Thoughts on Richard Feynman

Recently I re-discovered one of my favorite reads – memoirs of Richard Feynman, a nobel laureate for his work in the field of physics.  Now I know this is a physics blog, but it’s not really his work in physics that’s so astounding in my opinion, although the simplicity behind Feynman diagrams is beautiful; in all honesty I know too little about physics at this point to understand most of his work.

There is a stigma attached to being a scientist, a stereotypical attitude that is accompanied with the job and lifestyle of science.  Nerd.  Socially incompetent.  Lame.  Lonely. Anything and everything uncool.  Scientists are portrayed as awkward men that only know their way around their field and nothing else with a disregard to things that others care about such as fashion, social convention, etc.  And for the largest time I thought that was just how all scientists are.  Perhaps they need such so much subject knowledge that they simply do not HAVE time for anything else.

However Richard Feynman was none of those things.  I mean he was a genius and had a brilliant mind, but he made me realize there’s more behind a scientist than just their science, and I am now realizing how petty that sounds actually wow. But I guess bottom line, he’s the kind of scientist I want to be.  Impactful in ways other than just scientific discovery, and beloved by people that knew him.

When Physics Became Chemistry

When he first laid eyes on her he knew they had an undeniable attraction. If only he knew the destruction that they would cause together…

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It was an average day for him. Nothing particularly special, although he did think he saw a strange quark but when he blinked his eyes it turned into an up quark. Weird. But the electron continued, finding his place with the rest of the leptons, trying his best to avoid the attraction of the hadrons (they were so needy, some of them just always wanted him but he was too high energy for them and flitted away).

Suddenly he found himself on the other side of the universe. Unexpected? Yes. Impossible? No, quantum tunneling caused this to happen to him a few times before, it didn’t phase him, he simply sped up and struggled to find his way home.

That’s when it happened, that’s when he saw her. Something about her reminded her of himself, the magnitude of his instant attraction to her was incredible but yet he could tell they were so different. Where did she come from? How could this happen? Where did she go? He had to find out.

He accelerated to follow her; he needed to know more. But he was stopped by a cation in need. They were always needy, picking him up without even asking. “Please, Sodium Ion, you don’t understand I just saw this girl…” he started when Sodium responded, “Alright fine, as soon as you find enough energy you’re out.” Electron didn’t have time for this, he willed for the atom he was now bound to speed up, make up for the lost time. He needed to find his girl.

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Three minutes had passed and he was still stuck to the desolate Sodium atom. He was losing hope, 180 entire seconds, she could have flown to Mars and back in this insane amount of time.

Just when he thought all was lost he received a message from the core of the sun. Gamma rays! The solar flare came as a blessing, turning the sodium atom into mush as they collapsed into a mess of leptons and hadrons; the hadrons engaging in some nasty activity with each other as well. And then he caught a glimpse of her again. His heart was broken when he saw her accompanied with another electron. Somebody else had gotten there first.

“How could I have let this happen? I knew I should have steered clear of hadron territory.” He said to himself as he got caught up in a drift. Just what he needed, to be caught in between a potential difference.

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He lost track of how far he had travelled, and honestly wanted to kill the cell for the potential difference, and wondered where it even came from. Just when he was liberated from the sodium atom he found himself bound within a copper wire. Day in day out whizzing around, providing light to the International Space Station. His sense of importance grew, “I’m the reason this place works, well me and all of my fellow comrades,” he thought to himself, “maybe I have a chance with her, that other Electron never met me, that other electron hasn’t done nearly as much as me, I have to get out!”

Fate was on his side. He felt his surroundings grow hotter, a sudden burst of energy caused him to sporadically move against the current, he could feel the shape of his surroundings bending, twisting and turning until he realized he could use this to escape. He zoomed out of the remains of the burning ISS, determined to find his love.

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He traversed the universe to find her. Nothing would stop him from a glimpse of that charm, the spin in her step would complement his perfectly. He wanted nothing more than to have her in his arms, by his side forever. Neither time nor space was of any limit for him. He just wanted her.

Finally after god knows how long (literally, he enlisted a Higgs to keep track of how long it would take to find his one true love), he caught a glimpse of her. Curiously he saw a neutron emerge as well, and this time she was accompanied by a neutrino. Jealousy ran through him and he felt himself accelerate greatly to meet her, he reached levels of kinetic energy he never had before, anything to match hers, anything to be with her.

