The Science Cheerleader recently highlighted a resource with several physics theory songs provided by Haverford College.

Please see her post HERE to learn more about this resource.

Creating a world.
Cultivating a culture,
From the dust,
From the amoeba
From the old
Nothing—
No thing.

Gently weaving,
Stitching,
Sewing,
Spinning a web

Caressing our faces,
Adding lines

Pointing to dates,
Locations

Conducting the tune,
Controlling the symphony
Signing the song
So we—
You and me
can sing along.

The hands of time—
Are…

Much of the beauty that arises in art comes from the struggle an artist wages with his limited medium.

- Henri Matisse

I would like to start my short essay about paper folding with that quote by Matisse.  We often struggle with means in this lifetime, and in the process of creating any art or output from our work, those we did under great limitations and duress, end up as symbols of our pride.

I am inspired to write this after watching the 2008 award-winning documentary by Vanessa Gould entitled “Between the Folds”.  I watched it not expecting too much from the art of folding paper which is Origami. As the film goes on, I felt guilty for lowering my expectations too much.  It is exactly what I wanted:  Finding big correlation between Science and Art.

The documentary started with an Origami artist saying “You and I are born through folding.” We don’t often think we came from folding, the moment he said that this world is defined by the folds in our clothes, the fold in objects around us, the fold of our eyelids, the fold of the sound wave mechanicss across air, and the folding of time-space continuum itself, things started to get interesting.  I agree fully with what the Alchemists in the past believed:  Beauty can be brought from the mundane.

A fold is just a mere fold, and yet, there is a deep science behind it.  Origami is math, logic, art and physics theory combined.  It is also applied in nanotechnology, medicine, biology, natural science and even space technology.

How the hell can that be? You may be inclined to ask.

The documentary, like any other brilliantly written ones, should start with the origins.  I just found out that Modern Origami is basically a young art, popularized by Akira Yoshizawa (1909-2005):

This man is quite extraordinary.  He has created over 50,000 origami models throughout his life, but he never sold a single work.  Akira survived by doing odd jobs and even selling soup door-to-door.  He was the first artist to use wet paper in origami.  A self-taught man ahead of his time, as Vanessa Gould describes him.  Notice that there’s so much humility and class in how Akira lived, doing one thing that probably makes him happy.

Who are his disciples?  Those modern-day origami artists presented in the documentary have these occupations: Engineer, Scientist, Artists, Professors, Mathematicians,  and Historians.  You can say that anyone can paper fold.

Now to go back to the question how can origami be applied to various sciences.  I would like to enumerate the relevance:

• Mathematics – origami follows symmetry, if folds are carefully measured and planned, mathematical shapes can be created, like the origami of polypolyhedrons below that can also be represented by equations:

Polypolyhedron named Makalu

Polypolyhedron named K2

• Art – The documentary depicts that the Art of origami does not rely on capturing the details of real objects or living things per se, because paper will never be able to do that.  Instead, the art is on depicting the truth, about simplifying the details and still evoke a strong emotion.  Akira Yoshizawa’s works are a good example, he made the paper look like they’ll breath anytime:

• physics theory - Car airbags should work perfectly during accidents, one big consideration is how the bag is folded, origami helped in that aspect

• Nanotechnology & Medicine - in curing degenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and other genetic ‘error’, a nanomachine can be engineered to fold in a manner that will attach itself to a virus and detach itself from a host cell, leading eventually to eradication of the virus cells and cure

• Space Technology – the study of space owes itself much to space telescopes, by folding lenses, they can easily be deployed via rockets and unfolded in space upon deployment, pretty neat!

That being said, I did a simple experiment to see if folding paper can be seen differently.  I took a picture of a crumpled paper, an ordinary and plain one, and had this:

Just by mere folding, the paper mimicked the watercolor-like images of mountains similar with old Japanese artworks.  The shading and texture provided dimension in tones of dark, gray and white.  What is amusing about this activity is that it was done effortlessly.

