of fuel needed to lift a pound into orbit which needs more fuel to lift the weight of the fuel and more fuel to lift that fuel, et cetera. This will make it immensely cheaper to launch people into orbital altitudes. Space elevators can also be used to quickly and cheaply bring up pieces of space ships which could be assembled in space. These ships can be optimized for space travel since they won't have to deal with the stresses of leaving and entering the Earth's atmosphere.

Once space elevators become well established on Earth at least going onto the moon and other planets will become much easier and if we establish permanent colonies onto those bodies space elevators could be built there as well and and interplanetary trade can be established and humanity will continue it's legacy of exploration and expansion.

And now I'm tired so I guess I'll put what I have up now so I can update some what regularly and I shall continue this blog later on another day. Well as always feel free to ask any questions who may want me to expand upon in this blog or request a new topic for me talk about entirely!!!

Some pictures of what space elevators might look like (via Google images):

Space elevator itself

The base of the elevator on the surface of the Earth

Cool looking angle seen from space

(Oh, I hope if I make it big I get sued for taking peeps images off of Google without giving credit.

It's called the internet! All the cool kids pirate stuff!)

Special Relativity I

Before I talk any more in the science department I guess I should talk about relativity. I'm going to skip over Newtonian physics because it's pretty basic and obvious to grasp in most casses, but I will probably go back and talk about it during this post if it requires it. Relativity is a very strange and non obvious way to see the world, and i admit I still have trouble understanding everything about it (this post is also a test to see how my relativistic skills are, cuz the best way to learn something is to teach it(or blog it in this case)). I might not go into some aspects to deeply and completely explain relativity in this post but whatever, if I can perfectly explain relativity to people on the internet in one post i think i deserve a Nobel prize. Once again if someone here actually has a PHD or something in anything I'm talking about and notices i say something wrong PLZ comment saying something.

Any ways as probably anyone knows the person who came up with relativity was Albert Einstein. And as you know he came up with this stuff in a patent office, not that he was not educated though. He did go to college to learn about physics so he's not some guy who knew nothing. He started thinking about what a wave of light would look like if you were speeding along side it. He thought that that was such a silly thing to imagine, but soon he realized that it would be physically impossible to go at the speed of light, that no matter how fast you're moving light would always appear at the same speed.

Pretty much just with this assumption came all of his theories of Special Relativity. It's pretty trippy. One of the implications of this is the distortion of time. For this we shall set up the classic thought experiment, The Light Clock! Pictures would be helpful for this, TO GOOGLE IMAGES!

Excellent. So how the light clock will work is that it will send a photon from the source and it will hit the mirror and bounce back and hit the sensor, then the number of ticks will increase and then it will instantly send out another photon. Well say you're chillin in a train station with this light clock the size of a grandfather clock for no reason. Well you know the train is going to come in exactly 15 minutes and since you know the speed of light and the distance between the the the mirror and the sensor you know how long the photon will take to travel from the source back to the sensor. So you know exactly how many ticks it will take for the train to come. Every fifteen minutes the number of ticks will increase by the same amount.  So know you understand how the clock works right?

Well since that explanation took fifteen minutes the train's coming down the track now! But NO! The conductor is drunk at the wheel or whatever and the train barrels by without slowing down at all(yes this is how relativity is taught every where). But some passerby notices your clock and takes a gander at it. To him the clock is moving as the same speed the train looks like it is moving to you. So by the time the photon is shot out and hits the mirror the mirror has moved the by some amount and it appears that the light is moving at some diagonal angle as shown in the picture above (b).  So the distance the light has to travel is longer when you are moving than when it is still. However the photon to the passenger still looks like it is moving at the same speed. So it will take more time for it to travel this distance so that each tick will, to the passenger, take longer than the ticks for you. There fore time looks like it is going the slower outside of the train than inside for the passenger.

However if he perchanced to have his own light clock to you it would appear to move slower than your clock, so to you everything happening in the train would appear to move slower than outside even though the passenger is experiencing quite the opposite!

