Génesis García Rivera: Weight in Water

As human beings we like to know the world around us. As we grow up we realize that most of the nature, objects, and events around us have a reason to be. We learn the reason for the rain, the storms, the twisters. We find out that in the moon a person can float, the mass is the same, but the weight changes from the one you have on planet Earth, and that is due to the difference of gravity between the Earth and the Moon. An event that is quite interesting is the fact that a person can weight much less submerged in water. It may be an event we do not understand, but it truly is fascinating.

How come a seven year old little girl could carry her nineteen year old sister  submerged in water when on the ground the little girl can barely even make her sister move a few steps? It is not an easy job to explain the little girl why this happens, but she sure enjoys it. She can carry her sister all around the water and for her that is quite fun. She does not understand it. Eventually she will learn about science. She will learn that everything around us has an explanation. The classes may serve to help her grow in mind. She learns about the water cycle and how the water transforms in the different states. The mass is not created or destructed, it transforms. She learns about the properties of the earth, the way her body works and how it changes, she learns she must make certain force just to be moving all the time, and when it comes to moving something else, even more force must be applied. All this learning leads to more questions. It feeds the hunger to learn, to understand and to appreciate the events around her. But there is never enough knowledge, we keep learning until the day we day. Answers are given and more question rise in our minds until eventually the girl wonders why can I person weight much less submerged under water than on the ground.

That question leads to physics. The answer to that doubt is all in the forces that are applied to a body when it is submerged in a liquid, which in this case we consider is water. It is of common knowledge that gravity is force on every single object on Earth at any moment. This means even when a person or an object is submerged in water will still have the force of gravity upon it. That rule does not change. The only way that force can be canceled, or at least lessen its amount is by having another force facing the opposite direction from the force of gravity. This lead to having them against each other. Since, just like in the moon, our weight changes with gravity, we can assume that the force done from the water, upwards and towards the surface, must be bigger than the force of gravity applied. Since the water force is pushing upwards, this makes it easier to lift a person submerged in water.

In conclusion, science can explain the events around us. Little by little we learn the reasons why. When it comes to all the object on earth, they all have a force of gravity acting upon them. The weight changes when the gravity does. Which means that if there is a certain force acting against the gravity, and this force is bigger, the weight of the object or person will be affected, lessening it. This is the reason why it could be easy for a seven year old girl to carry her nineteen year old sister, as long as they are submerged in water.

Jairo Rosado Soto: Dark energy and the rate of expansion of the universe

When any person hears the word, Physics, usually what first comes to mind is nature and its behaviors; well for me I usually imagine and think to myself of the universe as whole. The universe is everything, and having such a wide term makes us question so many things about life and the existence of what we can see and might never see. It wasn’t even 100 years ago when humanity thought the universe was static, everlasting and unchanging. It wasn’t until around 1927 when an astronomer by the name of Edwin Hubble proposed and confirmed that the universe is expanding. This is now known as the Hubble’s law which serves as an important piece of information for many physicist and astronomers today.

Now with this law being confirmed many questions arise in this modern era. What is the fate of the universe? Will we ever get to travel and discover more of this unknown? Will the universe someday stop expanding? These and many more are questions that physicist, astronomers, and even normal citizens ask themselves. Now what we do know is with the advances in technology every day that passes by we get closer to answering some, maybe smaller, questions. One of these is the realization of a phenomenon called “dark energy”. We don’t know what dark energy is yet, but we’re getting a better idea each day that passes by.

Dark energy is a phenomenon that was discovered in 1998 which could turn out to be the predominant force in the universe, instead of gravity. This is without a doubt one of the phenomenon’s that is being studied and explored the most by the scientific community during this era. The study of dark energy could lead to knowing more of how the universe began or how its future will be like. Many questions will always remain unanswered and new questions will always arise, but if we someday get to know if dark energy has always been this way or if it has changed over time. This can lead us to know if the future will be dark and empty because galaxies continue to move apart from each other at very fast rates, or if the rate of expansion of the universe will slow down.

