Things I want to learn more about...!

pressure suits
CERN - can it recreate the big bang?
accelerometers
cane frogs and problems with non-native species
The Heat Death of the Universe
stray cosmic rays
electromagnetic smog

Wrinkle my pants: concern about nanomaterials

Carbon nanotubes, CNT. They're small, and they're strong. To put the size into perspective, we measured the wavelength of the green LED light on a laptop in my physics class. It is 550 nanometers. Ok, so the size of a nanotube is less than ONE nanometer. Can you believe that? So small it makes LIGHT seem big. It's actually the strongest material evern known, too, and it's very light and tensile, which means you can bend it. High strength steel has a rating of 200. In comparison, the CNT has a rating of 1250.

One application we discussed in class is a possible elevator into space. This is strange stuff, but it could be possible with CNTs. We might be able to use them in medicine, too, to deliver tiny, tiny amounts of medicine directly at the area where it is needed.

There is currently some concern, though, about whether the nanotubes might be carcinogenic. That's a big deal, because CNTs are currently being used to manufacture wrinkle resistant and stain resistant clothing. And cosmetics. And bicycles. And electronics. And paints. And truckbeds. And windowfilm. And concretes. And no-stink socks. And ... and ... and, it's getting to be everywherre. The idea is that they are so small that they can interfere with cell function and may cause DNA from replicating properly, causing lesions or tumors.

But when I've gone shopping for so many of these items, I haven't seen any ingredient warnings telling me what contains nanomaterials and what doesn't. That's troublesome, if in fact they are dangerous, because that means that I don't get the choice of *not* exposing myself to them. I hope they're alright, because we might be in trouble otherwise.

Nuclear Resources: energy solution or apocalypse?

I think when people envision nuclear power, they think of (1) utter disaster and (2) Homer Simpson. We can joke about people like Homer being employed at the plants, but people think about Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. There's a terrible fear that in some half-planned attempt to cure the world's insatiable desire for power, we'll kill everyone and nuke the entire planet. We didn't plan for all the outcomes of fossil-fuel generated energy, and now we have global warming. What will happen when we don't plan enough for use of nuclear energy? It's like raising the stakes, isn't it?

I heard a program on NPR in 2007 discussing one of the big caveats to nuclear energy. You must have enough wealth to maintain the plant properly. It seems like any ol' schmo of a country can maintain coal power. What happens if you run low on money? Chernobyl? That's not acceptable risk, is it? Or, could you say that the nuclear plant will generate wealth for the society?

We learned in class that there's a factor of 10-100 million between nuclear and chemical reactions. Our professor says it's safe, too. Well, I'm on board, I just don't think I'll be moving to Glen Rose, TX anytime soon. By the way, the Comanche Plant down there is 1 hr 46 minutes from Irving, TX via Google Maps. Yikes!

Reducing energy consumption is about more than the bill

The lowest we've gotten our energy bill here at our house is 230 KWH. When we called TXU once, they told us average household consumption is above 2000 KWH. That's astounding, isn't it? My husband's co-workers didn't believe him about our bill, and he brought it to work to show it to them. "Yeah right, we know you're eating by candlelight," they laughed. We're not, though. We do have high efficiency appliances and use CFL bulbs, but I don't know why their bills are so high. Part of the answer came when one of them revealed that they like to keep their house at 60 in the summer and 80 in the winter. Can you believe that? They have big houses, too.

It seems like they were more interested in the bill then in the actual energy savings, though. They want energy to be cheap again like it was in the "old days". It's so funny to refer to it that way. There were no electricity old days, really... It's all new, a small blip in human history. Something so new.

