Friday, August 26, 2011

Fyziks is Fun!


A property of quantum mechanics denotes that couplings on elementary particles diminish in strength as energy is made to interact with the forces responsible for holding said particles together. It is also true that the strength of the forces between particles increases with distance/decreased energy level. The force between these particles increases indefinately with distance.

I had also once read somewhere that seperating quarks (elementary constituents of more familiar particles) would create such an energy vacuum that the space formed between the seperating quarks would be spontaneously filled with more quarks ad infinitum. Wtf!

There are four forces responsible for holding all objects in the universe together. These forces can and have been measured, and differ in strength when compared to one another. Sofar there is no verified proof of the mechanism that is responsible for allowing these forces to work, though there appears to exist undiscovered particle interactions (i.e. higgs mechanism) by which forces such as gravity are fully explained (this is why things fall to the earth when I drop them!).

Since most of theoretical physics involves higher level mathematics, it’s daunting to read through a couple paragraphs of a university level text on String Theory, but it is possible to break the formulas down into written descriptions that anybody can understand. The reason that this simplification is usually not done revolves around the fact that mathematicians are the laziest people on the planet. Their preferred method of communication makes use of shorthand logic symbols called operators, whose purpose is to manipulate complex, imaginary, rational, irrational, transcendental, prime, and base-xx numbers. Math is very similar to programming in that it is a set of instructions whereby input is fed and output follows (think of functions).

Absolute space and time – the Newtonian concepts of space and time, in which space is independent of the material bodies within it, and time flows at the same rate throughout the universe without regard to the locations of different observers and their experience of “now.”

Big bang theory – the theory that the universe began with a violent explosion of space-time, and that matter and energy originated from an infinitely small and dense point.

Black hole – created when a dying star collapses to a singular point, concealed by an “event horizon;” the black hole is so dense that not even a beam of light cannot escape its gravitational pull. Black holes are prisons of light. It is not possible to “see” a black hole, but only infer its existence based on astronomical anomalies such as binary stars and the so-called Supermassive black holes reputed to exist at the centers of galaxies. It is only after all other possibilities have been ruled out that one can claim a certain region of space is inhabited by a black hole.

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