A collection of Science tit-bits
I've tried to simplify in places.
Ye're smart enough anyway.
I hope.
Antimatter:
Leaving Eden
The idea of Antimatter first came from a fella called Paul Dirac, he wasn't quite sure what he has stumbled upon. You see, he won a Nobel-peace prize in 1928 for formulating a really nice equation, its was really lovely, its still used today but now we call it a Dirac equation. Some of you might have used this equation in school during school but didn't even know it. In this equation the answer is always broken into two; a plus answer and a negative answer. Know he invented this equation not to make maths more interesting but to try and help to explain the behaviour of things called electrons.
Now pay attention heres comes the science bit: because the answer to this equation gave him two answers to his question about electrons he concluded that for every electron there is an equal but opposite twin. He called this twin the anti-electron. The idea of anti-matter therefore began to form. Now it'll start to get complicated, but bear with me, I'll try and keep it straightforward. Right! First off, what is normal Matter. Well Matter is simply the stuff that we and absolutely everything else around us is made of. Now lets image you have a really powerful microscope and you take a look at something (matter) really reallt close up, you'd spot little things called atoms, you look a little closer inside these atoms you would see a nucleus (middle of an atom) and around this nucleus you would see a little cloud of electrons. We look closer again, into the actual nucleus, we would spot protons and neutrons. Now we are smart monkeys who just love making tools, so we can take an even closer look at these protons and neutrons , a 1000 times closer in fact, and what are these protons and neutrons made of, well there are made of things we call quarks, these are the smallest things we know of, so we also call them fundamental particles. And that is what absolutely everything is made of. You, your dog, the grass and everything. So how small are these things, 1,000,000 atoms but side by side would stretch to the width of a hair.
The Smallest dot here is not an atom, its salt, the atom is the thing you can't see! next to it.
Hoorah! Background done, so what is anti-matter? Is more of less identical to matter, we can see matter, hell we are matter, but we can't see anti-matter. We can, though, make anti-matter (remember clever monkeys and our tools) in particle accelerators. The thing that makes anti-matter really weird is the fact that we don't know why there is more Matter than Antimatter. Shouldn't they be 50/50.
So what happens when Matter and Antimatter meet? well they completely destroy each other. Boom! Thanks to our man Einstein we know that E=mc2. The E means Energy, the M means Matter and the C means the speed of light. So we know what energy is made of. Now using this Einstein's equation, if you took just 1 gram of matter and using 1 gram of the anti-matter (roughly the same weight as a 5euro note) and join the two together they would destroy each other. But how big would the Boom be? Well about 100 times more than Hirosima. Now imagine taking a 1kg of both and banging them off each other, that would be 1,000 times more than a Nuclear bomb. Bye! Bye! Planet Earth. 100kg = goodluck Solar system.
Calm down, Calm down, there is absolutely no reason to worry about an anti-matter bomb, you see you can't go out and dig up anti-matter, you need to make anti-atoms one at a time, the fastest we can do that today even to make a gram who take longer than the universe will exist. Bad news, no magic source of power here either.
Boom!
So why isn't there they same amount of matter as anti-matter in the universe? Well there was for one billonth of a second after the big bang. Then, weird, matter stayed around and anti-matter vanished, well most of it did and we still can't find it. We are looking but we still haven't found it in bulk. Along comes CERN, its a massive 7km wide particle accelerator, that (monkeys tools) we have made in Geneva, using this we will make a mini big bang (some might call this a bang) right here on Earth, awesome, and then we will see what happens to the anti-matter. We're hoping to find a thing called the Higgs-Boson, some call it the God Particle, this should help explain things, you see us clever monkeys have come up with some good reasons using maths why there is more matter than anti-matter, but to prove these reasons to be true we gotta find sofar missing piece called as, aforementioned, the Higgs Boson. Come on CERN!
Cern; two particles collide going 99.999999% the speed of light
Well thats a wee bit about Anti-Matter, its truly amazing stuff, there is far more cool stuff that it does but way too much to hold your attention. maybe I'll do a part two.
Thanks, hope you enjoyed.
Infinity:
Jonathan Swift encapsulated the counter-intuitive character of infinity with insouciant style:
“So, naturalists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas on him that prey
And these hath smaller fleas to bite ‘em
And so proceed ad infinitum.”
Alas, the developing utility mathematicians put to the idea of infinity did not find the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes quite so relaxed. When confronted with a diagram depicting an infinite solid whose volume was finite, he wrote, “To understand this for sense, it is not required that a man should be a geometrician or logician, but that he should be mad”. Yet philosophers and mathematicians have continued to grapple with the unending, and it is a core concept in modern maths.
Maths:
Perceptions of the importance of mathematics have fluctuated in the 20th century, the nature of mathematical ability, and what mathematics can show us about how life began, and how it might continue.
Galileo wrote “this grand book the universe… is written in the language of mathematics”. It was said before Galileo and has been said since and in the last decades of the 20th century it is being said again, most emphatically. How important is maths in relation to other sciences at the end of the twentieth century - will it ever be made redundant, or is it increasingly crucial to our understanding of the world and ourselves? What insight can it give us into the origins of life, and the functioning of our brains, and what does it mean to say that maths has become more ‘visual’? Perhaps Maths is the language of the brain and words language of the soul.
Infinity:
Jonathan Swift encapsulated the counter-intuitive character of infinity with insouciant style:
“So, naturalists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas on him that prey
And these hath smaller fleas to bite ‘em
And so proceed ad infinitum.”
Alas, the developing utility mathematicians put to the idea of infinity did not find the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes quite so relaxed. When confronted with a diagram depicting an infinite solid whose volume was finite, he wrote, “To understand this for sense, it is not required that a man should be a geometrician or logician, but that he should be mad”. Yet philosophers and mathematicians have continued to grapple with the unending, and it is a core concept in modern maths.
Maths:
Galileo wrote “this grand book the universe… is written in the language of mathematics”. It was said before Galileo and has been said since and in the last decades of the 20th century it is being said again, most emphatically. How important is maths in relation to other sciences at the end of the twentieth century - will it ever be made redundant, or is it increasingly crucial to our understanding of the world and ourselves? What insight can it give us into the origins of life, and the functioning of our brains, and what does it mean to say that maths has become more ‘visual’? Perhaps Maths is the language of the brain and words language of the soul.
More Science stuff to come...
