Physics in our World

Victor E David Cruz

Since the first day of humanity, we have look forward to advance and evolve in every way possible. In the beginning our minds were full of question, so many that seems impossible to answer all of them, but with time we have found an explication to all of those question or at least to most of them. And the secret to success is Physic; this science is the main responsible for our knowledge about mostly everything. It explains how the moon behaves, how the world was created, it has been used for wars as lethal weapons and used to give place for maybe the greatest invention of all time: the light.

For this reason is very important to understand that physics is in our daily life, we used constantly and technically every day. For example we can relate the concepts of mass, force, and acceleration with cars, in sport like boxing, basketball, tennis, etc. The light for once, we cannot live without it, not nowadays. It was invented for maybe the greatest inventor of all times: Thomas Edison. Edison in 1879 used low current electricity along with a small carbonized filament, and an improved vacuum inside the globe, to give birth to a reliable source of light. The invention of the light bulb gave room to many other related inventions like: the devices for maintaining constant voltage, the parallel circuit and light sockets with on-off switches. But the big thing here is to realize that while Edison holds a world record of approximately 1,100 inventions, what he used in order to create all of his invention is known as Physics and as difficult that might appear to comprehend all of this an explanation of how all this works can be found in a Physics text book.

It is obvious to us now that Physics have been very useful to us lately, but it also has a dark side. For instant, Einstein’s brilliance was use to produce the atomic bomb. The simple equation E= mc2 which explains that energy equals mass times the speed of lights squared, is the responsible to the concept that a very tiny mass could be use to produce a lot of energy. But to keep it simple, I will show you how we using Physics are hurting not only us but our planet. The first thing that might come to your mind is the global warming, but this is not the only matter to concern. In case you do not know as time pass by there are less start in the sky, why? Because of light pollution, which is the emission of light output from artificial sources this is generated from an inappropriate application of exterior lighting products.  This is one of many ways that we are using Physics in context, in this case negatively.

So next time you find yourself in a Physics course think that what your professor is about to say is related not only to you but to many others. It might be difficult to erase the concept of light as an electromagnetic wave and its formulas, but remember no matter how hard Physics seems to be, nothing is new, we use it every day.