See relativiety is quite trippy indeed. Now Ima let that sink into your heads and also I'm tired of writing so I shall pick this up in my next post, good bye Nobel prize :'(

The Shape of the Universe

Well since this blog is called "Standing in Front of the Universe" I guess it should be appropriate to start it off by talking about that.

But before that let me explain my knowledge of these subjects. If you read my profile thing I have said that I am a college student, at the current age of 19. However this college is DigiPen which is a small school dedicated to video games. So all my knowledge about basic rudimentary physics like kinematics and circuits and stuff like that came from high school, the more higher level stuff I just learned about from reading books mostly. So I'm not some kid at Havard learning from one of the founders of string theory or something and allot of the stuff I might talk about is my own opinions or theories. So if you disagree with something I say or think I'm wrong just say something cause either I can explain what I meant or learn something new which is always fun.

Kay lets start this... I guess I can start explaining the dimensions of the universe and it's shape n stuff. I think everybody in the world can understand that there are three spatial dimensions, you know the directions that we can move our selves physically, Up-Down, Left-Right, and Frontwards-Backwards. Now these three axis' don't point in a particular direction, it's just that three spatial coordinates are needed to define a unique point in space. If I want to say where my house was I would give you the longitude, latitude and the altitude, and you would know exactly where my house is (not that I am going to). And using these coordinates one could get the unique location anywhere in the universe theoretically. But of course there is nothing special about the earth, which took us humans a decent amount of time to find out, so there is no reason to make the center of the earth the origin, the point where the three coordinates would be 0, 0, 0 which actually wouldn't be the center of the earth since 0 altitude is sea level but u get my point, of the universe. This brings me to my next point  that took humanity a while to realize as well, that spatial coordinates are essentially relative to what you measuring.

So anyone can can essentially make any coordinate system they would like. I could make my house the origin of my coordinate system and set my three axis' to be East-West, North-South, and Up-Down, so I can say my house would be (0,0,0) (0 feet East of my house, 0 feet North of my House and 0 feet above my house) while my friends house would be (100, -200, 10) (100 feet East, of my house, 200 feet south of my house, and 10 feet above my house) and no one could argue with me. At a single point there is no magic coordinate number that describes it it's only this far away relative from some other object that you're measuring.

So now we move to the next dimension, time. Hopefully now in our modern age almost one hundred years after Einstein's discovery of time as another dimension most of us can see how time can be a dimension. An easy way to explain is if I want to meet some one and I just give them the spatial coordinates (most normally given as an address) the will come only to get frustrated by the fact that I was not there since I came an hour later since I forgot to give them the time that I would be there. So to give someone a proper position I would be I need to give them four coordinates, three spatial and one time-al (itza word). So now we know that the world is four dimensional. What is the differences between space and time? Are theres more spatial and more time dimensions? Are there even other types of dimensions? Ah-ah-ah little ones. I shall explain, or hope to explain that later.

Now that we know that time is a dimension we can see that it also applies to the same rules as space. In respect to aligning our axis there is not much room since time is one dimensional, forwards in time and backwards in time. But the position of our origin can be moved to any when we want it. Most people describe time as the years starting 2011 years 43 days days ago because some really nice guy was lived at that time. But as I said there is nothing special about that time(although I'm sure many would disagree but ima not  go into that kinda stuff (at least not in this post)). No one can argue about the Jewish calender that sets it's origin many thousands ( about 3 ) before the Christian one. But no one can argue with them and there are many calenders used by numerous civilizations across the earth.  Once again it's just a nice point that many people can use reference against. Any one can say that they just ate breakfast about 4 minutes ago or that they got married 3 years after meeting each other.

With just these rules (and a few others that I'll talk about later) Einstein and some other scientists that you wouldn't remember ( cause you know, I totally remember there names) came up with special relativity, general relativity, subatomic physics, and string theory. So if you're going in your bed going "well this is all obvious" i just want you to know that time it took for humanity to realize these truths and the implications they eventually brought with them.