Maybe because my husband and I are younger that we're adapting to conservation easier. When we bought our very first car together, we scrimped and saved and bought a rusty old Geo Metro for $450. It ran, and it ran about 55 mpg. The Geo Prizm after that, which we also scrimped and saved for, was $1600-- a fortune to us-- and it got about 40 mpg. It didn't make sense to get anything that would use too much fuel, and there was no purpose in vanity. Utility was essential. Now that we're "established", we drive an '07 Nissan Sentra, which gets about 30-35 mpg depending on how we're driving it. Now that the bare economics aren't the most essential thing, I would feel irresponsible getting a less efficient fuel economy. It wouldn't be for money, either. It would just be wasteful.

Is there no sense of wastefulness?

Ah, my childhood... I had no idea how special it was. When we got out of the bath, we used buckets to carry the dirty water to the toilet for flushing. We'd carry it around for all sorts of things, like hand-watering plants, too. In the evenings, the living room was lit with the rainbowed hues of the many colors of kerosene filling the hurricane lamps. Outside, on the porch, part of our night ritual was raising and lowering wicks on oil lamps. We just didn't use the fuel and resources because we didn't need it.

I think now about how many hours I spend, wasted, on the computer. I used to draw, then, or play on the piano. We took walks and sat out on the porch in the heat of summer. Was it cooler then? I know it wasn't, but we never minded the heat. We stayed downstairs in the summer, and we stayed upstairs most of the time in the winter. It was just part of the rhythm of life, and I accepted it as normal.

The produce was fresh, because we didn't have a refrigerator. We didn't buy yoghurt often, but we did buy cheese, and we ate it within a day or two. Nothing spoiled, because we ate it. Is this so odd? Now that I have a refrigerator in my house, there are all kinds of things which spoil in the back, while we're not looking, so busy with school or work.

I wish I had a dark back pantry, like my mother, to hang fruits and vegetables from the ceiling. We had potatoes and onions, all hanging down to us, and a shelf full of canned fruit from the summer. I looked forward to certain seasons, because they meant mulberries, or figs, or pears, or pumpkin. I didn't know this as a child, but my mother was intentionally buying what was in season, and she planted fruit trees suited to our climate.

In a way, getting married and having a home of my own has been an unlearning process. I had to learn how to shop to fill a refrigerator. I had to learn how to buy pre-packaged foods, which ones tasted fair and which ones were gross. I learned how to leave the lights on, and how to run all the appliances at once. I don't like what I've learned.

It's time to get back to basics. Reducing consumption is about more than the bill. It's about simplicity.

Quantum Effects, those sneaky devils

I admit it, I don't really understand quantum effects very well. I do know there's something crazy going on here, though, and it's worth reflecting on.

I know this much, it goes back to de Broglie. Particles have wavelengths. At least that's what he said. It's a very small wavelength, smaller than a nucleus, but it's there. So, as the waves as concentrated in this small unit of space, it's a particle... but is a particle made of waves? Or are these the wrong kind of terms to try to think of it.

Our professor told us that as technological capabilities get on a tiny scale, we're starting to experience some strange things. On a scale smaller than an atom, it turns out sometimes electrons get entangled, which means they behave the same way over far distances, I think? Or, the outcome of certain experiments on them is determined by the way you set up the experiment.

I guess this is a revolution against the Newtonian universe, right? Where things behave in predicatable ways? We've got hidden variables, maybe, or many worlds, even. Or just statistics? I don't know. It's unsettling, all the ideas about dead cats in boxes. Absurd.

Is it ok for me to say I don't "believe" it? There must be something more to all of this, something clean and straightforward to explain it all. Simple laws, right? Maybe that's wishful thinking...

Global Warming: Maybe Al Gore isn't so crazy after all

One of the biggest impacts this class has made on me is in what we have learned about global warming. When I came into the class in September, I actually wasn't sure whether or not it was real. I mean, there are dissenting voices. They say that people who believe in global warming are a cult, an environmentalist, pantheistic religion, all out to take your rights to use your property as you see fit. I wasn't decided or not, though. I felt I didn't have the scientific understanding to weigh though all the evidence.