To sum it up, I now look at Origami as confluence — the combination of many disciplines and natural laws to come up with a new form, idea, and experience.  It led me to believe the principle of Alchemy all the more:  The principle of equivalent trade, you must first take it seriously, and with great attention to detail and patient execution, value can be derived.

Origami after all is created with  intentions, unless you just happen to crumple a paper.

physics theory, FORTRAN, Games and Cocoa

This blog is not going to be about, how the Large Hadron Collider will end the world, how worldwide media are in a conspiracy to exaggerate the truth about Climate Change, or how Hollywood is failing to adhere to the strict rules of physics theory (actually I can’t guarantee posts on that won’t happen – heres looking at you ‘The Core’). This blog is going to be about my trials and tribulations, in learning Post Graduate level physics theory, coding useful physical applications in FORTRAN, parallelising code to run on large super computers, and my new hobby learning to code in object orientated C, known as Cocoa, with an ultimate aim of developing and designing a new standard in multiplayer iPhone games.

physics theory

The physics theory I will discuss could range from the simplest; such that an A-level student could understand, to the rather more complex areas, such as Quantum physics theory, aimed at more of a Graduate level, and will compliment my current field of research into ab initio molecular dynamics. Discussing important news and views from the bleeding-edge world of physics theory. My grounding in physics theory comes from my first degree; Integrated Masters in physics theory (MPhys (Hons.)) from the University of Salford in Manchester, UK in physics theory with Space Technology. Following on from my First with Honours, I have undertaken the mammoth task of a PhD at King’s College University in London, working within the excellent Thomas Young Centre.

Programming

I don’t class myself as a programming expert and yet I have always been willing to help when my colleagues have come to me for advise. I started on the long programming road learning the simplest language (if you can really call it programming), HTML, moving onto the more versatile and yet utterly useless language of PASCAL (Delphi) at Salford. During my Masters, I designed and wrote a simple car-following model, learning C++ from scratch to use simple objects to control the model cars in the system.

Since then I have found out that the majority of scientific coding is done in the low-level language FORTRAN for simplicity of coding practises, cheap mathematical computational cost, easy integration with Message Passing Interfaces (MPI), and large multitude of prebuilt mathematical libraries for scientists. So have learnt to programming simple ‘post processing’ applications to read and analyse simple outputs from plane wave mechanics ab intio codes such as Quantum ESPRESSO, and am now working towards the development of new coding implementations within the ESPRESSO code, adding new (and exciting!) additional features.

As a hobby I have also  begun to learn to code in Object-C (Cocoa) using XCode 3.2 on the Mac OSX operating system, going back to basics with simple programs, hopefully progressing to development for the seminal iPhone hardware with the (modest) aim of revolutionising the multiplayer gaming sector with new ideas and features never before seen on a mobile devise – I have big plans, just need to learn to code them!

So sit back, relax and enjoy physics theory, FORTRAN, games and Cocoa – and please feel free to comment!

Question:

Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

Answer:

Using Boyle’s Law, we know that gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed. But first, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time, so we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving.

I think we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving.

As for how many souls are entering Hell, let’s look at the different religions that exist in the world today.
- Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell.
- Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can deduce that all souls go to Hell.
- With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially.

Boyle’s Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added… so looking at the rate of change of the volume in Hell gives two possibilities:

1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.

2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Mary Joleisa last year that, “It will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you,” and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number two must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over.

The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct… leaving only Heaven and thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Mary Joleisa kept shouting “Oh my God.”

