lenses in my room

sorry no video this week, youtube isn't cooperating with my computer.

so as i was thinking (panicking) for an idea i came across the shot glasses in my room.
as i pondered the structure of the little things i noticed something peculiar about the bottom of the glass. it forms a ) ( structure thereby making a diverging lens. i looked around my room and took the following pictures. a diverging lens is created when it takes light either from a parallel source and spreads it out or the other way around. in this case it takes light that is spread out and brings it together making it smaller. it takes light from all around the outside of the lens and condenses it to an area that is not as large. it doesn't converge the rays, only condenses.
and so there is my physics for the week.

lenses in my room

electrons. tiny bits of matter, or waves? the answer, both. shown in this experiment here we can clearly see how a bit of matter can act like a wave. the video shows a test from firing atoms at a wall (not actually a wall but i don.t know what it is actually called). the particles were fired at a plate that had two thin slits for the particles to go through. we beleive that the particles should have gone through the slits and formed two lines on the wall very similar to the two slits the particles passed through. but, they actually formed a pattern associated with an interference pattern from waves. the brighter spots are where the two crests of the waves met up and hit the wall, while the dark spots are where the crest and trough collided and canceled each other out. at first scientists believed that the particles were hitting each other and making this pattern. so they then tried firing the particles one at a time, the interference pattern still came up. this meant that the particles were suddenly turning into waves and passing through both slits at the same time, and then interfering with itself.
scientists then decided to look and see what was actually happening. the placed a measuring device near the slits to see what actually happens. yet when they did this, the particles behaved like particles again. they formed two lines. this meant that the simple act of observing the particles made them act like particles and not waves.
we have come to know this has the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

shockwave

nothing says freedom like a really big explosion of old ammo. in this video we can clearly see what happens when something is detonated at a very high velocity. in the first few seconds of the clip we are able to see the shockwave. this shockwave occurs when an object is moving so fast through a medium that the medium does not have time to react, so when it finally does react it is almost instantaneous. we see the air almost instantly react to the massive amounts of heat and pressure that built up in the explosion. the second video is a good example of waves in the air. the explosion sets out a pulse in all directions creating lateral waves causing the air to compress and decompress very rapidly. this is clearly shown in the dirt on the ground as the air moves past it.

aaaand were back

brief technical difficulties have been sorted out

anyways,



its kinda cute when people try to defy simple laws of nature. like Steorn and his "orbo" machine. he claims that it can create 30% more energy than it takes in. in theory it sounds like a good idea, but then again so does riding a 50 foot wave. so in theory we could hook two of these machines up together, one acting as a motor and the other acting as a generator (because we know that motors and generators are the same thing), and create an infinite amount of energy. we would basically have a machine that would be able to supply power to a bomb roughly the size of the big bang. so here we are in our world of infinitely created energy when a little thing called the law of thermodynamics has to come in and just ruin the party. we know that energy can neither be created or destroyed, just change forms. so it is physically impossible for this machine to "create"energy. in fact it is impossible for the machine to be 100% efficient when you factor in the slight wind resistance, small amounts of friction, sound energy lost, heat energy lost, earth's magnetic field acting upon the metal, ect. all these small things add up to energy lost on the machine making it impossible for it to get over 100% efficiency. well damn, i thought this crack-pot idea actually had a chance at succeeding.


i love how he even says that it is impossible.

because i was sick this weekend...

i was basically vomiting most of my stomach contents into that once-was-shiny-porcelain bowl of mine so i didnt really have time/ enough energy to make a blogpost. but it seems to have subsided now, so please forgive the tardiness of this post. now on to the "phun".



this neat little app allows us to play with physics like some kind of sick god bent on playing with colorful blocks and then turning them into water. yes, at the click of a button we can change the friction, mass, density, gravitational force, ect, and just overall change physics to better understand how it works. this app was originally designed to just kill time but i think that it has great potential. we could use a setup where we have spinning bats to hit a ball and we find the velocity of the object. or find out how much friction it takes for that box to start sliding downhill. it is a perfect digital world with no air resistance, perfect repeatable results, and im pretty sure that it cant screw up the lab computers more than they already are. not to mention that this program works well on my computer when i have trouble trying to run the java apps on the online text.
just consider it.

truck go boom

cement truck+a few hundred pounds of dynamite and c4= greatest episode of mythbusters ever. so lets start off with the basics first. the massive potential energy is set off by the added energy of the detonator which is basically just two metal poles stuck into the c4. a charge is run through the poles and travels through the c4 because the c4 acts as a bit of a resistor. sparks fly and just like the pickle in class the c4 ignites and sets off a chemical reaction that produces a lot of heat, light, and sound energy. the truck then tries to hold itself together but the force of the explosion is too much for it to handle and the truck just starts to move with the explosion. all the pieces of debris are thrown in to the air and act like projectiles landing far from the point of origin because of the massive Force(X) and Force(Y) vectors caused by the explosion.

great balls of lightning!

we all know that lightning is when there is no longer an equilibrium with the charge in the ground and the charge in the clouds. and it is this imbalance that causes the charged particles to jump from the cloud to the ground ( or ground to cloud). but what happens when the charged particles just stagnate in mid air? this video has a very good example of a weather phenomenon called ball lightning. there are several theories about what is happening here. some believe that there are thousands of tiny nano-particles in the air acting as sort of a battery. and when enough of these come together they discharge and create the ball lightning. others believe that it is due to irregularities in air pressure and dryness that creates small pockets of trapped charged particles that discharge in midair rather than connecting with the ground-cloud. it almost reminds me of that weird staticy noise we heard when landon's finger got close to sammy and we heard a sizzling noise. i think that it is that same effect just in a more concentrated area and with enough charge that it is visible to the eye.

i also wanted to throw this in. just some classic Bill Nye with a nice tribute to The Vapors at the end.

ok this one is pretty cool. the tesla coil is supercharging its metal sphere and making it very very negative. so negative that the air around it seems almost positive and the shocks jump out from the metal sphere. ok that was the charge part of this thing. now here is the cool stuff. each shock is played many times a second to get the desired sound from the coil. which means that it could be fired a few hundred times a second for a very high pitched noise. this is what plays the song. the electrons jumping off the metal heat up the air creating a mini thunder bolt. only this thunder bolt is short and in a frequency that we can hear easily. i would go into more detail about this but we havent covered sound yet and i dont really know what im talking about.
finally is the coolest part, those little neon lights at the bottom of the screen. they light up when ever the coil is firing due to the electrons just flying through the air. they enter the light and turn the light on. i thought that was pretty damn cool.
there is another video (not posted) that has almost the same thing only on a much smaller scale and you can better see the neon light effect.