All these questions and slightly possible answers may still be events billions to even trillions of years away, but we might at least get hints of it today. Any scientist would hope to see signs of what is to be of the future by looking and studying the behaviors of dark energy in the past and present. Dark energy is estimated to be around 75% of the mass-energy in the universe, it might depend on your source, with the other 25% being baryons, which is what atoms are made of (protons and neutrons), and dark matter. Now dark matter is another mysterious subject that has led to many questions of our universe.

Dark matter is a non-luminous matter that doesn’t absorb or radiate light, but acts normally under gravity. Now dark energy and dark matter are commonly confused for the same thing, but in reality they are probably complete opposites. The only thing common between both is that they’re invisible and we aren’t 100% sure what either of them are. Now unlike dark energy, which is almost a complete mystery to us, we do have some information on what dark matter is. In simple terms, dark matter is an invisible mass that holds galaxies together and without it galaxies and stars probably would not exist. It basically works like atoms and ordinary matter, in holding the universe together.

Now I say all this information because it leads to one important topic: the rate of expansion of the universe. I found research from BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, which is basically a survey designed for an optical telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, US. Baryon oscillations, sound waves in the universe, I learned are a way to measure the expansion rate of the cosmos (universe) and it can provide a more detailed look at dark energy. Now I found research that BOSS around 2 weeks ago revealed that they had mapped 164,000 galaxies estimated around 11 billion light-years away. This means that light left these galaxies when the Universe was more or less 3 billion years old.

These advances and studies of the cosmos are exactly what are needed to maybe have a better understanding of dark matter, dark energy, and our ever expanding universe. These results provide the most accurate measure humanity has had of the rate of expansion of the universe 11 billion years ago. This data is a possibility to answers on some of the most profound questions we have on the nature of dark energy and can lead to a more profound understanding of the universe. With the advances in technology every single day that passes by who knows if we are closer than ever before to understanding dark energy and dark matter, and to one of the biggest discoveries known to man.

Ivonne Pérez Rodríguez: Importance of Quantum Mechanics for the modern world

Quantum mechanics is a science that deals with the behavior of matter and energy at nanoscopic scales. Quantum mechanics it is responsible for many technological advances that make life easier. This branch of physics has influenced our daily lives by making modernism possible. Quantum mechanics it’s very complex to understand but its applications are countless. Without it there would be no transistor, and hence no personal computers and there would be no laser, and hence no Blu-ray players. Those are examples of some technological contributions from quantum mechanics but it haven’t just contributed in the technological field but also in the health field. 

Before the transistor, computers worked with vacuum tubes. Vacuum tubes were very big, fragile and generated a lot of heat. If you wanted a powerful computer, you needed to have a big space for it and a considerable amount of money. People were not able to have computers like those. Just some companies had them. Thanks to the discoveries in quantum mechanics and the manipulation of the semiconductor properties, transistors were created. After the appearance of transistors in our world, the first transistor-based computer was created. This computer, different from the vacuum tube ones, was reliable had a low power consumption, occupied less space and it was cheaper. After that computer many more were fabricated and then the need of hook them all together arise. So we can say that quantum mechanics its an indirect promoter for the Internet creation. Also transistors appearance in our world opened the door to transistor radios and many other technologies we daily use as cellphones and ipods.

A lot of new materials can be created from different particles studied by quantum mechanics that might help in our technological advancement. As an example there is a particle that it is currently being studied that can be used to improve the material in solar panels making them more efficient for electricity generation. Quantum mechanics has also contributed in accuracy. It contributed to the creation of ultraprecise clocks. Many people will wonder why the precision of time is so important without knowing that many measurements are done based on time like the GPS. Another example of accuracy improvement thanks to this field is the quantum thermometer, a thermometer capable of measuring extreme temperatures with accuracy. This kind of thermometer it is very useful at research laboratories and places were extreme temperatures need to be measured. 