It turns out the evidence is very basic. It isn't confusing at all, when presented on a simple level. Ozone is being depleted, especially in areas near the poles, and ozone depletion leads to global warming. Some people say that the earth is warming for other reasons, and there may also be other contributing factors, but that doesn't discredit the fact that the chemicals we are releasing into the atmosphere by our human action is removing oxygen from the cycle which cannot be returned.

I didn't understand any of this. Yet, as a result of the oxygen leaving the cycle up there in the ozone (which is so thin already! just a cm), people will get more skin cancer, and special micro-organisms like plankton will die. Plants, too, are being damaged.

Here's some more that I learned. We actually know what the greenhouse gasses are. It isn't helter-skelter in vague theories. They're CO2, methane, and CH4. All of these trap the infrared light from the sun. It's called the greenhouse effect because infrared light comes in, and these gasses keep the heat from that light trapped in our atmosphere. We're like a parked car in the sun.

Now look at this, what we learned in class--
In the US, if we have 360 million people,
and 100 million cars
at maybe 400 gallons of gas a year,
and we know that each gallon of gas puts 20 lb CO2 in the air,
that's 800 BILLION POUNDS OF CO2 EACH YEAR!!!

And fossil fuel plants add another 1,200 BILLION POUNDS!

So, looking over all this, I used to think that Al Gore was crazy. His movie, An Inconvenient Truth, was something to laugh at. Silly politician with his Powerpoint slides... Well, he isn't so crazy. We have to do something about this. We are not being good stewards of the earth.

Lifetimes of energy sources

Hubbert's Law is a model for consumption of any non-renewable natural resources. You have to make some assumptions. The initial and final consumption is zero; the initial rise is exponential; it reaches a peak before a decline. Then, high cost drives consumption down, with the consumption eventually at zero.

It fits our model for consumption of oil and petroleum products. There are actually organizations, I learned, studying what they call "Peak Oil". Hubbert predicted in the 50's that we would peak in use in the 1970's, and that actually happened. That's amazing that he could predict it. Well, on top of that, he said we would run out by the end of the 21st century. It looks like cost will definitely be prohibitive to use by that point. All it has taken so far is for gas to reach $4 a gallon, and people have sent in their orders for Priuses.

The Association for the Study of Peak Oil says that eventually, we'll run out of those easy-dig VAST fields of oil. I guess that's true, if people are sniffing around the Barnett Shale for oil. According to my father-in-law, who owns a small oil and gas company, your typical underground reserve in this area will only be the size of a city block, but in the middle east, they might be miles long. These are just little pockets here, but every bit counts now that it's coming up in price.


What do we do, though? We can't all drive a Prius. Some people need trucks to work. Other people have larger families, and I know a Prius won't hold more than three children and their parents comfortably. It's nearly impossible to fit a child, a toddler seat, and an infant carrier in one of those things. It's like... We have this entire culture, this entire system built around the consumption of these non-renewable resources, and we have no way to wean ourselves from it. We're spoiled, aren't we? And are our lives truly happier?

Car thoughts: thinking about everyday forces

"All objects will move in a straight line at constant speed unless something interferes with its motion."

I have a long commute to school in the morning. I never look forward to it. The baby is usually crying in his rear-facing car seat. I often wish I could reach him to comfort him, or pick him up, but I can't. It's 45 minutes to an hour of pain for both of us.

I asked my professor about rear-facing car seats, and he told me it was likely it had to do with inertia on our bodies. He told us that most of the time, when people die in car accidents, it isn't that they get smashed by anything or bang up their bodies so badly; most of the time it's their organs continuing to move within them while the car suddenly changes in speed. I have this horrible image of hearts and lungs getting ripped out from the inside, whether that's accurate or not. With babies under 25 lb, or a year, I have the idea that their lack of strong neck control could put some part of their necks at risk?

