4 Phy and I spent a lesson studying the big bang theory…

2R – We looked at how power stations convert the chemical energy in fossil fuels into electricity.

4 Che – You did your final experiment to investigate rates of reaction. We’ll finish off and summarise tomorrow.

Finally… Just to show it’s not all work and no play… when you’ve finished all your prep, you can click on the image below to have a go at a great game from the science museum called launchball!

Michio Kaku reveals his plan to create a super suit which will give the wearer superpowers equivalent to that of the superheroes found in comic books! This can all be done using the laws of physics theory.
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Build whimsical machines by connecting rotating wheels and rods to negotiate a variety of ostacle courses. It may not be as clever as the construction kit in Sodaplay, but it’s rather fun.

http://www.physics theorygames.net/game/Fantastic_Contraption.html

Over half the background radiation that we receive comes from radon gas, a naturally occurring daughter product of Uranium decay. It is present in granite-some granite buildings have radon monitors installed; Cornwall in the UK is a prime location – giving people a scare some years ago. Concentration is higher indoors due to lack of ventilation and U based building products. Cosmic radiation sources are galactic cosmic rays, geomagnetically trapped particles and solar cosmic rays.  The amount of cosmic radiation varies with atmospheric thickness, i.e. altitude and latitude, so taking a plane ride increases our exposure to background radiation. On the ground, fortunately, the atmosphere provides an effective shield.  The gamma and x-ray radiation from the soil is due to uranium and thorium decay chains and naturally occurring  Potassium-40 and varies with geographical location. A man of mass 80kg probably has 160g of K in his body of which adioactive 40 K comprises 0.01% of the total so we ourselves contribute to our own background dose. Rich sources of potassium in our foods are ready to eat apricots and tomato puree – thus in baked beans also, so it really is true – eating baked beans irradiates you. Here’s the whole nine yards, but percentages vary geographically. The chart includes consumer products such as tobacco products which contain 210 Po, a compelling reason for giving up smoking,  domestic water containing 226 Ra and 220 Rn, combustible fuels, ophthalmic glass containing thorium for rose tinting, luminous dials and signs containing 3 H and 147 Pm and smoke detectors containing 241 Am amongst many others. It’s worth pointing out that nuclear warfare, nuclear accidents and controlled detonations add very little to global body irradiation per person, although the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 released 1.4 EBq  (exabecquerels) of radiation and caused significant local damage.

Lack of safety features caused reactor overload. This is the badly damaged turbine hall

Yesterday, I sat around and watched 15 episodes of Clannad in order to procrastinate on doing my history homework. (That stuff takes a long time: about 75 minutes total for reading and questions. It’s not particularly interesting either.)

I also wallowed in despair about missing an A- by 1 point and about losing $5.50 during the food festival. We barely sold anything (seeing as my group basically just messed around for the entire time and barely made any sushi. As if sushi with just seaweed, rice, and cucumber wasn’t bad enough…) and yet bought a bunch of stuff, most of which I didn’t eat.

I did a few problems from AoPS V2, though. That was fun. I should do more tomorrow. (Except that I still need to start doing more AIME problems.)

In addition, I looked through a few problems on Coulomb’s Law and electric fields, but completely forgot about actually doing some. >_< Lots of physics theory stuff to finish up today and tomorrow, including finishing my notes on chapter 18 of Cutnell/Johnson (from now on, “C/J”), taking notes on chapter 19, and doing problems on the topics in those chapters. (I’m not working much on Thursday, of course, since I’ll probably be too tired from NACLO and a piano lesson.)

OK, I can’t help it. I wrote about neutrinos once before, but they’re too cool and I can’t leave them alone.

I’ve been reading about IceCube, a neutrino telescope at (literally, at) the South Pole. What in the world is a neutrino telescope doing there?