Now Ima go talk about something a little less obvious and something I heard on TV allot but they never really explained it well and I had to think about it for a while to understand what they where trying to say. For thousands of years ever since the dawn of humanity trying to figure out what was up above beyond our reach, we always thought that the earth was the center of the Universe. I mean, given the times it's undoubtable that even the most wise being then would come to that assumption. But over time Copernicus,  Kepler, and Galileo showed that we are definitely not the center of the solar system, then we saw that we wear no where near the center of the galaxy, and now we know that there are numerous amounts galaxies in the Universe. AND some scientists theorize there might be an infinite amount of Universes!?!? Where will it end!?

Any ways, well if the earth isn't there center of the universe that doesn't mean there isn't one, I mean the universe started out as a single point in space so why can't we go there and just call that the center, if everything blew up in equal directions from that point the only logical thing is that that is the center right? Well in a way yes but kinda no? What? Exactly!

This is where the people on the tube and in some books try to explain the exact shape of the universe but didn't completely explain what they meant. According to Einsteins theory of relativity the math showed that the universe should be continuously expanding in all directions and even though Einstein didn't like that idea Hubble showed that the universe really was expanding (I won't go into how he showed that now since it's not really integral to my story but if some one wants to I can explain in the comments). Hubble showed that that every galaxy was moving away from us in every direction and the farther the galaxy was from us the farther it was moving away. AHA! So our galaxy is at least the center galaxy! Booyah! MILKY WAY! MILKY WAY! Hey now don't get carried away. To explain whats happening the balloon analogy works well. If you take a balloon and draw a bunch of dots on a balloon and blow it up(with your breath preferably not explosives) you'll see that each dot is moving away from each other as the "Space"(balloon) expands and the farther away two dots are the faster they move away from each other.

And here is where the people on the TV always stopped explaining. Every time I saw this I'm like "But the balloon has a center!!!" But how I imagined is that the balloon was some filled thing that there where stars n galaxies inside of it since we live in a 3d space and balloon s are 3d but the tricky thing is is that the Universe isn't a 3D balloon but a four dimensional balloon and all of the galaxies and stars and planets and us are stuck on the out side of it. Just like how a 3 dimensional balloon has a 2D surface the Universal Balloon has a 3dimensional balloon on it. I know it's tricky to imagine but once again our aged ancestors thought the world to be a 2dimensional plane with edges that you can fall off of the we thought that the universe was just  3 dimensional with boundaries that we have know idea what could be beyond.

So techniquely there is a center of the universe but since we are stuck on the edge of the universe we can't go up or down. Imagine it like the earth if it had no mountains or valleys, perfectly flat. It is a 3 dimensional object but every point that we can go to (the surface of the earth) can be described by 2 points (essentially longitude and latitude). What this means is that we live in a 3D  world with no boundaries, just like if you went straight west for a long time and you tried your best not to turn in any direction you would end up in the same point even though all your measurement s said you went in a perfectly straight line. This also implies to our 4 dimensional balloon if I went straight and didn't turn up-down, or left-right, in the slightest possible way no matter what space wont end and I would come back to the same point as when I left.

However the is an edge of universe and there is a center of the universe it's just perpendicular to all the three axis'; left-right, up-down, and forwards-backwards(i said frontwards before right? that was weird), so we will never be able to go past the edge or towards the center, at least with our understanding of the universe. And we would have no Idea what it would mean to do such a thing. If you saw someone go one of these directions you would just see them disappear in front of your very eyes! But now this leads to more questions: is this other dimension time? Is it another space dimension? IS IT A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT TYPE OF DIMENSION?!?!?! For that you will have to subscribe to my blog! Or just wait until i can actually answer that question myself or most likely when I have a weird discussion about it to myself and i just put my thoughts onto this blog.

And hopefully this gives me a bit of credibility to my blog since as of current I only have to followers, my friend and my self and this is my first actual post.