Other contribution of quantum mechanics that we can mention is the discovery of the laser. Thanks to Max Planck and this new field of physics we can apply laser technology in many things like CD players, health care, defense systems, among others. As this contribution to physics and our world, many others can arise if more people get involve in this field of study.

For all these things mentioned above, I believe that quantum mechanics is a promising field for technological advancement in our world. This field has helped us to better understand our world in detail and many new aspects of physics.

Pedro I. Justiniano Narváez: Physics: The Universe and Its Secrets

In this Universe that we live in, contains a vast amount of secrets that are unknown to man. These secrets have been a curiosity to mankind since before the great Greek philosophers and scientist like Aristotle and Plato, and to this day we do not know all of it. Physics is the science that tries to uncover all of the unknown through observations and analysis of all the phenomena we experience every day. Physics is applied to almost everything imaginable, from chemistry to biology, from planet rotations to a proton. Great minds like Planck, Stephen Hawkins, Hubble, Isaac Newton and the famous Albert Einstein have tried and contributed to our understanding of how the universe is and how it works. And to this day, the discoveries that Albert Einstein has made are still being interpreted and used to make explanation of the Universe.  Through Physics many unknown marvels have been discovered and the most recent ones were possible through Einstein’s contributions and his ideas.

One of the most famous physicists, Albert Einstein, changed history during his lifetime. He proposed some mind raveling ideas that to this day are not fully understood. Einstein discovered the extremely famous theory of relativity which we all have heard of it before even if we do not understand it. It is thought that in 1931 Einstein was the first to attempt to build a model of the Universe using his ideas and concepts that he thought to were true. He made the “Lambda” which is a term he used “that would counteract gravity and allow the whole system to stay beautifully in balance” (Powell 1).  Although, some people argue that he quit trying to fully understand this term, others say that he kept experimenting with it and came to the conclusion that “as space expands, new matter appears out of nowhere to fill the new empty space. The two processes balance out, so that the average density of the cosmos never changes” (Powell 1).   This contradicts one of the fundamental laws in Physics which is mass cannot be created nor destroyed, only transformed.  This conclusion that Einstein made up can be better explained using Dark Energy. This “Lambda” is now regarded as a new way of seeing the Universe by thinking it as an energy field or matter-creation field. All of this explained here was derived from the General Theory of Relativity and even though Einstein stopped implementing “lambda” in his research it is used to this day.

If one can go deeper into the foundation of all of these discoveries recently made in Physics most can be traced down to one of Einstein’s greatest treasure that he left mankind, the Theory of Relativity. This theory is not yet approved to become a law because there is not a conventional way of proving this and for it to become a law it needs a lot of experimentation and there cannot be an exception, but it has been used to explain many and extremely important phenomena in our Universe. It was used by Hubble to explain how the Universe is constantly expanding on its own; it is also used by Karl Schwarzschild who was one of the first scientists to propose the idea of the black holes. This theory helped create the area of Physics known as Quantum Physics when Einstein did an experiment implementing the Theory of Relativity to back up Planck’s experiment that proposed “that light energy exists not as continuous waves, but as a stream of miniscule quanta particles or units” (Burgess 1). It was also used to understand and propose the most accepted idea of the creation of the Universe, The Big Bang Theory. If the Theory of Relativity comes out to be false, all of the latest understandings and discoveries made in the last 20 to 40 years could end up in a trash can, due that most of them have come from the simple equation , E=mc^2, which means, energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. 

There are still a lot of discoveries and mysteries that the Universe contains. That is why scientist are working hard to fully understand the “why” and the ‘how” everything works because if we do understand it, we may implement that knowledge in some of our everyday living. And other brilliant minds like Newton’s, or Aristotle’s will keep on discovering new things about Physics and helping mankind understand this complex place that we live in. Although Einstein died more than 50 years ago, his ideas and his theories are his legacies that he left to mankind to act as guidelines to help us unravel all the secrecy the Universe contains.