- Nadir

When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
When I heard the learn’d astronomer
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Walt Whitman

Introduction
When the subject of science comes up, many people identify with what the student in Walt Whitman’s poem has to say, we see science as something abstract, boring and esoteric. If anything, it seems that scientists are more interested in charts, diagrams and equations and simply unable to appreciate the beauty of the world around them. Who wants to be stuck in a boring lecture hall hearing about star formation, or sit in front of a computer crunching the numbers that simulate a star’s shine, when you can go out and just look up and appreciate the majesty around you? Now I know that several of the science geeks out there will disagree with what was just said and will argue that science is beautiful; that there is just as much beauty in those equations and diagrams. As you look up into the night sky, the theories and explanations that science offers doesn’t take away from the beauty of a starry night but enhances it. But if science is so aesthetically beautiful, why hasn’t it been written in song or talked about in poetry? Is science so dry and devoid of human emotion that we are unable to connect with it on some level? Is it so far removed from the human condition? The answers may surprise you.

A Night at the Opera
In 1975, Queen recorded the song “’39”, written by Brian May, for their fourth studio album “A Night at the Opera”. It is very apparent that the song lyrics and melody speaks of a soulful separation from one’s loved ones and the world but is there more to the story? Before we begin to analyze the song we should first look to its writer. Brian was an astronomy PhD student at Imperial College studying the reflected light from interplanetary dust and the velocity of dust in the plane of the solar system while teaching math and rehearsing with his new rock band, Queen. Though his PhD thesis was almost complete, circumstances would force Brian to explore other options; his student grant had dried up, Queen was becoming successful and he felt he was being pulled in so many directions that something had to go. In the end, the PhD got chucked, much to his parent’s dismay, and science’s loss was rock music’s gain.

A Night at the Opera

But the song “’39” isn’t just a mournful story of loss or yearning. It is also a science fiction story that centers around the relativistic effect known as time dilation. This concept, deeply rooted in physics theory and first discovered by Albert Einstein in his 1905 Annus Marabilis paper, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”, describes the effect of a clock slowing down, as seen by an observer, as it approaches the speed of light. In this paper, Einstein reconciles the paradox that Maxwell’s theory of electricity and magnetism posed with Newton’s laws of mechanics. So what does this mean for the song? To best answer this question, we turn to Brian’s response in his 1983 Guitar Greats interview on BBC Radio One. Brian says:
“It’s a science fiction story. It’s the story about someone who goes away and leaves his family and because of the time dilation effect, when you go away, the people on earth have aged a lot more than he has when he comes home. He’s aged a year and they’ve aged 100 years so, instead of coming back to his wife, he comes back to his daughter and he can see his wife in his daughter, a strange story. I think, also, I had in mind a story of Herman Hesse which I think is called ‘The River’. A man leaves his hometown and has lots of travels and then comes back and observes his hometown from the other side of the river. He sees it in a different light having been away and experienced all those different things. He sees it in a very illuminating way, cause I felt a little bit like that about my home at the time as well having been away and seen this vastly different world of Rock music. Totally different from the way I was brought up and I had those feelings about Home.
So usually the song, I think people generally usually won’t admit it, but I think when most people write songs there are more than one level to them. They’ll be about one thing on the surface but underneath they’re probably, even unconsciously, trying to say something about their own life, their own experience. I know in my own stuff there is something like that.”
A physics theory Problem
So we see the multi-faceted metaphor behind the song though Brian does get one thing incorrect, the Herman Hesse poem isn’t “The River” but “The Poet” but the central theme is correct as we will see from the song’s lyrics. The physicists amongst us will recognize this isn’t just as a science fiction story but a physics theory problem as well and Brian has managed to do what few sci-fi stories have done; get the science right. We can use clues in the song to determine the speed at which our space-farers are going. For the mathematically anxious amongst you, I can assure you there is nothing more here than simple algebra. The time dilation equation can be expressed

where is the tick of the clock on Earth, is the tick of the clock of our travelers, is the speed the travelers are moving relative to Earth and is the speed of light. The lyrics to the song go ’39

In the year of ’39
Assembled here the volunteers
In the days when lands were few.
Here the ship sailed out into the blue and sunny mornin’,
The sweetest sight ever seen.
And the night followed day,
And the storytellers say
That the score brave souls inside
For many a lonely day
Sailed across the milky seas
Ne’er looked back, never feared, never cried.