He caught up, she saw him, they stared. Into each other eyes like they had never seen anything else before. No other piece of matter was as beautiful as her, or anything else, nothing compared to her, her grace, her beauty. Her charge and her spin were so alluring, he felt a pull towards her, so alike and yet so different.

“Wh-who are you?” He stuttered, “I’ve never seen anybody as beautiful as you before, I’m just – wow, I’m at a loss for words!”

“Hi.” She said with a flip of her body, “I’m positron, I’m not from around here, its nice to be out and about in open space for once, and you are?”.
He crept closer to her, so close he could feel her spin, he could feel her charge. “I’m electron” he said as he saw her race away.
“NO!” She screamed. “I can’t be with you, I’m so sorry, I’ve never seen anybody like you but we can’t be together, its too dangerous, don’t touch me!”

Determined to have his love he chased after her and pulled her into a close embrace. With a white flash they ceased to exist.

Annihilated.

Ka-boom.

The Beauty of Being a Nerd

You ever have something happen to you, and you realize you need an analogy for yourself to understand?  For example, Newton’s 3rd law is frequently used as an analogy in real life, every action has an equal and opposite reaction.  While the application of this law as an analogy doesn’t make much sense, I guess we have to understand some of the deeper beauty behind this.

Life, isn’t very understandable.  Things just, happen and sometimes its too much for people to understand but science, science has laws, science is action-reaction pairs, there’s never a time where NaOH+HCl will not give you NaCl+H2O.  Fixed outcomes, similar to math.  1+1=2, the derivative of x^2 is always 2x. (assuming you stick to a base ten system where everything is amongst the reaches of what I can understand.)

And then you have to stop and think about what’s even in an analogy, something that describes one thing as another in a more relatable and understandable manner. The idea that things such as science can be used to explain the complications of life, and vice versa, is remarkable.  And I for one think that it’s beautiful to be able to interconnect vastly different things together, almost poetic really.

How do you relate your scientific knowledge to life? (If at all you do, and I’m not some crazy person who describes almost everything as being “asymptotic to 0”)

WATER ON MARS

There is, apparently confirmed by NASA, flowing water on Mars.  I repeat.  There is water, flowing, on the surface of Mars.  Like what!? Water supports basic life, does that mean there is a now a greater possibility of finding life elsewhere?  This reminds me of that quote:

“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying” –Arthur C. Clarke

Just needed to put that out there.
*Ges back to reading articles* Oh guys here’s the link if you want for the article NASA released:article

Pentaquarks!

Holy crap holy crap holy crap holy crap!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (Please excuse my profuse usage of exclamation points) Today is a HUGE day in the particle physics community.  CERN’s Large Hadron Collider confirmed a new particle, pentaquark.  So, I already made a post on the standard model, and you know that any particle comprising of 2 quarks is a meson (technically a quark and its anti-quark), and any particle comprising of 3 quarks is a baryon.  This was all that was experimentally confirmed in terms of particles made up of quarks, and a pentaquark is well, a particle made up of 5 different quarks.  Imagine all of the possibilities that can be added now, the additions to be made to the standard model.  This is amazing, it’s brilliant, above all its beautiful.  I’m not quite sure on how exactly they find this particle, this stuff is a bit too advanced for my puny high school mind to comprehend, but what I CAN comprehend is that this particle has insane implications for our understanding of the universe.

Klein Bottles

When I first heard this I have to admit I thought of Calvin Klein, so it was really that curiosity that drove me further.  Klein bottles are bottles with no inside or outside.  That seems quite baffling at first.  Every bottle has to have an inside and an outside right? WRONG.  Reading up on Klein bottles I was transported back to the age where I discovered mobius strips; I had a book titled 365 Science Experiments and one of them was making your own mobius strip.  I can’t say it blew my mind or I was amazed or anything because I didn’t really get it.  I drew a line with my pencil and I didn’t understand what it meant when the line went along both sides of the paper once I untangled it and lay it flat.  I didn’t realize that this meant a mobius strip has only one edge.  I think of a klein bottle as a mobius strip taken to the next level.  Although I don’t quite understand the implications of the Klein bottle, it’s aesthetically pleasing and it made me realize what the mathematical field of topology is and how interesting it is.