I really want to comment on how revolutionary Newton's Laws are to the common-sense understanding of the universe. Without the idea of inertia, I would thing:
1. Car moves because of the engine and gas
2. Car stops because I stop using the engine to move it

Actually, that's not quite right. I'm still in the Aristotelian mindset. Aristotle said that things can only move with constant speed if there is a mover still acting on them, keeping them going at that speed. This is what you can observe in typical circumstances, but that's because of friction and all the other trappings of ordinary living. Really, I should be thinking:
1. Car is set in motion by engine and gas
2. Car continues to be in motion, until it is overcome by the forces of friction and air resistance.

Ah, it's hard to change your way of looking at the world!

Aristotle: great in physics, not so great in metaphysics

This is a medieval drawing of Aristotle's ideas about trajectories.

At my university, ancient philosophy is revered. In part, it comes out of the Neo-scholastic movement that honors the continuum of venerable philosophy in the West, a tradition of reverence to the Fathers of our knowledge. Oddly enough, I'm in a metaphysics class right now, at the same time as a modern physics class. We're reading Aristotle's Physics, which deals with his ideas on natural things and motion. He was such a brilliant man. I think even modern physicists admire the way he sat down and tried to figure out why things happen: he really was a scientist, and he tried to discover the laws of nature.

Aristotle's view of all things happening because of certain causes (aitia) is very good; he says that "Nature us a source (arche) or cause (aitia) of being moved or being at rest to which it belongs primarily" Bk2, Ch1, 192bln22. But, applied to stones falling, this might make you think that a rock was falling to the earth because that is it's natural place, according to the final cause. That's just not so. It's gravity. Thanks, Newton. If you hadn't come along and suggested otherwise, I might have gone along believing the causal definitions of physics!

Unfortunately for the ancient world, he missed his mark when it comes to the laws of motion. Thanks to Newton, modern people can enjoy a few corrections. One of these regards falling bodies. Aristotle wrote, "The heavier a body, the faster it falls." Well, did you actually try that one out, Aristotle? I think one of the reasons he didn't ----- and this is just *my* theory ----- was that he valued intellect as higher than material things. As such, he would do better to have reasoned through it than to condescend to consult matter. Perhaps?

Either way, if you drop a ball of lead and a ball of wood, they will both hit the ground at the same time. Now, as embarrassing as this may seem, I actually... I was actually carrying around the Aristotelian idea! Ok, ok, I know I must have been told a couple times in school that that isn't the case, but it just "seems" right, doesn't it? I think it may have to do with many visions of falling bodies interacting with air resistance: feathers, leaves, paper?

Here's one to remember: All bodies in a vaccum fall at the same constant acceleration.

Pseudoscience - noun, a way to steal your money

It's likely pseudoscience if somebody wants to sell you something too good to be true. I'm thinking of magnet belts that work your abs while you watch television. Or, maybe those healing crystals which claim to "heal the planet one person at a time". The "platonic solid crystal" is only $100-- would you cheat yourself out of all that peace and harmony for a measly one hundred dollars? The FAQ for the crystals promises the store owners personally pray over each crystal before shipping it. They have some amazing claims. But why isn't this real science?

Well, real science has to be measurable. Quantifiable. You need to be able to repeat the results. When they measure the crystals at healingcrystals.com, they use the wrong end of the ruler intentionally, because "the numbers 11 and 12 have a positive healing vibration". How do they base such a claim? Do numbers vibrate? Can we measure that? Can we demonstrate that in ANY way? At this point, we have to say that this kind of therapy would be pseudoscience, bordering on some type of religion. There's an element of faith in it, faith that the crystals can bring some type of healing.

In this way, pseudoscience has a tendency to be abused for monetary gain. Since you don't have to base your claims on real research-- verifiable claims folling the scientific method-- you can really say whatever you want. Snake oil, tonics... You would think that as society becomes more modern, peoople would become savvy enough to outsmart the con-men, but the con-men are getting smarter, too. Sometimes, they even steal people's good name and claim that the person has endorsed them. That actually happened to my professor!