Citations:

Burgess, Joanna. "10 Discoveries Relativity Made Possible: Discovery Channel." Discovery Channel. N.p., n.d. Web. . .

Powell, Corey. "On His 135th Birthday, Einstein is Still Full of Surprises - Out There | Discovermagazine.com." Out There. Discover, 14 Mar. 2014. Web. . .

Mario Figueroa Colon: Physics of Rainbow

So many topics in physics to think about and to write about because physics is in our everyday life and we can put physics in almost anything but I found one very interesting and it is rainbows. Rainbows are very rare you can see them but you can’t touch them depending from where you see it you can see it very large or very short if you’re in a plane you can see a full circle not just the arc these ones are called glory. Some legends say that “rainbows were once used to symbolize snakes, and that they for-tell the arrival of evil." In other places rather they symbolize God's promise to never send another flood to destroy the whole world.

Rainbows have seven colors starting from down to the top we can see red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet also known as Roy G. Biv, from these seven colors the white light is made that means the sun light is made of the same seven colors we can see that with a prism the prism can break the white light in the seven colors of the rainbow. On cloudy days rain drops act like the prism and let us see the rainbow breaking or bending the sunlight. This can be also made without the rain or even in the dark just with a disk and a flashlight what it happens is that the light bends when you use the flashlight on the disk and the light made refraction so the colors of the rainbow are seen.  Yes refraction not reflection the refraction meaning is the fact or phenomenon of light, radio waves, etc., being deflected in passing obliquely through the interface between one medium and another or through a medium of varying density.

These phenomena mechanics have been study for a long period of time Descartes was one that studied rainbows. Descartes made a sketch describing the conditions required to see a rainbow that it says the sun have to be directly behind him and the light that reflects from the raindrops are to be ahead of him between 40.6 degrees and 42.2 degrees centered point where the shadow of the head would be. 

The eye forms the image on the retina, where the light is sensed, the cornea those 80% of the refracting work. Our eyes can’t detect light emitted from objects mostly infrared the light we can see is from the sun or artificial light. When we see objects we see reflected light immediate bouncing of incident light. Occasionally we see light that has been absorbed then reemitted at a different wavelength (time delay but just a tiny fraction). 

That’s how our eye can see the rainbow is very fascinating all of these and there’s plenty more to study about all these wave of lights and how to make a better perform of the eye I believe that studying these phenomena mechanics we can build a lot of different useful machines for energy resources and also for human eye performances as some new glasses that can be adjustable for many scale of view. Rainbows are very interesting phenomena that could teach us much more.

Hidalgo Pomales Delgado: Physic, Theories and God

In this article I am going to write about the physics and the universe. In addition to that, I will mention my own opinion about the theory of the Big Bang and the existence of God. In first place we need to know what are physics and the applications. Physics is the study of the laws of nature that applies many principles from other sciences such as biology, astronomy, chemistry and geology. The physics study the matter and energy while describing the behavior of each component of the universe. The physicists are often researchers who analyses nature and aspects related to nature. These scientists combine their creativity, attributes and problem solving capacity to successfully advance across the barriers of the universe. Furthermore, during this semester we have study many phenomenon in nature and understand the relationship between the universe and science.

On the other hand, I think that physic is great because is versatile, put the math to use, explains, teaches you to think and it can make things possible. I mention that physic is versatile due to the exploration of near and far mysteries of the universe. In terms of mathematics, it provides the tools for physicists to understand the world we live in. Furthermore, one important thing attribute about the physic is that it teaches the learner to think, and develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills. As part of this advantage, the physicists have created many objects that facilitate our daily lives. For me, that is the main reason why the physic is one of the most important sciences in our world. 