Well, it’s using the Earth. The idea is this. Neutrinos hardly interact with matter at all. Even the Earth is hardly a barrier to them. So by staring not up but down, into the incredibly thick and pure ice of the South Pole, what you’re actually doing is staring in the direction of neutrinos that have just passed through the Earth via the North Pole. Anything else, any other particles, would have been absorbed by the Earth long before they reached you, so you’re looking at the northern sky with a filter that only lets neutrinos through.

OK, so great. Neutrinos go through the entire Earth. Surely they’ll go through your little experiment just as easily. The IceCube neutrino telescope is a cubic kilometer, but that’s nothing compared to the Earth.

True, but remember that there’s lots and lots and lots of neutrinos. Almost all make it through the Earth, but that still leaves a huge number that interact with the Earth. And almost all make it through IceCube, too, but a smaller number interact with the ice.

Notice that the neutrinos that interact aren’t somehow weaker or slower than the rest. All these neutrinos are identical (though there are three different types, but there’s a twist there, too! See, aren’t neutrinos cool?). Just because a neutrino “made it” through the Earth doesn’t give it any better or worse chance of making it through IceCube.

So what does that mean, make it through? Or, more to the point, not make it through? What exactly happens to these little neutral ones?

Now the story gets really cool. Amazing, really.

Every once in a great while, a neutrino will slam into a neutron. When this happens, the neutron spits out something. The something depends on which kind of neutrino hit it. An electron neutrino causes an electron to come out (leaving a proton behind). A muon neutrino causes something else, a sort of electron on steroids, to come flying out. It’s called a muon.

OK, I have to tell this story. When the muon was first discovered, a physicist (one of my favorites) named I.I. Rabi, said, “Who ordered that?” The muon didn’t make any sense at the time. It was the wrong weight to be anything predicted. It seemed to have exactly the properties of the electron, except for two. It was much heavier than the electron, and it quickly decayed into (you guessed it) an electron. So what good was it. Who ordered that, indeed?

Later, scientists found that they could use muons from cosmic rays to verify Einstein’s relativistic time dilation, but that’s another story. This is about neutrinos!

Anyway, if the neutrino makes a muon, something amazing happens. The muon comes flying out of the atom at breakneck speed (if muons had necks). It’s going so fast, in fact, that it is actually faster than the speed of light.

Wait a minute, you just mentioned Einstein, and now you’re breaking the one law that everyone knows Einstein proved. Thou shalt not go faster than the speed of light.

Yes, but . . .

No buts, it’s your rule, now you have to obey it.

But wait.

OK, what?

Einstein said nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. Light, it turns out, travels just that fast. In a vacuum. But in ice, light goes a lot slower. And the muon can go faster than light in ice. Einstein is still intact, but the muon still does something remarkable.

Just as an airplane going faster than sound creates a sonic boom, a muon going faster than light creates a luminal boom! That’s right, a sonic boom for light. And it gets better. That luminal boom comes out as light we can see. And . . . ta daa . . . it’s blue!

That’s the blue glow you see around nuclear power plants. It’s really there, and it’s caused by particles moving faster than the speed of light in water. How cool is that?

So now you’ve got this ice, you’ve got these muons made by muon neutrinos, you’ve got this blue glow. The ice below the South Pole is probably the purest and clearest in the world. There’s nothing to compete with this blue light, and it just lights up that ice, traveling a great distance through the crystal clear solid water. And when it comes to a detector (called a DOM for Digital Optical Module), that detector grabs the blue glow and stores it away. You’ve just detected a neutrino!

OK, so what? So you’ve just detected a neutrino. Big deal.

It is a big deal, and here’s why. Neutrinos weigh almost nothing. Almost. We now know that they have a tiny, but real, mass. Why? Because of Einstein again. Any particle with zero mass travels at the speed of light, but any particle with a real mass, no matter how tiny, travels slower. At the speed of light time stops. But at less than the speed of light, time ticks away, however slowly.

