Some science
Adding some science to everyday life.
This is a simulation of a rotating 4 dimensional Cube, otherwise known as a Tesseract.
What you are seeing is it Rotating. It is not being distorted, reshaped, or anything like that. it is simply Rotating - It appears to be distorted because you are only seeing the ‘projection’ of it. similarly if you rotated a 3D cube infront of lamp the shadow you would see would appear to distort.
What is quantum tunnelling and why should you care?
Well, a reasonable argument for why you should care is that it is a prerequisite to you reading this article. Quantum tunnelling is the reason for the season(s) because without it there would be no sun! It is how the the sun manages to continuously maintain the process of nuclear fusion. Without stars undergoing fusion, they would have never created all of the elements that eventually resulted in the “star stuff” that is we.
Hydrogen, the simplest element, makes up the majority of the sun ringing in at 74.9% of its mass. Helium, at a not-so-close second, rings in right around 23.8%. Okay. So, what is nuclear fusion exactly? It is the process in which lighter atomic nuclei fuse to create heavier atomic nuclei. The resulting energy that is released is what causes the sun to burn. Well, that’s cool, right? A bunch of hydrogen running around bumping into each other to create helium. I know, riveting stuff. But, hold on, we’re about to get to the good part.
Hydrogen is a positively charged particle. So, if a bunch of positively charged hydrogen atoms are flying around then they can’t be actually slamming into each other. Can they? Well, grade level science would tell you no. Remember, “opposites attract.” So, if like charges repel each other, how are the hydrogen atoms fusing? Good question, my friends, and I’m glad you asked. The answer is quantum tunnelling.
Quantum tunnelling is the phenomena in quantum mechanics when a particle passes through a barrier that would have been impossible to pass through in classical physics. In classical physics, this would be similar to throwing a ball at a brick wall and it passing through ‒ without barrelling a hole in the wall. Obviously, the ball will not go through the wall, but in the world of the incredibly small, the quantum world, things are a little different. Because of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the position of the particle when colliding has a degree of uncertainty. There is a small (read as infinitesimal) chance that the particle could exist on the opposite side of the invisible barrier that blocks the particles from colliding. It’s a REALLY small chance, but there are so many particles in the sun, that it happens all the time and causes the sun to burn.
Hence, we are star stuff.
You can watch Henry Reich of MinutePhysics explain quantum tunnelling here and how it applies to the sun.
I hate waking up to bad news.
Thanks to Congress and the White House failing to agree on budget cuts, and the subsequent “sequestration” (across-the-board, slash-and-burn, top-to-bottom money-trimming), NASA has announced that they are suspending all education and public outreach activities. It’s a suspension, not a cancellation … but uggghhhh.
NASA knows this sucks. But they’ve been put in a place where they have to choose whether they can support their actual missions with the money they have been given, and no matter how much they value the extras (and they do), it’s rock-and-a-hard-place time for space folks. It’s hard to put presents under the tree if you’re struggling to keep the lights on.
Projects like the Mars Curiosity Twitter account and NASA’s Twitter socials will continue. So what could we be saying goodbye to? These are the outreach programs that put Mars science in underprivileged classrooms, turning science into smiles. The programs that publish free ebooks of our Earth as art, erasing borders and instilling wonder in one fell swoop. Programs that allow us to travel beyond our planet in a single click. These are programs that plop down space telescope mock-ups in the middle of downtown Austin so the kid in me can do cartwheels with sciencey glee.
Today, online, there are so many wonderful places that can take up the slack (blogs and websites like this). But will we be able to do this effectively if NASA can’t even do it themselves? I don’t know. But we will try.
Because if we do try, then we can remind people who vote and people who make budgets of what NASA already knows: Whenever we look up, we are inspired to make new things possible, in sciences terrestrial and astronomical. And when we look back down at Earth, and those borders disappear, doesn’t it make you want to make this chart a little more even?
(Source: astrodidact)
Nuclear Auroras
Pretty, huh? That’s an aurora. But it’s not like any other aurora you’ve seen.
That one was caused by a nuclear weapon detonated in space. In 1962, the U.S. military detonated several nukes about 250 miles above the Pacific in order to, well … see what would happen. The project, called Starfish Prime (which sounds like a comic book villain), disrupted the Van Allen radiation belt that surrounds Earth and sent a wave of charged particles toward Earth.
Charged particles interacting with the atmosphere are exactly what cause auroras. Only they’re not usually visible as far south as Hawaii … unless you use a nuke to make them.
If you’d like a more peaceful look at auroras, check out this episode of It’s Okay To Be Smart on YouTube: The Auroras.
A great way of getting perspective of scale, and a revelation that the universe is in fact composed of football fields, salt, and golf balls.
These guys always tweet interesting factoids. Check them out.