Now, there is an important theory about the creation of the universe. This theory is known as the Big Bang. This theory literally, is the time of nothingness emerge all matter, ie the origin of the universe. Matter, so far, is a point of infinite density, which at one point explodes generating the expansion of matter in all directions and creating what we know as our universe. On the other hand, let remember about the First Law of Thermodynamics and the Law of Conservation of Matter. The First Law of Thermodynamics establishes that energy can be neither created nor destroyed and the Law of Conservation of Matter establishes that matter can be neither created nor destroyed as the energy. These laws directly contradict the theory of Big Bang because there is no way that from the nothing emerges all matter, unless that a divine origin occurred. In a specific moment it was created by someone who was all-powerful. This is my opinion in terms of the origin of the universe and the unsupported Big Bang theory. 

If you take the Big Bang theory as a mathematic equation, you have:

                  0=0+0+0+⋯   Because something have been created from nothing

Now rewrite 0 = 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + … as:

                  0=(1-1)+(1-1)+(1-1)+⋯

Take out the parenthesis:

    0=1-1+1-1+1-1+1…

Now regroup parenthesis again:

  0=1+(-1+1)+(-1+1)+(-1+1)+⋯

You have:

  0=1+0+0+0+⋯

Finally:

  0 = 1

This represents that from the nothing you cannot create something. It should be created by someone. I am not necessary proving the existence of God, but in my opinion there is no way that the universe was created from nothing.

Alex Agudo: Simply Just a Genius

He’s well known around the world. Famous Scientist and Physicist. At 30 years of age had already achieved most of all his important work. Winner of a Nobel Prize. His legacy work, is taught and used today. This and much more was accomplished by Dr. Albert Einstein. Who was a 20th Century Physicist, born in 1879 on Germany and died on New Jersey in 1955. So what is some of his work? Probably the two most know are the relativity or special relativity theory and the equivalence of matter and energy better known as E=MC2 equation. 

The papers containing these two ideas were ignored at first. Let’s take a look at what really are these ideas. So Einstein, presented the idea of relativity in 1905, however, he completed the Theory of relativity in 1915. But this wouldn’t have been possible without the attention of Max Planck. The theory predicted the perihelion of Mercury’s orbit, a prediction that Newton’s theory fell short of accomplishing; also predicted a measurable deflection of light around the sun when a planet or another sun orbited near the sun. So, a definition of the theory would be: (a) laws of physics are all the same for all non-accelerating observers, (b) the speed of light within a vacuum is the same no matter the speed at which an observer travels. With those definitions as a base, he conclude that space and time were interwoven into a single continuum, called space-time. In other words an event that occurs at the same time for an observer could occur at different times for another observer. 

Moving on to another important part of Einstein’s legacy, the equality of matter and energy idea paper “Does the Inertia of a body Depend upon Its Energy Content?” was presented also on 1905, and had the comments and experiment help of Planck, proving the theories. As matter of fact the resulting equation is derived from the relativity theory. So what does the equation means? It relates the equality of the kinetic energy (E) to the mass (M) as the speed of light is a constant so it never changes (C2). This shows us the possibility of changing mass into energy and energy to mass. This is tied to the nuclear energy, smashing particles and capturing the resultant energy, which proves one part of the equation. And the other part is perfectly demonstrated by the particle acceleration process, where low-mass particles zipping through a device collide to form large particles; this process can be achieved in facilities like the “Large Hadron Collider” at CERN. So Einstein is an indirect father to the nuclear bomb. He didn’t participate on the project but the whole idea and realization of the bomb was entirely based on E=MC2 equation. 

Einstein won the Physics Nobel Prize in 1921 for discovering the Law of photoelectric effect, which states that when a substance is bombarded by photons (light), electrons will be released by that substance, creating energy; this is why the solar cells can exist. He only won it for this law, because the relativity theory and the equality of matter ad energy where still unknown and not very understandable at that moment. Another curious fact of Einstein, is that he actually came up with these ideas wile working as a Patent Clerk, using his free time on working these ideas which subsequently will make him a well Known genius and probably one of the most capable and intelligent human being ever to exist, and as he said once: “Try not to become a man pf success, but rather try to become a man of value”, and he surely did became a man of value.