After giving the matter some significant thought, she wondered why she continued to choose black holes for friends. You know the type--the ones who don't allow even a photon of a reaction to escape the event horizon that invariably seems to separate them from all those who orbit them. What DID they do with everything they consumed, anyway? Did it just get sucked into oblivion, as though it had never existed in the first place? Was it stretched, crushed, or torn into pieces before it disappeared? Or did it exert some sort of enduring influence on the hole first? She really wondered.
Hi! Black Hole here. It's all about the energy. So much going on inside the hole that . . . If you are posting this in the blogosphere, that only means . . .
She also wondered if her superficial understanding of black holes was accurate, and decided to investigate. According to Ted Bunn, "As you would expect, the escape velocity depends on the mass of the planet: if the planet is extremely massive, then its gravity is very strong, and the escape velocity is high. A lighter planet would have a smaller escape velocity. The escape velocity also depends on how far you are from the planet's center: the closer you are, the higher the escape velocity."
She imagined that probably held true for any number of other contexts too--the larger the "mass" (a.k.a. importance? influence?) of the thought, word, habit, person, culture, or institution in one's life, and the closer one was to that entitity (in both time and space), the more influence their gravitational field would be likely to have, and the more difficult it would be to disengage oneself from that orbit.
It did make her wonder why negative words seem to have a much higher escape velocity than positive ones.
Showing posts with label physics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label physics. Show all posts
Monday, September 04, 2006
Monday, August 28, 2006
The Roots of Things
For awhile now, I've been fascinated by the realization that the behavior of light, heat, energy, sound, color can all be described and represented, to some extent, in terms of waves. Because (at least at this point in my life) I believe that truth is consistent across contexts, and that the observation of similar patterns across contexts is a sure sign that something fundamentally important is at play, I started wondering about the potentially important truths embedded in that phenomenon.
As I explored, I discovered that light is cropping up as an important theme in all sorts of unusual places--Appliance Design magazine regularly contains articles that refer to light-based innovations, including the use of blue light to reduce bacteria in the mouth that causes tooth decay, the use of light to weld certain plastics, etc. Other articles in science magazines talk about things like quantum dots, the use of light as a mechanism for storing information, or the influence that light has on children's ability to learn (in one study, full spectrum lighting improved test scores by something like 67% . . . but replacing flourescent lights with full spectrum lights is expensive . . . so we continue to default to alternatives like attempting to use standardized testing to coerce change in student achievement).
All of these ideas seem to have a couple of things in common--a relationship to electromagnetic fields and, more generally, an association with quantum mechanics. Naturally, I wanted to know more about that. Unfortunately, math and I have not always been on speaking terms,
though, and I found that as a result, I didn't have the mathematical background to understand the answers to the questions I was asking. Fortunately, a friend of mine who is a theoretical mathematician, among other things, spent the better part of a year convincing me that math is a part of daily life, and that if I could live life, I could understand math. Through our conversations, coupled with a number of diagrams and three dimensional demonstrations, I learned about fractals, Julia sets, Mandlebrot spots, vanishing points, harmonics, vectors, pivot tables, and a host of other interesting things that I never knew existed and that I never could have guessed I would find so incredibly compelling. I suddenly had an appetite for things mathematical, and, more importantly, the confidence that I could digest them once I had consumed them.
Since then, I have been relying on sporadic, fortuitous contacts with physicists and mathematicians that life in a research one university affords, and their patient and good-humored explanations, to slowly fill in the gaping holes in my understanding of many of the fundamental principles that govern the world.
During one recent conversation of this nature, another friend suggested that I consult a book entitled, The Roots of Things: Topics in Quantum Mechanics for answers to some of my questions that were written for a lay person with only minimal references to math. Although I have to say that his definition of minimal and mine certainly differ, I have made it to page 63--pretty impressive for someone who finds that somnolence overcomes her the minute a mathematical equation crosses the page!
So, my next few postings will be an attempt to make sense of some of the things that I'm reading.
As I explored, I discovered that light is cropping up as an important theme in all sorts of unusual places--Appliance Design magazine regularly contains articles that refer to light-based innovations, including the use of blue light to reduce bacteria in the mouth that causes tooth decay, the use of light to weld certain plastics, etc. Other articles in science magazines talk about things like quantum dots, the use of light as a mechanism for storing information, or the influence that light has on children's ability to learn (in one study, full spectrum lighting improved test scores by something like 67% . . . but replacing flourescent lights with full spectrum lights is expensive . . . so we continue to default to alternatives like attempting to use standardized testing to coerce change in student achievement).
All of these ideas seem to have a couple of things in common--a relationship to electromagnetic fields and, more generally, an association with quantum mechanics. Naturally, I wanted to know more about that. Unfortunately, math and I have not always been on speaking terms,
though, and I found that as a result, I didn't have the mathematical background to understand the answers to the questions I was asking. Fortunately, a friend of mine who is a theoretical mathematician, among other things, spent the better part of a year convincing me that math is a part of daily life, and that if I could live life, I could understand math. Through our conversations, coupled with a number of diagrams and three dimensional demonstrations, I learned about fractals, Julia sets, Mandlebrot spots, vanishing points, harmonics, vectors, pivot tables, and a host of other interesting things that I never knew existed and that I never could have guessed I would find so incredibly compelling. I suddenly had an appetite for things mathematical, and, more importantly, the confidence that I could digest them once I had consumed them.
Since then, I have been relying on sporadic, fortuitous contacts with physicists and mathematicians that life in a research one university affords, and their patient and good-humored explanations, to slowly fill in the gaping holes in my understanding of many of the fundamental principles that govern the world.
During one recent conversation of this nature, another friend suggested that I consult a book entitled, The Roots of Things: Topics in Quantum Mechanics for answers to some of my questions that were written for a lay person with only minimal references to math. Although I have to say that his definition of minimal and mine certainly differ, I have made it to page 63--pretty impressive for someone who finds that somnolence overcomes her the minute a mathematical equation crosses the page!
So, my next few postings will be an attempt to make sense of some of the things that I'm reading.
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