Some of you are still taking the last of your finals, and some of you have already departed. For the seniors and those not taking AP Physics next year, I won’t have you in class again. I’ve enjoyed teaching all of you, and I wish the best of luck in your future endeavors. As you depart, I have a few things I’d like to share with you.
I’m going to tell you a secret now: My primary objective as an educator this year was not to teach you physics.
Yes, you read that correctly. It’s true I want you to learn physics and do good science and things, but there are more important lessons to be gained from a scientific approach to the world. Things like the power and importance of rational thought. Like the universe follows this basic set of rules, and we can describe those rules by using the language of mathematics. Anything that happens will follow these rules, and if you have a basic understanding of them you can really appreciate the beauty and interconnectedness of this world we share.
As you leave, let me share a video with you. This is the famous Last Lecture, given by Randy Pausch. Dr. Pausch was a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and in September 2006 he was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. He was 45. His lecture is about achieving your goals and the legacy you leave behind. The video is long, over an hour, but it is well worth your time and I recommend you watch it.
Randy Pausch died on July 25, 2008 at the age of 47.
My Honors Physics classes are trying to estimate how much energy the school uses in a regular week. I found this website, which offers some nice estimates about how much energy various appliances use. Feel free to use it to help you make your estimate.
In Honors recently we’ve been looking at electricity, and the question was posed to me: “how much current does it take to kill a person?” I didn’t really have an answer that I was sure of, but this morning I found an article that has one: just 7 mA, applied directly to the heart for 3 seconds, will do the job. That is 7 milliamps, about 60 times smaller than the current flowing through one of the small light bulbs on the circuit boards when connected to the 3 V batteries.
And it was Adam Savage from the Mythbusters that said it, so it must be true!
I’ve written before about how nuclear power is the best carbon-free electricity source at the moment. Not to say that others like wind and solar will never work, but they’re not viable to use on a large scale at the moment, and won’t be without several more years and a lot more money for research. If we’re going to cut carbon emissions drastically starting soon, nuclear is the only way to go.
There is still a large percentage of the population that resists nuclear power, and this is because most people are just uninformed. I’ll admit that nuclear stuff is scary, and if something goes really wrong the results are really bad. One of those really bad things happened at Chernobyl in 1986, and people are afraid it might happen again. Rightfully so, I think.
The big problem with the public resistance to nuclear power, though, is people like Ken Gale. As far as I can tell, he’s not an expert on anything except comic books, yet he has written this article about the safety issues of the nuclear power plant at Indian Point, New York. He says a lot of scary things, and anybody who reads this would be crazy to embrace nuclear power.
The problem is this: barely anything he’s said on that site is actually true. His claims that the plant regularly releases radioactive gas, it releases radioactive and thermal pollution into the river, the high level waste is stored in open pools, and that New York wouldn’t notice if the plant was shut off are ludicrous. None of those statements is even remotely close to fact. The author claims to have researched the page, but he doesn’t list his sources so I don’t know where he got this “information.”
If you’re going to oppose nuclear power, at least do some real research before you do. Inform yourself before taking a stance either way. Be skeptical of any claims for or against, do your homework, and make up your own mind.
After the Hubble Space Telescope was repaird in 1993, the photos it sent back were nothing short of stunning. Humans had never seen the universe in that way before, and more scientific papers have been written from Hubble’s images than any other piece of scientific equipment in history.
There is a space shuttle mission happening right now (STS-125), in which the crew of Atlantis is making some modifications, upgrades, and repairs. These repairs are intended to allow the telescope to function until 2014, at which time Hubble will be decommissioned after more than 20 years in space.
This series of photos from The Big Picture is pretty amazing and features the astronauts and scenery from the mission. My personal favorite is #18 with the shuttle and telescope silhouetted by the sun.
A few Honors classes today got a few problems like this:
Use any arithmetic operation +-x÷or () to make these numbers equal 24.
3, 5, 6, 7 (answer [6-5+7]x3=24)
This is a common game that is great for building logic skills and number sense. If you’d like to play more on your own, try this link. It’s good for your brain.
I hope everyone is enjoying their vacations. Be ready to work when we get back!
I came across this video this morning, and it’s worth a look. It explains the science behind how your clothes get washed, but I think it’s just cool to see the candy corn sticking together like that.
In Honors Physics we did a demo with peeps and the vacuum tube, and of course there’s a lot more you can do with peeps (besides the obvious snacking). The Washington Post newspaper holds a contest around Easter time for the best diorama involving peeps, and today they published the 40 finalists with photos. Some of them are very clever!
In case you get bored this weekend, here’s a site I recommend you visit. It will make you laugh (hopefully), and it might make you cry. Will it change the way you think? Probably not. Will there be things that are over your head? Yes probably, but there’s also a lot of things that you will understand.
The website to which you have been directed is the official homepage of The Flat Earth Society. Yes, there are apparently still people out there who don’t believe the earth is round. I also recommend the Wikipedia article about the FES for some further reading.
Are there really people who believe we live on a flat planet and everyone has been deceived by an elaborate conspiracy? Can anyone really be that dumb? Does anyone take this seriously?
A colleague pointed this article out to me today. In Honors Physics last week we did a lab to measure the speed of sound with a tuning fork, hollow plastic tube, and a graduated cylinder filled with water; this blog post suggests a way to measure the speed of sound while singing in the shower. Let me know if it works*.
I recommend the blog too; it’s written by a physics grad student, and is pretty entertaining. Add it to your RSS reader. Don’t know what one of those is? Try here.
*I will not be responsible for laughs or strange looks you may get while attempting this.
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