Don’t you hear my call
Though you’re many years away?
Don’t you hear me calling you?
Write your letters in the sand
For the day I take your hand
In the land that our grandchildren knew.

In the year of ’39
Came a ship in from the blue,
The volunteers came home that day.
And they bring good news
Of a world so newly born,
Though their hearts so heavily weigh.
For the earth is old and grey
To a new home we’ll away,
But my love this cannot be,
For so many years have gone
Though I’m older but a year
Your mother’s eyes from your eyes cry to me.

Don’t you hear my call
Though you’re many years away?
Don’t you hear me calling you?
Write your letters in the sand
For the day I’ll take your hand
In the land that our grandchildren knew.

Don’t you hear my call
Though you’re many years away?
Don’t you hear me calling you?
All your letters in the sand
Cannot heal me like your hand,
For my life
Still ahead.
Pity me.

Queen, written by Brian May

We can now examine the song as a physics theory problem and determine the speed of the ship. Maybe some time in the future, mankind will learn to travel the stars at speeds close to the speed of light. Unfortunately, it’s nothing like we see with Star Trek’s warp drive but the physics theory is rooted in special relativity. From lines 1 and 20, we can tell the journey takes a total of 100 years, let . We see from line 30, that only one year has passed on the ship so, . Plugging what we know into eq. (1), we get

Solving for shows that the travelers are moving at 99.995% the speed of light; not quite the speed of light but very close. But the song goes much further, it doesn’t just describe the time dilation effect, it also discusses the very human implications of this mission.
The Poet and the Time Traveler

How does this contrast to Hesse’s “The Poet”? Are there any similarities and if so, what are they?

The Poet
Only on me, the lonely one,
The unending stars of the night shine,
The stone fountain whispers its magic song,
To me alone, to me the lonely one
The colorful shadows of the wandering clouds
Move like dreams over the open countryside.
Neither house nor farmland,
Neither forest nor hunting privilege is given to me,
What is mine belongs to no one,
The plunging brook behind the veil of the woods,
The frightening sea,
The bird whir of children at play,
The weeping and singing, lonely in the evening, of a man secretly in love.
The temples of the gods are mine also, and mine
the aristocratic groves of the past.
And no less, the luminous
Vault of heaven in the future is my home:
Often in full flight of longing my soul storms upward,
To gaze on the future of blessed men,
Love, overcoming the law, love from people to people.
I find them all again, nobly transformed:
Farmer, king, tradesman, busy sailors,
Shepherd and gardener, all of them
Gratefully celebrate the festival of the future world.
Only the poet is missing,
The lonely one who looks on,
The bearer of human longing, the pale image
Of whom the future, the fulfillment of the world
Has no further need. Many garlands
Wilt on his grave,
But no one remembers him.

Hermann Hesse

It is clear from the Queen song, the protagonist of the song feels separated from those around him. He comes from a different time, one that is 100 years in the past but must, unfortunately, live in the present; the time traveler is still a young man and still has a long life ahead of him and he now must struggle to find his place in a world that is not his. This contrasts beautifully with the Hermann Hesse poem, as the poet too feels a similar longing and separation from those around him. He too is unable to integrate with those around him and can only look on as everyone lives their lives.
So you see, science is not as boring as the student in the “Learn’d Astronomer” poem thinks. Science is a very integral part of our lives and is a part of the world around us. Science is a part of the human condition.

You will be assimilated – or perhaps it is waht you will have to assimilate. Whatever – the introduction to simple direct current (DC) circuits is a very simple topic. What is more difficult is understanding the underlying principles and concepts – What is a current? What causes it start “flowing”? What exactly is “voltage”? What does it do? Where does it go?

These questions are a lot more difficult (and a lot more interesting!) than the level of  DC circuit analysis that we do in unit 1 physics theory. However, it is necessary to concentrate on the Circuit analysis before we get back into the fun stuff.

Let us meditate:

Ommmmm

Oommmm

Ohmmmm

Ohmmm’s LAW!

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