This wasn’t strictly physics sorry, but well, what’s physics without math?

Check out this link if you want to know more about Klein bottles: https://plus.maths.org/content/imaging-maths-inside-klein-bottle and if you prefer youtube videos to solid blocks of text (I know I do) then numberphile makes GREAT videos, that’s where I discovered Klein bottles https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAsICMPwGPY

High School Physics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xzn2ecB4Hzs

I thought it was just me that didn’t quite enjoy my high school physics classes much.  Classical physics, it doesn’t really stimulate me as much as Modern physics does.  This video emphasizes on Relativity and Quantum theory and how its absent in education nowadays.  Now, I take IB, and we do have a small bit of this, an option in relativity is offered, as well as astrophysics, a chapter on nuclear physics and one in quantum physics and particle physics.  But beyond say the standard model, photoelectric effect, and Feynman’s diagrams we don’t go much in depth.  Plus my physics portions don’t even have calculus in them.  For that matter I’m only learning calculus now in the 12th grade.

I want to pursue a future in physics, and sometimes I get exasperated by the physics present in my syllabus.  Wonder why it matters to us whether I can calculate the energy produced by a windmill.  And then I go to the internet and it reminds me of the beauty of physics.  I can listen to people speaking of physics in a manner as passionate as I feel about the subject as well, speaking passionately about the parts of physics I don’t quite like as much and it makes me wonder.  Why can’t my physics portion reflect this beauty?

Why doesn’t physics education convey the beauty behind the subject? Why must we be confined to only knowing the subject instead of appreciating it and loving it.  Of course I do understand that the Personal Engagement criteria for my investigation is meant to instill some sort of appreciation, but it doesn’t really work now does it? Tons of people will still graduate with an IB Diploma having taken physics HL not realizing how beautiful it is.

Sorry this post was more rambling than it was about physics, but I did need to get this out.

Quantum Tunneling

The whole wave-particle duality theory blew my mind when I first heard about it, and to this day it still amazes me.  Recently I stumbled upon Quantum Tunneling and realized just how crazy it sounds.  Basically, things that are in places they technically shouldn’t be, might end up there because of the minute probability of it occurring.  And what really blows my mind is that the second you stop adopting this method of thinking, the entire theory kind of collapses. The second you look at this from the standpoint of classical physics, it’s flat out impossible.  Now my science may be wrong, I’m just a 12th grader studying high school physics learning off the inter webs, but I feel like either way, this truly is amazing *_*

A whole lot ending with -on

I love YouTube, and I think a lot of what I discover stems from that huge website and creatures like minute physics or vsauce or even sometimes vlogbrothers.  One day I stumbled upon a song by Hank Green called “Strange Charm: A Song About Quarks” and well, it was catchy.  “Up down strange charm, top bottom”. So I googled Quarks. What are the infamous particles that Hank Green states everybody has in his song?  And then I found the standard model.  A whole new world opened up for me.  Bosons, fermion, gluons, means, a lot of things ending with -on and don’t forget, this was before the confirmation of the Higgs Boson, another beauty.  The standard model, minus the mathematical representation which is too complex for me to understand, is beautiful.  Everything the world is made of is on this one simple chart

Hello world!

Physics.  It’s so vast and you don’t really realize it initially.  It starts out as that annoying subject in school with all the formulas to memorize about things that don’t really make sense, that you don’t really care about, but suddenly one day you wake up and see the world differently.  That swing the children are playing on? Simple Harmonic Motion.  The jerking feeling when your car breaks but you’re moving forward? Inertia of motion.  Suddenly everything makes sense, leaving you with a thirst for more.  When I first learned about Newtons laws of motions, it amazed me that every step I took on Earth, the Earth would provide a force back, imagine that, the EARTH is pushing up against me.   The awe of learning that your body’s mass can attract other objects (well, if your mass was large enough and the distance between the two bodies was incredibly small then sure) is just amazing, and that was nothing compared to when I discovered the fields of particle physics, quantum mechanics, or relativity.  Physics to me, is explaining how the world works, bringing us one step closer to understanding and appreciating it, so with this blog, I invite you to join me in my journey through Physics.