Remember I mentioned the other twist about neutrinos? Here it is. Neutrinos can change back and forth, from one type to another. We know that now, but didn’t know it just a few years ago, and that caused a big worry. It seemed the Sun was making far too few neutrinos. Since neutrinos come directly from the Sun’s core, while visible light takes a long, long time to reach the surface, some scientists worried that perhaps the Sun’s core was dying. Instead, the answer is that the Sun is making the right number of neutrinos, but we were only able to detect one of the three kinds coming out. Since the Sun only makes one of the three kinds, it must be the case that the other two kinds (called the muon neutrino and the tau neutrino) pop into existence as the other kind pops out – in other words, the neutrinos turn one into the other.

So what does that have to do with mass? If the neutrinos were massless, then time wouldn’t pass for them, and they’d have no time to change one into the other. The fact that they can and do proves that they have mass.

Again big deal. Right? Wrong.

The big deals are many. First of all, neutrinos don’t weigh much, but there are a lot of them. A lot of them. Suddenly their mass becomes important for lots of things, including supernova explosions.

But there’s more than that. No theory we currently have shows why or how the neutrino should have mass. The mass of the neutrino points toward new physics theory. It’s like that cloud on the horizon of physics theory at the end of the 19th century that led to radioactivity, special relativity, quantum mechanics, and the modern world.  The 20th century’s cloud was the neutrino mass, and the more we learn about these amazing, ghostly particles, the closer we will come to seeing what wonders await behind this cloud. I for one can’t wait to see.

It wasn’t so long ago that Julius Moab’s album, Zero Blance – Rai Coast i no BSP Bank, was hitting the airwave mechanicss of PNG. In his typical style of musical parody, Moab had everyday Papua New Guineans singing the lyrics of his comic performance. Within an economic context, a zero-sum game is one in which the gains of one player are exactly balanced by the loss of the another. Moab used the zero-sum reference to highlight the difficulty in meeting the demands of the extended family system within PNG as a result of the social transaction of acquiring a wife.

Within India, a developing country PNG can learn from, the zero-sum game is being played out in the fight against petty corruption through the implementation of a new sort of zero sum: the zero-rupee note. Distributed by a local NGO called 5th Pillar, the note is not legal tender; it is simply a piece of paper the colour of a 50-rupee note with a picture of Gandhi on it and a value of nothing. Its purpose is to shame corrupt officials into not demanding bribes.

According to Vijay Anand, the President of 5th Pillar,  the idea was first conceived by an Indian physics theory professor at the University of Maryland, who, in his travels around India, realized how widespread bribery was and wanted to do something about it. He came up with the idea of printing zero-denomination notes and handing them out to officials whenever he was asked for kickbacks as a way to show his resistance.

Interestingly, the concept has proven to be somewhat effective, with reports that it has changed the behavior of corrupt public and private officials. Anand thinks the notes work because corrupt officials so rarely encounter resistance that they get scared when they do. And ordinary people are more willing to protest, since the notes have an organisation behind them and they do not feel on their own.

Whatever the reason of its success, the zero-note is a simple initiative that is helping to transform the social norms of a society where corruption is systematically endemic. It surely is something that Transparency International PNG, and particularly the PNG-based Business Against Corruption Alliance (BACA), should investigate as a possible grassroots campaign.

没人说的话看不出来Frank Wilczek是头牛－nobel prize laureate, 21岁就搞出来他的炸药奖了。不过牛不一定牛气冲天，这位就很低调，很朴素，很和谐，即使是上身西服脚踏旅游，你依然挡不住炸药光环的buff。人家一口 pizza一个饱嗝地跟你谈particle physics theory，string theory，然后刷刷两排xx作用力公式，差距就看出来了，好好学习，天天向上吧。

牛人说未来几年将是particle的黄金时期；biophysics theory？I don’t know。

招Postdoc要有高质量paper，good recommendation，还有最重要一点，看你顺眼，这就看造化了

牛人渴了，点名要coca，百事再次遭到无视。。。